جدید قانونی تصورات پر مذہب اور اخلاق کا اثر: مغربی اور اسلامی تناظر میں ایک تقابلی و تنقیدی جائزہ

Authority is the centerpiece of the law as well as legal system. It cannot be properly understood without adequate understanding of the structure of authority that underlies it. The role of moral and religious values in the law has been a vital issue in classical as well as contemporary legal philosophy. Discussion about the theoretical foundation of the law remains a key issue in the modern legal thinking as a legal system is considered to have emerged from cultural contexts. Western legal systems are broadly grounded in to the Judo-Christian and Greco-Roman cultures. Though a fundamental change took place in the Western Europe as cultural traditions which affected the very nature of law both as a political institution and as an intellectual concept. The creation of modern legal systems was, in the first instance, a response to revolutionary change within the church and its relation with the secular authority. It led to bifurcation of social morality and religion in the modern law. Now most of the modern theories are based on this concept. The present paper presents a study of the origins of the Islamic law as well as the contemporary western legal thought in connection with religion and ethics. The conflict about moral and religious values reflects their code of life and concept of religions. In Islamic law authority-which is at once religious and moral is the will of the creator which is basic source of Islamic law, However, Fuqahᾱ differentiate between legal and moral values

Facilitating Teachers Understanding and Practice of Constructivist Notion of Teaching and Learning: A Focus on Soliciting Students Prior Knowledge

This small-scale action research seeks to explore possibilities and challenges in facilitating a teacher to elicit students' prior knowledge for classroom teaching and learning processes. This effort is based on the rationale, informed by the constructivist notion of teaching and learning, that is students' are not blank slates' or empty vessels', they do bring prior knowledge, experiences and attitudes to the classroom context and are active constructors' of their own knowledge. For this, I as an action researcher worked with one lower-secondary level social studies teacher in a community based school of Karachi. In this respect, the study explores the existing perceptions and practices of the participant teacher with reference to focus this research. Subsequently, a general action plan was devised to facilitate the teacher's understanding about the constructivist notion of teaching and learning in general, and the solicitation of students' prior knowledge in particular. This action plan was implemented being sensitive to filed situation and participant teacher' needs. In this regard, data for reconnaissance and observation of action implementation stages were collected through classroom observations (through taking running notes), semi-structured interviews, researcher' reflective diary and document analysis. The gathered data was analyzed at each stage throughout the process. The study reports some possible strategies to facilitate teacher in developing understanding about constructivist teaching and learning, and soliciting students' prior knowledge. These are: a) input' through relevant literature to develop participant' conceptual understanding of the topic under question b) sharing reflection from classroom practice episodes c) brainstorming, concept mapping, Know, Want to know, and Learnt (KWL), and students' analogies (as some strategies). The report concludes by presenting some key learnings as I experienced as a teacher educator and action researcher during the process, and possible focus for further research.