This article discusses whether there is a contradiction in prescribing a religious, more specifically a Christian, tradition as the ethical basis for a teaching that is prescribed to be non-denominational. In the Swedish curriculum, the ethics borne by a Christian tradition and Western humanism are used as a platform for the school's teaching at…

This article examines the conditions for designing an epistemologically grounded teaching about religions through an identification of what knowledge is central to the subject of Religious Education (RE). A starting point for the analysis is a discussion of Michael Young's well-known concept of powerful knowledge, as a possible platform for…

In Sweden, ethics education occupies a prominent position in the curriculum, both in the general, introductory sections and as a part of the subject religious education. The aim of this article is to investigate teachers' insights regarding ethics education and to contribute knowledge about opportunities and challenges with ethics education, by…

The overarching aim is to explore what teachers perceive as the opportunities provided by using literature in ethics education in compulsory school. When being interviewed, in what ways do the teachers express views on the potential of fiction to encourage students to accept certain human conditions as imaginable, or to create motivation for…

The aim of this article is to highlight the role of religiously motivated ethics within the field of sustainability didactics. The article starts with critical reflections on the idea that religion, by proposing claims for knowledge of absolute authorities such as "divine beings or supernatural dimensions", offers capacity for uniting…

The aim of this article is to highlight some conceptions of ethical competence identified in interviews with teachers in religious education in Sweden, and within analyses of policy documents in a Swedish and an Icelandic educational context. As a starting point we take seven interviewed teachers' comments about what they view as important ethical…