Spiritual-Based Curriculum Enactment in Elementary Islamic Religious Education: Teachers’ Perspectives from Demak, Indonesia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35445/alishlah.v18i3.10039Keywords:
spiritual-based curriculum; islamic elementary education; teacher perspectives; digital spiritual literacy; religious moderationAbstract
Digital transformation presents both pedagogical opportunities and ethical challenges for Islamic Religious Education (PAI), particularly in integrating technology with religious moderation, spiritual development, and moral formation. This study examined how elementary PAI teachers conceptualize and report enacting a spiritual-based curriculum and identified the conditions shaping its implementation. A qualitative descriptive design using inductive qualitative content analysis was employed. Data were obtained from open-ended questionnaire responses from 20 PAI teachers across 20 elementary schools in Demak Regency, Central Java, Indonesia. One hundred nonblank item-level responses were coded, categorized, and abstracted into themes. Descriptive counts were used to indicate thematic prevalence without implying statistical generalization. Six themes emerged: technology as a scaffold for religious meaning; an uneven transition from digital consumption to student production; dialogic and ethical approaches to wasatiyyah; tension between religious habituation and spiritual autonomy; relational modelling alongside contested disciplinary practices; and digital risks, teacher capacity, and an enactment gap between reported practices and proposed activities. The findings suggest that spiritual-based curriculum enactment depends less on technological sophistication than on teachers’ ethical mediation, reflective pedagogy, relational modelling, and capacity to connect religious routines with meaningful reflection. The study proposes an integrated framework emphasizing ethical digital mediation, dialogic moral formation, reflective spiritual internalization, relational modelling, and ecological enactment capacity. Further research using classroom observations, interviews, documents, and pupil perspectives is needed to examine actual enactment and educational outcomes.
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