n October 2020, ACRPS-Tarsheed launched the periodical, “Manhajiyat”, an interactive electronic educational journal aiming to remain current and up to date. It offers an educational platform where ideas, knowledge, practices, experiments, and innovative educational initiatives can be shared to encourage critique and dialogue focused on inquiry, imagination, creativity and innovation to elevate education in the Arab world.
“Manhajiyat” targets quality contributions exploring learning in schools from early childhood to grade twelve. It addresses all members of the education sector. The journal works towards publishing rich and inspiring content from both Arab and international writers. It offers contributions in varied styles and mediums and is cognizant of trends and innovations. It promotes dialogue, seeing it as the means by which to enrich the educational experience and make it a valuable source of inspiration for individuals and institutions alike.
In the first volume of “Manhajiyat”, Tarsheed’s opening statement reads:
Tarsheed was established to focus on the education sector and has contributed to the development of this sector in Qatar. Considering the importance of education in the Arab world, the need was great, and the efforts needed even bigger. After building educational institutions that earned it great renown, rich discussions around the work came to the fore. These were discussions between principals and teachers, supervisors and education consultants, between teachers and students; discussions that developed into dialogues of distinctly humanist dimensions inspired by the needs of the Arab world and its cultural tools. This dialogic humanist social interaction was an expression of a deeper desire for self-knowledge and for knowledge of others. It revealed an aspiration to transcend time and space and transform current reality. This is where the story of “Manhajiyat” begins, a need to weave out of ideas, experiences, communication, reflection, and action the tapestry of a lived experience in the world of education; an experience infused with hope, confidence and passion.
From this conceptualization of “Manhajiyat”, began an effort towards implementation. It was then educators, teachers and experts agreed that it needed to be an electronic journal; a platform that offers original and up to date educational content reflective of the age and the transformations in knowledge and technology. A journal that can fill a real void in the region. For, international journals have been, and always will be, a main source of knowledge for educators, and this fact only served to highlight the dearth of Arabic journals even further, as the few available journals in Arabic were either short-lasting attempts, or publications that currently only enjoy limited circulation.
The Arabic language is not only the means of communication of our journal, but it also shapes its modern Arab identity and serves as a means by which and through which to interact with human cultures. A means to intertwine idea and practice, and to focus on critical thinking, free expression, inquiry, innovation, originality, commitment, and passion.
Circumstances dictated that this idea would come to fruition at a critical time in Arab and international history; a time when schools are empty and students, teachers and educational leaders are in their homes, forced by the constraints of the pandemic to innovate swift, practical solutions to ensure the continuity of teaching and learning. This crisis generated great concern and much skepticism regarding the existent mechanisms for education that had been developed over the past decades, and it also led to the realization that the challenges being faced offered opportunities to apply new visions and mechanisms. We all found ourselves exploring new concepts of education and we became engrossed in conversations about learning and the future of learning.
“Manhajiyat” has become vital for us, and we have seen this same conviction in every person we approached to participate. Our first steps to widen the circle of discussion was to run a series of webinars which allowed us to identify what was needed with more specificity. The webinars were hugely successful and included a wide audience from several Arab countries. These soon resulted in an influx of articles written by practitioners and experts, and with the journal’s advisory board continuing to broadening its participant base, we soon found ourselves publishing the first volume within only a few months.
The periodical aims to elevate teaching in Arab countries within the wider context of educational development. The road towards our goals and objectives begins with the cornerstones of the learning process. It begins with teachers and educators in the field reading an article, giving constructive criticism and feedback, and making suggestions. It widens even further with professional development and self-growth, with the production of educational resources and tools, with the utilization of knowledge and experimentation to become a rich interactive learning community of teachers and educators.
This current issue is the product of tens of practitioners and experts in education in the Arab world, and we hope your critiques and comments will inform each new publication and that this combined effort will serve our goal of improving education in our Arab region. We are hopeful that “Manhajiyat” will begin to fill the current void in the Arab educational scene, and that your constructive interaction and participation will allow us to go even further.