The Characteristics of Religious Education Teachers and Respecting Diversity in Religious Education in Croatia

The first part of the article deals with the European and, specifically, Croatian sociopolitical and cultural framework of inclusive pedagogy and presents its basic postulates. The second part contains answers to questions linked to the treatment of differences in religious education in Croatia and characteristics of teachers that can be linked to this theme. It presents and interprets the results of a quantitative study conducted in April 2015 among religious education teachers of various religious communities that teach religion in schools (N = 471).     

Dutch Cooperation Schools as Democratic Communities: A Constructive Perspective from Dewey’s View on Democracy in Education

In this article, the authors reflect on the results of their previous research at cooperation schools in the Netherlands, where students and teachers from nonaffiliated and Christian backgrounds come together. Dewey’s perspective on educating democratic values is combined with empirical results of this research, answering the question what Dewey’s concept contributes to the reflection on the relation between values and religious education at these schools. This article shows that this reflection and the implementation of value-based religious education offers opportunities for schools that face the challenge of practicing encounter between students from different backgrounds.     

Religiosity and Education: The Views of Greek Student Teachers on the Religious Education Course

The correlation of student teachers’ religiosity with their views on the religious education course that they are called on to teach in Greek public schools is the subject treated in the present survey. The five main features of religiosity, that is, (1) religious faith, (2) religious knowledge, (3) religious experience, (4) participation in a religious group or community, and (5) daily practice and conduct, were assessed for 1009 student teachers. With the help of data processing and cluster analysis, a causal relationship was found between their religiosity and their views on religious education.     

Student primary teachers and their experience of religious education in schools

This article is based on research into the way student primary teachers experience religious education when they train in schools. The research findings suggest that the experience and quality of training in many schools is not adequate and that this experience undermines student confidence in relation to religious education. The author argues that despite the increased reliance on school as an arena for the training of teachers, in the case of religious education many student teachers do not have the opportunities to observe or teach religious education even where the school or student is keen to do so.     

Spiritual Development in Public and Religious Schools: A Case Study

This article addresses teachers' understanding of spiritual development in public and religious schools in Boston and Chicago. It examines how teachers define spiritual development in different educational contexts and looks at the way they relate spirituality to a number of factors including community, identity, and character. The data from the research indicates that teachers understood spiritual development within the specific environment of their school but that they all located the need for spirituality within education as part of the reaction against the perceived negative side effects of modern society.     

Religious studies,religious education and the aims of education

This article interacts with a recent article by Denise Cush and Catherine Robinson in which they call for a new dialogue between religious studies in universities and religious education, and identify a number of developments in religious studies that have implications for the practice of religious education in schools. Cush and Robinson are representative of an influential body of opinion among religious educators that looks to religious studies for inspiration. It is argued that they, along with others, fail to appreciate the difference between the aims of religious studies and those of religious education and that this unrecognised difference leads them both to engage uncritically and superficially with the history of post-confessional religious education and to fail to recognise that the roots of some of the weaknesses in contemporary religious education can be traced to the influence of religious studies over it. Showing that religious education has (and is required to have) a different set of aims from religious studies (though some aims may be held in common) alerts us to its distinctive nature, and this in turn facilitates a clearer understanding of its role in schools, which can serve both to direct and to evaluate educational outcomes.     

Preparing primary school teachers to teach religious education

Under the guidelines for Initial Teacher Training, all potential primary teachers are required to learn about teaching religious education. However, religious education is not a high priority on ITT programmes and trainees may often have little introduction to it. Given the sensitive nature of religious education, what is the best way to prepare trainees for teaching religious education, and how far do we need to take into account their views about the subject? This article reports on a study involving trainees on a one‐year PGCE course. All the students were preparing to teach in primary schools and were not specialist religious education trainees. The aim of the study was to discover how trainees felt about teaching religious education in the primary school and how far their feelings linked to their views about religion. The conclusions suggest that any effective preparation of the trainees needs to recognise the diversity of their starting points and allow them opportunity to reflect on their views of religion and religious education.     

Religious education in Syria: unity and difference

This article discusses the almost identical syllabuses of the Christian and Muslim religious education programmes of the Syrian Arab Republic. Content analysis of the students’ textbooks and teachers’ guides (in Arabic) reveals common themes of citizenship education and national unity. Classroom observations in Damascus also highlight how Christian and Muslim teachers have similar ways of teaching religion. Finally, the article describes how each programme aims to unite, in its own way, all the Christians of Syria as well as the Muslims. It becomes evident that the Syrian religious education programmes strike a balance between the religious autonomy of the faith communities and the need for national unity.     

Catechesis and Religious Education in Canadian Catholic Schools

A key concept in contemporary Catholic educational discourse makes a distinction between religious education and catechesis. This distinction is based on the assumptions of faith commitment on the part of catechesis and the focus on cognitive outcomes on the part of religious education. Many official documents on Canadian Catholic school education, however, reflect an understanding that closely associated catechesis with religious education or fail to sufficiently distinguish between the two. The article argues that changes in contemporary culture make catechetical models of religious education problematic and that Catholic schools in Canada would be well served by an approach that emphasizes the educational goals of religious education. This is not to say that catechesis has no place in religious education but this is best achieved by making use of cognitive and effective outcomes in lesson planning and realizing that the school as a whole has many opportunities to foster catechesis.     

The influence of research within religious education: the Westhill Seminars,RE professionals,pupils and schools

This article investigates the educational value of research studied by exploring the influence on a range of religious education professionals from a set of research seminars. The seminar series, sponsored by the Westhill Endowment Trust, has been running since 2004, bringing together teachers, advisors and higher education professionals working on religious education in UK schools and internationally. The seminars have been intended to develop the relationship between research and professionals, and they have generated a number of publications. Eleven seminars involving a total of 167 participants are analysed in terms of what participation in the seminars may have influenced (the professionals, pupils, schools), which aspects of the seminars were influential and why the seminars were influential. This article describes the process of developing appropriate methods to investigate both the influence of research seminars and the results of their use. The research includes a questionnaire and follow-up interviews. The most significant indications show that the seminars influenced pupils in schools and professionals; the publications from the seminars had a distinctive influence, and spending time to think and discuss about religious education was at least as influential as the presentations by researchers.     

A Framework for Religious Education

Religious education is not compulsory for pupils in special schools and its curriculum content is not laid down in the National Curriculum but Erica Brown believes that the spiritual and religious development of all pupils with special educational needs must be encouraged. She is director of special educational needs, The National Society, Church House, Westminster, responsible for in-service training for church schools in England and Wales, and editor of RESPECT, a bi-annual journal for teachers of RE to pupils with special educational needs.     

Shaking Religious Education: A New Look At The Literature

This article offers an analysis of religious education practice through the literature that informs it. It engages Derrida's critique of the “metaphysics of presence” (1982a) to develop a theoretical framework for a new look at the ways in which different approaches to religious education represent religion and racial difference. The article specifically examines literature that has impacted mainstream Christian and “secular” religious education in South Australia from the 1970s until today. The article concludes by proposing a new approach to racial, cultural, and religious difference in religious education—one that begins to understand religious education's engagement with Others in terms of ethical questions, deliberation, and a radical openness to what is unforeseeable. It argues for the need for religious educators to begin to actively and deliberatively engage with “who” and “what” has traditionally been absent from multireligious approaches to religious education.     

民国浙江教会中学的宗教教育及其当下启示

宗教教育是教会中学必须一以贯之的教育事工,浙江教会中学也不例外。自20世纪20年代中后期起,浙江教会中学迫于社会各界压力,进行了调整改革,宗教作为必修课的地位被取消。但是,不管如何变化,宗教教育在学校教育中始终处于核心地位,而且特色明显,这对当下的中学思政教育具有启示意义。     

Religious discrimination discourse in the mono-cultural school: the case of Poland

The article forms an analysis of the religious discrimination discourse in Polish public schools, with special attention paid to the culturally specific, Polish understanding of the notion of religious discrimination. The introductory part presents the concept of religious discrimination as present in anti-discriminatory policies. The following part outlines the Polish system of religious education and its relation to the religious discrimination. Studies on religious discrimination in Poland are presented and discussed. Important context is supplied by a presentation of two recent cases of religious discrimination in Polish public schools, and the actions undertaken by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Authors of the article point out the important influence of cultural context on the perception of religious discrimination. The attention is drawn to the seemingly homogenous environment of the Polish school and of the discriminative discourse used in political and social debates. The analysis shows that the presence of religion as a subject in Polish schools remains a cause of conflict between the religious and atheist citizens, a conflict in which concepts of religious discrimination and religious freedom are used as arguments by both sides.     

Quality of religious education in Croatia assessed from teachers’ perspective

The main aim of the present study was to examine the quality of religious education in Croatian primary schools when assessed from teachers’ perspective. Religious education teachers (N?=?226) rated the impact of certain factors on the existing quality of religious education in primary schools and expressed their expectations about the future status of this aspect of education. In addition, teachers rated different sources of their professional satisfaction as religious education teachers. We identified understandable latent dimensions of teachers’ opinions, expectations and satisfaction where retained dimensions are modestly interrelated. The conducted regression analyses suggest that teachers with different professional status-related personal attributes are fairly uniform in their views, expectations and satisfactions. An interesting finding of this study concerns the relationship between school-based Catholic religious education and the parish-based catechesis, where an existing relationship represents a weak source of religious education teachers’ satisfaction. This represents a valuable empirically driven insight regarding the Catholic religious education in Croatian schools with some importance to the broader context of religious education in general.     

Islamic religious education and the plan against violent radicalization in Spain

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the importance of Islamic religious education in public schools in Spain as an instrument in the prevention and fight against violent radicalisation. In this article, we examine the legal status of Islamic religious education and the latest regulations on Islamic religious education that emphasise the fight against Islamist terrorism. We also study the regulation of teachers of Islamic religious education and their role in the counter-narrative required to deter the message of Islamist terrorists and prevent violent radicalisation.     

Towards the decolonisation of religion education in a pre-service education classroom

ABSTRACT

In this article, I reflect on my attempts to decolonise religious education at a historically white university in a post-apartheid South Africa. This pre-service education project conducted in 2017 happened against the backdrop of two events, namely, a renewed curriculum policy, Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) and the #RhodesMustFall (RMF) and #FeesMustFall (FMF) protests. These events encouraged me to reflect on my academic role as a teacher-educator preparing pre-service teachers to teach religion in schools. This led to me asking many questions such as, what is the effect of my teaching religious education?, How do teacher-educators prepare religious education pre-service teachers for a multicultural and multireligious society?, How does my teaching align itself with the decolonisation of education? and How do I redress the colonial past in my religious education classroom? The data which included reflective reports, student experiences and self-reflexivity acknowledged the findings that religion education served as a unifying factor in building social cohesion. The significance of this paper lies in the argument that decolonisation becomes an imperative if one is striving for social justice and intends to commit oneself to a more equitable society where crossing borders must be a seamless act.     

Understanding the Study of Religion in Undergraduate Programs of Religious Studies as Religious Education

The aim of this research is to investigate the intergenerational changes that have occurred in Australian Jewish day schools and the challenges these pose for religious and Jewish education. Using a grounded theory approach according to the constant comparative method (Strauss 1987), data from three sources (interviews [296], observations [27], and documents) were analyzed, thus enabling triangulation. Findings show that there is an incongruity between what the adult community defines as the central components of Jewish and religious identity, which are more particularistic, and the perspectives of Jewish youth, which are more universalistic.     

Religious doctrines and critical religious education: teachers’ epistemic switching in a confessional setting

The purpose of the present article is twofold: first, to examine whether epistemic switching is documented in the context of religious education; and second, if it is, to show the challenges as well as the strategies that teachers utilise when they engage in epistemic switching. The context of our study is religious education in the Greek-Cypriot educational system – an example of a confessional setting in which Greek Orthodox Christianity is the only religion being taught in schools. This article describes a qualitative case study research – which is part of a larger, 1-year project – that explores the understandings of religion and interculturalism as well as the pedagogical perspectives on religious education of six Greek-Cypriot primary school teachers. The findings show how the possibilities and obstacles of teachers’ epistemic switching could inform larger debates concerning the entanglements between critical religious education pedagogies and religious doctrines, especially within confessional educational contexts.     

Finding a Golden Mean in Education Policy: Centering Religious and Public Schools

The separation between Church and State, private and public education, is blurring, and coming together, as the government gives families vouchers to attend private and religious schools. Religious groups are starting and supporting their own charter schools, and local jurisdictions (cities and counties) are providing free transportation and food services to children attending private schools. What emerges, and is the focus of this analysis, is the new “middle ground,” a “golden mean,” by which public schools learn diversity and choice while private/religious schools are helped by public programs and funds. The oldest, perhaps, was Lyndon Johnson's compromise with the Catholics to get Title 1 passed as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that sends public school teachers into private schools to help children in need. This study examines the emergence of a middle group in public–private education, and how the policies are working and what's changing. It argues that the child is the center of education, and government and private agencies are changing and should come together to serve the clients, the children.