theorizing

Theorizing in the humanities is a foundational pillar of scientific advancement, with university faculty who play an important role in this regard. However, humanities faculty face significant barriers that hinder theorizing. This study explores the cognitive and professional obstacles to theorizing among Iranian higher education humanities faculty.

This research is applied in purpose that employs a qualitative phenomenological approach for data collection. Potential participants included all professors and experts in the humanities field in Iran. The sampling was purposeful and the selection method was based on the opinions of "key experts", with data collected through unstructured interviews. The sample size was determined based on the theoretical saturation criterion, resulting in a total of 15 interviews. Data were then analyzed through thematic analysis following Smith's (1995) interpretative phenomenology method, conducted in three stages using MAXQDA24 software.

The cognitive and professional barriers to theory development among humanities faculty were identified as one main theme, two sub-themes, and seven fundamental themes relating to cognitive barriers, and eight fundamental themes relateing to professional barriers.    Cognitive barriers include lack of awareness of one's mission, latent ignorance of one's situation, lack of awareness or neglect of societal issues, neglect of qualitative research methods, simplistic approach to basic research, lack of awareness of the benefits of conceptualization, and being single-minded and not equipped with other peripheral sciences. Professional obstacles also include a low tendency towards interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, lack of presence in the field (society and industry), superficiality and the prevalence of shadowing, lack of specialized fields of study, failure to go beyond existing science and knowledge to solve problems, failure to operationalize what has been learned, single-role positioning of faculty members, adherence to undeveloped and unconstructive research approaches and methods.

By identifying barriers to professional cognitive theorizing among faculty members in the humanities, the present study has led to a better understanding of this issue and to taking appropriate measures to reduce and eliminate these barriers. Overcoming these barriers necessitates enhancing cognitive and professional development programs, revising academic evaluation and promotion systems, promoting interdisciplinary studies, and strengthening industry engagement to smooth the path of theorizing in the humanities.

Developing research spirit in children as the most important future human capital of any society is considered one of the smartest strategies to face ever-increasing developments and transformations. Therefore in this research, we tried to identify and present the dimensions of fostering children as researchers using a qualitative approach based on the grounded theory method of dimensional analysis. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect the data. Twenty experts in didactics and education, preschool teachers, and parents from the cities of Qom and Tehran were selected using criterion and snowball sampling methods. Data were analyzed using the natural analysis method. The collected data led to the emergence of five dimensions through the explanatory matrix of the dimensional analysis method. The results showed that reinforcing a research spirit in children is a function of relationships among multiple and multilevel factors arising from the quality of the conditions, context, perspective, and educational processes in which they are fostered.

As a possible way of improving curricula, it was hypothesized that the role of religion in curriculum development needs to be revisited. To this end, experts’ views on religious foundations of curricula were sought, identified, analyzed, and conceptualized. The results show that the experts’ views on religious foundation of curricula is mostly affected by their standpoint on both curriculum and current perceptions of its religious foundations. This was taken to be the experts’ reaction to their understanding of the very concept of curriculum. Some consider this concept to be equivalent to curriculum development, while a very few think of curriculum as a field of study and as a result includes curricula’s religious foundations. The former limited view of curriculum and its dimensions has led to a limited impact of religion on curriculum. Therefore, both understandings of curriculum and its religious foundations need to change in order to maximize the role of religion in curriculum. Considering curriculum development as a science could lead to the identification of fundamental roles that religion, as a semantic network of reasoning, can play.

In this research, one of the views of the Islamic curriculum proposed by Hashim has been described, analyzed and criticized. In the analysis, it was found that she considered the curriculum as a document and system. Her view on religious science is influenced by al-Attas' view. Accordingly, she considers science as a religious one in condition that it is free from Western elements and replaced by Islamic propositions. She seeks to design and develop a curriculum that places particular emphasis on Islamic goals and content. The most important criticisms indicates the neglect and lack of theoretical explanation of philosophical and methodological foundations, reliance on formalist views, Neglecting the curriculum as a field of study, being under the banner of the discourse of existing Western sciences. Hence, the important need of this field today is to go beyond the passive encounter, which is based on the adaptation, refinement and formalistic completion of existing Western knowledge, and to turn to reactive and proactive encounters that seek to provide theoretical formulations. New development of curriculum knowledge boundaries from an Islamic perspective is essential.

In recent decades, the two terms "resilience" and "patience" have attracted much research. Now the question is whether these two variables have the same structure or do they have two different structures? What are the similarities and differences between the two in terms of concepts, fundamentals, methods and techniques? The study was an analytical one which was a combination of systematic review, content analysis and literature review. Information was collected from book and article sources. The results showed that Patience involves resilience and beyond. In terms of conceptual constructs of patience, it was observed to include: inhibition of anger, inhibition of lust, patience, endurance, expectation, and openness of reason. Whereas conceptual structures of resilience include: tolerance, adaptation, return, adaptability, capacity building and change and reconstruction. Likewise, the process of patience growth is: emotional restraint; forbearance; Expectation; perfection. So it can be concluded that, the patience as a complete model of Islamic lifestyle, can be used in both the treatment and development of clients, especially in crisis-related interventions. This approach can be a good substitute for emotionally focused and resilience perspectives.

Curriculum theorizing is the methodology of the theory development. We recognize, two approaches to curriculum theorizing; explanation and understanding. Explanation resemble the processes of theorizing like natural scientist does and understanding is an approach to theorizing with its personal engagement consideration, uniqueness evolve from the complexity of and unrepeatable educational phenomena. In this article, two main ideas, objectivism-reductionism, subjectivism-mystrianism and a branch of the second idea so called; conceptualism are examined. It is argued that all three ideas are corresponding with the explanation or understanding and so their deficiency in human life is determined. It is argued that neurophenomenology could be considered as a remedy for the fragmental deficiency and incompetence of the current dominant positions in curriculum theorizing. We called the neurophenomenology inspired theorizing as; "understanding explanation" and explain it in reference to the Varrellas, Varelachr('39')s methodology of reciprocal constraints.

“Islamic Curriculum” is one of the newly-emerging concepts and areas in the curriculum studies. It mainly focuses on islamization of the curriculum based on the monotheistic worldview. However, no clear and defensible theoretical framework has been offered on the nature of Islamic curriculum and its boundaries. This paper aims to present an initial idea and framework for the Islamic curriculum and its boundaries. For this purpose, the content of existing works on Islamic curriculum was described, analyzed and criticized in the three stages. In the first stage, after identifying individual related works, the author's purpose of the Islamic curriculum and his/her intended dimension(s) for islamization of the knowledge dimensions of the curriculum were analyzed. In the second stage, the nature of author's activity –theorizing or applying current Western theories- were analyzed in the works. In the third stage, the works were criticized with regard to their content and conceptualization. Based on the current status, two main trends could be identified in this perspective: enriching Islamic curriculum with Islamic values, based on the theoretical framework of curricula design and development dominated in the West; and Islamic curriculum as a major philosophical-valued theory. Due to the insufficiency of these trends and their ignorance toward different knowledge dimensions of the Islamic curriculum, this study proposes a third alternative trend and seeks to call upon the specialists to consider the production of the Islamic curriculum knowledge by expanding theoretical discussions in all its related dimensions. Undoubtedly participation in the production of appropriate Islamic curriculum knowledge needs some so-called theorizing, as the only way of creating new knowledge.

According to the faculty members of the Islamshahr Islamic Azad University, one of the structural approaches of the Country Higher Education in the field of humanities and religion is an analysis of the effective deterrent factors on the Theorizing Seats, scientific critique and debate, and identifying and prioritizing its solutions. Using descriptive-survey method, this paper has studied the entire faculty members of the university, considering that 174 of them were selected randomly by the Stratified Sampling method as the sample group. Required data were collected through a researcher-made questionnaire with a reliability of 0.89 based on Likert scale 5. Data analysis based on single-group Z inferential tests and single group analysis of variance (F) showed that, respectively, cultural, administrative-structural, factors related to policy making of the theorizing system, providing research service’s methods and motivational factors have a deterrent role in theorizing; however, the inhibitory intensity of the various studied factors is not statistically significant with 0.99. Providing stronger scientific-research privileges for the professors and compilation of a comprehensive agenda of the Theorizing Seats are respectively the most effective solutions to overcome the obstacles.

Theorizing, as the highest level of knowledge, depends on a group of underlying factors in the theorist itself, his time and space requirements and surroundings. The main question of the paper is that what is the role of ethics (Including virtues and vices) and the firm characteristics of the theorist in the process of the production of science and theorization? With the help of descriptive-analytical method, that is, referring to religious texts and rational analyzes, we have shown that the ethics of the theorist plays the role at least on the three main stages from the various stages of the production of the science include: (1) problemology or problem-finding, (2) the science’s teleology or targeting, and (3) the process of the discovering and understanding the reality. It has also been shown that this role-playing is merely grounded, not more, and it has also become clear that this role-playing never implies the acceptance of the normative or meta-normal relativism about knowledge.

The realization of human sciences is based on two main subjects: first, the methodological subject that means to design a model and formulate the paradigm parameters of human sciences from viewpoint of Islamic thought; second, the theorizing that is necessary for understanding and explaining of social reality. In this paper, the first subject, designing of a model and formulating the paradigm parameters of human sciences from Islamic view, will be discussed. In the methodology of human sciences, it is mentioned that each science has some fundamental ontological, anthropological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions. The epistemic system that resulted from those assumptions and entitled theoretical system, theoretical viewpoint, or paradigm, is one of the most important issues in the methodology of each science. The questions are these: what is the role of a paradigm in the methodology of human sciences? Which paradigm is an Islamic paradigm of human sciences? What is(are) the difference(s) between an Islamic paradigm of human sciences and a non-Islamic paradigm of human sciences? Because this paper has been applied the methodology of thematic commentary, its technique is text analysis. In the text analysis or according to Maurice Duverger, classic methodology, first, some questions are raised and then the answers are founded in the text. In the methodology of text analysis, there is a bilinear relationship between a reference to the text and a conclusion on each subject. It means that finding the answers begins with raising the questions and after studying the text, some parts may change the meaning of the other parts. As a result, the paradigm parameters of human sciences from Koranic view are divided into two groups: the first group called worldview consists of some ontological and anthropological assumptions; the second group called meta-theory includes some epistemological and methodological assumptions.