Lutheran schools transform students, families, congregations, and communities. While effective school leadership is crucial for this potential transformation, the difficulties of school leadership continue to increase. Leaders of Christian schools face challenges unique to the parochial context. The purpose of this study was to explore how…

Previous studies suggest that small rural schools experience a range of challenges relating to their size, financial difficulties and geographical isolation, as well as potential opportunities relating to their position within their communities. In Northern Ireland, these schools are situated within the comparatively rare context of a religiously…

Children's religious education is vital for the formation of pupils in Dutch Orthodox Protestant schools. Therefore, it seems self-evident that parents and teachers cooperate. This article presents research on parents' and teachers' opinions about the helpfulness of cooperative practices in religious education. A total of 1346 parents and teachers…

A long tradition of both State and religious interest and support characterised provision for education on the island of Ireland from the 1700s. Following the partition of Ireland in the 1920s, the newly created political entities of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland forged separate and distinct education policy trajectories that largely…

This article explores adolescents' and teachers' interpretations of shared education through interviews with participating teachers and pupils in one school partnership in Northern Ireland. As an initiative explicitly designed to bring pupils from Catholic and majority Protestant schools together, shared education offers potential for building…

Society in Northern Ireland can be characterised as being underpinned by an enduring cultural, religious and political divide between two dominant communities: Catholics and Protestants. The educational system largely reflects and contributes to the reproduction of this separation. Teachers are generally deployed in schools that are consistent…

The aim of this study is to gain empirical knowledge about how the Bible functions in the context of Protestant Christian primary schools in the Netherlands. It presents the results of an empirical explorative and qualitative study on the perceptions of teachers and school administrators (directors and internal supervisors) on the goals of Bible…

There is considerable literature concerning the impact of education in divided societies. Some seek to defend separate schools, often for different faith groups, while others stress the benefits of school integration on social cohesiveness. Contact theory has been employed in efforts in many countries to address social discord. Northern Ireland is…

The cycle's third article considers the Prussian elementary school evolution from the second half of the 19th century to the early 20th century. Special attention is paid to the elementary school system development as well as pedagogical issues of the school organization and management. Scientific and specialized literature on the research topic…

In this article, we present a reconceptualization of sport as a series of collaborative contests with players on different teams scoring goals cooperatively: players on both sides lose or both sides win together depending on whether they can improve the scores they earn in overcoming limitations and obstacles by working with the other team. When…

This action research project occurred to assess the effectiveness of the continual learning process, a philosophy described by W. Edwards Deming. The study took place at a small, U.S. Midwest Lutheran school, conducted as a positive response to a teacher survey indicating the study's need. Five of the central concepts of this philosophy were that…

This article reports on the impact visits to community-based museums in a divided society, Northern Ireland, had on young people's historical, political, and cultural understanding of the commemorated past. It examines the responses of two student groups, one predominantly Protestant and the other Catholic, to two museums, each presenting its own…

The relationship between the police and communities can be difficult in ethnically divided societies, especially if membership of the police force is largely drawn from one community. This situation pertained in Northern Ireland, which has separate schools for different religious communities. Despite a major reform of the police after the signing…

Previous research showed that strong religious communities wish for cohesion and cooperation between pedagogical environments in religious socialization. This explorative and descriptive study examines what Dutch orthodox Protestant primary school teachers perceive to be their role in comparison with others, such as parents. We extensively…

This paper explores the origins of the German public education system. This part of the work provides an analysis of the formation process of the German primary education system between the 15th and 18th centuries. Also, this paper explores the use of philosophical approaches in German education, and examines the impact of Protestantism on the…