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…

Teachers in the non-confessional Swedish subject religious education have conflicting responsibilities to convey values and facilitate critical thinking. The research regarding these responsibilities has often been considered a theoretical problem and the discussion has concerned theoretical solutions. However, the problem is not only theoretical.…

In recent research on moral psychology, the human consciousness has been compared to a tongue, with different taste buds, which together can cause a variety of sensations. According to this theory, people in general have a preparedness to react to situations, which can provide opportunities or pose threats in a social context. Moral psychologist,…

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 delicate question of teaching ethics in compulsory school regained urgency in Sweden in 2013 when national tests were introduced in religious education, of which ethics is a part. In this article, a variety of ethical competences that teachers want their students to develop are presented, based on group interviews with 46 teachers. Grounded…

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…

Religion has become a prominent issue in times of pluralism and in relation to citizenship in school and in society. As religious education (RE) is assigned to be one of the main school subject where issues of what religion is are to be raised, RE teachers' conceptualizations of religion are of vital concern to investigate. In this article, RE…

In this article, a religious education, which combines a respect for relevant critical demands, when analysing religious truth-claims, and a sensitivity to the need to avoid unwarranted criteriological constraints in the analysing process, is examined. Starting with an analytical comment upon Andrew Wright's critical realist approach in terms of a…

The aim of this article is to present a unique corpus of film-recorded classroom observations of sixth-grade classes (age 12-13) in the Swedish cities of Gothenburg, Partille and Trollhättan in the late 1960s. The material documents how RE could be taught in Swedish schools in line with the curriculum of Lgr 62 which internationally was an early…

Intercultural dialogue is a concept and discourse that dates back to the 1980s. It is the major means for managing diversity and strengthening democracy within Europe and beyond. It has been adopted by the United Nations, UNESCO and the Council of Europe as the basis for interreligious and interfaith initiatives and has become increasingly…