My diploma thesis, Attitudes of Future Preschool Teachers towards Muslims, examines the attitudes of preschool education students towards Islam and Muslims. In the theoretical part, I first introduce Islam, its characteristics, and its importance in Slovenia. I then focus on stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination against members of the Islamic religion, and Islamophobia. This is followed by a chapter on Islam and Muslims in the field of education. In the preschool legislation, I try to highlight the parts that mention Islam and its followers. Based on various European studies, I present teachers’ attitudes towards members of the Islamic religion, show how prejudices and stereotypes towards them are manifested in educational institutions, and finally make suggestions on how to deal with negative attitudes in the educational process. .
The results of studies abroad are varied, but mostly worrying, and in Slovenia we have found almost no such studies. However, I did not find any studies on this topic in the field of preschool education. Therefore, in this study I wanted to find out: what associations future preschool teachers have with Islam; whether they would include a Muslim child in their class if they had the choice; what personality traits they attribute to members of the Islamic religion; what they feel towards members of the Islamic religion; and whether they have any prejudices or stereotypes towards them.
The results show that preschool education students most often associate Islam with the basic concepts of Islam and that if they had a choice, they would accept the Muslim child in their class. They mostly attribute positive personality traits to Muslims accompanied by positive feelings towards them. The majority of the respondents did not express prejudices and stereotypes towards Muslims. In our study, we found that many questions had a rather high percentage of undecideds, which could indicate insufficient knowledge of the problem, but also a tendency to choose a more socially acceptable answer or to avoid expressing their negative attitude towards Muslims and Islam.
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