In the years either side of Federation in 1901, Australia's Irish Catholics balanced two often contradictory impulses: their determination to retain their cultural and religious links with Ireland in the face of an often unsympathetic Protestant majority, and the desire to become 'good' Australians in order to make 'a go' of their lives in the new…

While the preference for university by school leavers has been researched extensively, this article seeks to explore if religious influence might also come to play when selecting a university, with particular reference to Australia, a country whose higher education environment is largely made up of public, secular universities. The data used is…

Finding Common Ground (FCG) is an inter-belief dialogue program hosted in the Multi Faith Facility of Swinburne University of Technology. FCG is a voluntary program that offers Swinburne students a safe space to discuss their religious faith, or alternative value base, and to learn from those of others. Two iterations of this program were…

Parent-child communication about gender and sexuality has received increasing attention since the late 1990s, in response to growing awareness that open dialogue plays a vital role in sex and relationships education, and improving sexual health outcomes for families and young people. However, the insights gained from this literature have been…

Can the philosophical foundations of spiritual practices inform management education pedagogy and in the long-run support emotional development and more ethical and responsible business practice? In this article, we introduce the essential aspects of three different spiritual traditions--Daoist inner work, Buddhist mindful reflexivity, and Quaker…

Purpose: In this paper we seek to provide insight as to how wisdom is, or might be, perceived and enacted in Higher Education contexts. Selected constructs of wisdom derived from the "Bhagavad Gita" provided a platform from which seven invited College of Education faculty participants considered their own framings of wisdom in the…

This study is located in a lesser-known educational context and investigates aspects of migration, religion and multilingualism. Focusing on the discourse of second-generation adolescent migrants in a Tamil Hindu temple school in urban Australia, I discuss how flexible language practices manifest in this migrant faith setting. I argue that the use…

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…

This article reports on an exploratory study about maintaining and supporting the cultural identity of children from culturally and linguistically diverse family backgrounds in foster care placements. In this study, we spoke with foster carers and caseworkers who respectively live and work with children from culturally and linguistically diverse…

Ongoing global issues relating to the decline of the popularity of institutional religions, the rise of numbers of non-religious persons, and new models of spirituality in superdiverse societies have resulted in the need to reconceptualise religious diversity as worldviews diversity, and to critically examine increasing calls for the provision of…

Since the mid-2000s soft power approaches to counter and prevent violent extremism (C/PVE) have increasingly been implemented by civil society, state actors and UN agencies internationally. Education is a critical and previously undervalued component in PVE, as it has only recently begun to attract significant scholarly and policy attention. This…

In the absence of a dedicated subject for teaching general religious education, the inclusion of Civics and Citizenship education as a new subject within the first Federal Australian Curriculum provides an important opportunity for teaching the religious within Australian schools. The curriculum for Civics and Citizenship requires students to…

This paper presents results from a large-scale national survey of attitudes of students in Catholic schools in Australia towards Muslims and Islam. Over 2232 students completed questionnaires which were obtained from students in 42 Catholic schools throughout Australia. These schools were drawn from both rural and urban areas in New South Wales,…

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) have an important presence in contemporary civil society and have gained further prominence through their repertoire of social welfare and services. This study engaged social work educators (n = 316) across nine countries to examine their perceptions of including discourses on faith and FBOs in the social work…

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…