Combating Islamaphobia through history teaching

Abstract

Islamaphobia has long been a phenomenon in Malta due to the island’s strong Catholic culture and long history of conflict, with Muslim Arabs or Turks frequently regarded as “the enemy”. Today with the appearance of irregular immigrants from Africa who started arriving in Malta after 2000, the local population is now faced with a new situation, that is, with the presence of a small but growing Muslim community on the island. This paper details an attempt to use history teaching as a possible tool to combat prejudice and onesided images of “the other” within the Maltese context using a topic from the Maltese history National Curriculum, that of the Great Siege of Malta in 1565. The history learning activities were carried out in a co-educational private school with three different classes of Year Eight students (12/13 year-olds), a total of 74 pupils. These classes consisted of mixed achievers and were not set or streamed in any way; the pupils’ social backgrounds were reasonably homogeneous, with their parents tending to come from an upper middle class background. The vast majority of pupils are Catholics and the school offers compulsory Catholic Religious education, although it exempts pupils from attending Religious classes if their parents formally request that their children opt out. This school educates pupils from the ages of 3 to 16 and most subjects including history are taught in English.