The planned integration of Catholic social teaching (CST) across the curriculum was the primary focus of the 'Identity and Curriculum in Catholic Education' (2013-2018) initiative in Catholic schools in the state of Queensland. Initial reconnaissance involved a survey of teachers' views regarding the identity, purposes and characteristics of…

This case study explores the perceptions of students regarding their engagement in interreligious learning and teaching in one Australian Catholic Primary School. The study probes the learners' understandings of what interreligious learning and teaching looks like in their context and how it might relate to their understandings of their evolving…

Historically, Australian higher education has been statist, uniform, and secular. Indeed, up until 1989, even communist Poland had more Christian universities than Australia. Only in the last 3½ decades have eight different Christian universities and colleges emerged. This article first explores the origins of these new institutions and the…

Australia is a religiously diverse nation with a growing trend in 'no religious affiliation' and irrelevance of religion in the lives of young learners and their families. The purpose of this study is to explore the perspectives of School leaders, teachers, and support officers in describing their role in interreligious learning and teaching in…

This paper attempts to move beyond a critique of historically dominant ways of thinking about teaching and learning relationships to offer a conceptualization of relational pedagogy from a theological perspective. It offers commentary on the potential of relational pedagogy for Christian faith-based schools informed by the scholarship of German…

A recontextualising approach in religious education has been adopted in the newly revised religious education curricula of the four dioceses in Victoria: the dioceses of Melbourne, Ballarat, Sandhurst and Sale. This approach requires a radical change to the teacher's role from knowledge transmission to one which supports students to grapple with…

Agentic orientation, critical thinking (CrT) and taking the fourth-person perspective (4PP) are described as teachable attainments. A Personal Viewpoints (PVs) Biblical Studies curriculum challenged Year 7 students to resolve socially problematic situations through group discussion and perspective-taking. A life-issue scenario was used to pre- and…

Philip Phenix's (1964) book "Realms of meaning: A philosophy of the curriculum for general education" started the ever growing movement concerned with how school education might help young people in their search for meaning, purpose and values in times of rapid cultural change. Today, in globalised, digital, secularised culture, the…

This article reports on students' and faculty members' experience of their pluralistic Jewish day school's educational mission to nurture students' Jewish identity exploration within a broader social and cultural world. It articulates these stakeholders' perceptions of the ways teaching and learning of Jewish values, customs, and knowledge are…

The purpose of this paper was to explore bilingual educators' perceptions of their strategies to maintain their cultural and religious identities within a multicultural society. This multiple case studies of three institutions employed semi-structured interviews and documents. The research question guides this study: What are strategies that have…

Australia is a culturally, religiously and linguistically diverse country, however, learning about the religious dimensions of this superdiversity is inadequately reflected in the national school curriculum, notwithstanding recent attempts to address this at the state level in Victoria. Debates regarding the role of religion in school have raged…

This qualitative study, examining seven communities in the globalized Asia Pacific area, aimed to investigate Jewish community attitudes toward Hebrew, their heritage language (HL), as influenced by the social environment. The main finding was that the "complex ecology" of context influences attitudes to Hebrew. The article delineates…

In a shrinking world where events across the globe become relevant for the lives of masses of people regardless of the distances that divide them, some serious issues have arisen which have particular significance for education policies and practice. Too many children are growing up against a backdrop of polarised views and attitudes which is a…

This article explores the nature of leadership as expressed in literature and workshop commentary on the identity of the Catholic school within an Australian context. Employing a qualitative methodology, data from workshops designed around school mission were compared and integrated with data from texts of selected Post Conciliar documents on the…

Research points to sections of the middle-class repopulating the "ordinary" urban public school and whilst there are key differences in how they are navigating public school choices, from "seeking a critical mass" to resisting traditional methods of choice and going "against-the-grain", or collectively campaigning for…