Animated Film as A Medium for Strengthening Love for the Prophet in Elementary Education
Keywords:
Affective Learning, digital prophetic pedagogy, Islamic Animated Film, Love, Prophet CharacterAbstract
The rapid expansion of digital visual culture has increasingly shifted children’s admiration from religious figures toward entertainment icons, weakening their affection for the Prophet Muhammad as a moral role model in elementary education. This study therefore examines whether an animated film about the Prophet Muhammad can strengthen elementary students’ love for the Prophet. Employing a quantitative one-group pretest–posttest design, the study involved 107 fifth-grade students from three elementary schools in Demak Regency. Data were collected using the 20-item Prophetic Love Character Scale and analyzed through descriptive statistics and paired-samples t-tests. The findings demonstrate a consistent and statistically significant increase in students’ love for the Prophet across all participating schools, with an average score improvement of 25 points following the intervention. These results indicate that animated visual narratives are effective in fostering students’ emotional engagement, including empathy, admiration, and emotional connection to the Prophet, thereby supporting deeper internalization of prophetic values. Although the absence of a control group and the reliance on short-term post-intervention measurement limit the generalizability of the findings, the study nonetheless confirms the pedagogical potential of prophetic animated films in elementary Islamic education. Overall, this study provides empirically grounded and pedagogically meaningful insights for the development of a digital prophetic pedagogy aligned with contemporary learning contexts
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