A teacher sits on an exposed root of a tree that gives him shade, surrounded by children who kneel in the grass. He calls them, one by one. They come forward and recite by memory the day's passage that they have meticulously copied onto pieces of wood. If the child's performance is not perfect, then he must return to the group to study the lines selected from the Koran.

In the West African nation of Burkina Faso, just north of Ghana, education has taken many forms. Traditional Koranic schools, like the one described above, coexist with modern Koranic schools, which are more similar to Western education. Both teach Islam to the mainly Muslim population of this country.

Martine Kirwin, an early childhood education major at Ohio University, returned to her home in the summer of 2003 to study the Koranic schools to better understand their students. Her research is funded by a Provost Undergraduate Research Award, which she earned with help from her adviser Angela Baum, assistant professor of human and consumer sciences.

During Kirwin's six-week stay in Burkina Faso, she interviewed teachers and observed traditional and modern Koranic schools. While the Muslim population privately supports both schools, study of the Koran is the only main similarity she found.

“Children are enrolled by their parents in Koranic schools for many reasons,” Kirwin says of both types of schools. “In most cases, the parents' intention is to make their children better Muslims.”

Kirwin, educated in a Christian school in Burkina Faso, says that the students in both schools learn to read and write in addition to studying Islam. Traditional Koranic schools allow for an education for poor, rural children who cannot afford tuition to modern schools and otherwise may not have had any instruction. Students from the traditional schools, however, are unlikely to go on with education, although there are students at Ohio University who grew up in this tradition, she says.

Modern Koranic schools take a different approach to education. Students in these schools not only memorize and recite the Koran, but also must understand the meaning of the text. In addition to the Koran, they are taught Arabic, French, or English, and mathematics in a classroom with desks. Students in these schools are from the upper class, urban centers of the country, and many continue their education after high school.

In contrast, Kirwin spent time for class assignments at Ohio University's Child Development Center, a preschool with children ages 3 to 5 where classrooms are less structured than the schools she visited in Africa. “Here there is more flexibility, and the kids have more ways to learn,” says Kirwin. In Koranic schools, children sit silently and are separated by gender.

After completing an education in the United States, Kirwin hopes to return to Burkina Faso to organize a preschool or have a classroom of her own where all backgrounds would be present. She sees her experience with the Koranic schools as a useful tool.

“I'm going to be able to deal with a Muslim student, who was raised differently than a Christian student,” she says.

For more information about the School Of Human And Consumer Sciences, visit the Web at http://www.ohiou.edu/humanandconsumer/childandfamily.htm.

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