In Ireland primary RE is a fractured, contested, complex and changing territory devoid of a common language and characterised by a proliferation of syllabi and curricula generated for increasingly diverse school types. For centuries the dynamic decolonising process has led to a questioning of former orthodoxies and an attempted de-linking of the…

During the years of political violence in Northern Ireland many looked to schools to contribute to reconciliation. A variety of interventions were attempted throughout those years, but there was little evidence that any had produced systemic change. The peace process provided an opportunity for renewed efforts. This paper outlines the experience…

When preparing students for study abroad, understanding the religious dimension of the target country/culture is generally viewed as essential for cultural competency training. What is generally left unexamined is the civil religious culture that might be operative. This essay first provides an introduction to the concept as it was introduced by…

Societies which suffer from ethnic and political divisions are often characterised by patterns of social and institutional separation, and sometimes these divisions remain even after political conflict has ended. This has occurred in Northern Ireland where there is, and remains, a long-standing pattern of parallel institutions and services for the…

Australian Protestant schools have often been depicted as sites that restrict knowledge. This paper presents the findings of a 2010-2013 field study of 137 teachers, exploring the nature and extent of Protestant School English teacher self-censorship when excluding and selecting texts to teach. In both survey and interview data, I find that the…

The increasingly pronounced distinction between educational institutions that retain their ecclesial identity and those that jettison religious commitments reflects a bifurcated educational landscape in which institutions are characterized either as a "church-related" or a "Christian college and university." This development…

This article explores policy and practice in relation to support for speakers of community languages in Northern Ireland primary schools against the backdrop of the broader UK context, with reference also to the Republic of Ireland and wider European and international experiences. After an initial discussion of the educational, social and…

This article explores the use of a constructivist pedagogical approach to cultivate reflective dispositions during small group Bible study. Conducted in a local church Bible class setting (n = 12), the instructional design emulated the reflective thinking process, while adopting collaborative knowledge-building as its pedagogical framework.…

Initiatives in intercultural education have frequently involved the promotion of contact between members of different groups as a means of improving intergroup relations. Experience from Northern Ireland suggests, however, that such schemes have often been organised and delivered in such a way that opportunities for sustained, high-quality contact…

To what extent does the adoption of consociational power-sharing affect the design and implementation of education reforms? This article maps this territory through rich and detailed interviews collected in Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in 2012-2013. Insights from these interviews are corroborated by…

The focus of this article is on 9th grade students' (N = 9) perceptions on aspects that make them feel authentic in integrated religious education (RE) lessons among students of various faiths. All of the students had previously studied RE in segregated groups. The data was collected in a collaborative teaching experiment in Finland with student…

The purpose of this paper is to examine how teachers teach and students learn about citizenship education in two faith-based schools in Northern Ireland. The data show that participants in the Catholic school were confident in their own identity; teachers encouraged active engagement with contentious, conflict-related debates and students…

There has been growing interest by British policy-makers in the importance of acknowledging the role of migrant children's background in their educational progress. Therefore, this article draws on studies of language-ethnicity and of language-religion to understand the linguistic and the religious heritage of four groups of Brazilian migrants in…

The work of the Australian mission in the southern part of Korea during the first half of the twentieth century has been a relatively undeveloped subject in scholarly research. By focusing on the educational work of the mission between 1910 and 1941, this article provides an overview of how the missionaries interacted with the Japanese colonial…

In this article, we examine how narratives of religious traditions are used as resources in religious education (RE) and compare practices from Evangelic Lutheran religious education (LRE) and Islamic religious education (IRE) in Finnish public schools. The sacredness of narratives from holy books entails that there can be contestations over their…