Aims

Al-Athfal is an international, peer-reviewed journal that advances rigorous and innovative scholarship on early childhood education, care, and development in Muslim societies and other culturally grounded, underrepresented educational settings worldwide. The journal foregrounds how faith-informed values, culturally embedded caregiving, lived religion, and local institutions shape children’s learning, development, and well-being, and it seeks empirically grounded, theoretically explicit, and policy-relevant contributions that improve real-world educational practice and policy. We prioritize submissions that move beyond local description by offering transferable conceptual insights, methodological innovations, robust measures, or actionable implications with clear cross-context relevance.

Scope

The journal welcomes original research articles, critical reviews, comparative analyses, methodological papers, and policy studies that address (but are not limited to) the following areas:

1. ⁠Pedagogy and Curriculum in Early Childhood Education — design, implementation, and evaluation of instructional models; play-based and values-based learning; emergent literacy and numeracy; assessment of learning in the early years.
2. Religion, Lived Faith, and Early Childhood Formation — lived religion in the early years; religious socialization and identity formation; ritual, narrative, and moral pedagogy; faith-based early childhood institutions; everyday religious practices and meaning-making in family and community life; comparative perspectives across religious traditions in culturally grounded settings.
3. ⁠Child Development and Well-being — cognitive, social-emotional, moral/spiritual, linguistic, and physical development; culturally situated approaches to resilience, empathy, and prosocial behavior.
4. Family–School–Community Ecosystems — parenting practices, home learning environments, faith- and community-based socialization, and the role of local religious and community institutions in supporting early development.
5. ⁠Teacher Professionalism and Early Childhood Workforce Quality — teacher beliefs, reflective practice, professional preparation, pedagogical leadership, and continuous professional development.
6. ⁠Inclusion, Equity, and Early Childhood Policy — access and equity; inclusive practices for diverse needs; gender and social justice; governance and policy in Muslim-majority settings and other culturally grounded, underrepresented contexts worldwide.
7. Measurement, Instruments, and Intervention Evaluation — development, validation, and cultural adaptation of assessment tools, screening instruments, and evaluation frameworks that are transparent and replicable or adaptable across settings.

Out of scope / low priority: Purely descriptive manuscripts lacking methodological rigor, theoretical framing, and clear broader contributions may be declined. Single-site studies are considered when they offer analytically generalizable insights and clear implications for practice or policy.