Concentric Circles Nurturing Awe and Wonder in Early Learning - A Foundational Approach

CONCENTRIC CIRCLES Nurturing Awe and Wonder in Early Learning: A Foundational Approach Elora Ruth Harder /Muzaffar Iqbal The environment, learning materials, teaching methodologies and specific worldviews of teachers all contribute to the shaping of the conceptual framework in which young learners may spend much of the rest of their lives. Rather than arithmetic, language arts, and science lessons, it is this “molding” of the young learner that is the most important aspect of early childhood education. Once formed, this framework has a profound effect on one’s entire life. It ncit only influences initial ideas about how the physical world surrounding us came into existence, but also informs our inter-personal relations, lifestyles, habits, attitudes toward life and learning, and much deeper processes which affect the spiritual and emotional composition of our beings. In fact, one may say that the years of early childhood education are the most important developmental time in a person’s entire life. Concentric Circles is based on a thematic approach which seamlessly blends the Quednic worldview with pedagogical material, techniques, and tools, and situates the entire process of learning in Islamic intellectual soil. It integrates disciplines and allows teachers at schools and parents at home to draw upon a large body of material from the three realms from which the Qur’an itself draws its material: the cosmos, the nafs, and the human story. Thus restructured, the process of learning becomes transformative through its inseparable and seamless linkage with the Book.