This article addresses two current debates that have generated increasing interest in a number of countries but have rarely been considered together: the debate on religious and interreligious literacy and the debate on the assessment of the outcomes of Religious Education (RE). Against this background, both debates are reviewed and critically…

This article explores the implications of a proposed move towards a religion and worldviews curriculum in England for contact-based interfaith programmes in schools, through a case study of the Faith and Belief Forum's School Linking programme. Quantitative and qualitative data collected through 1,488 teacher and student surveys, teacher focus…

Taking Quebec's mandatory religious education curriculum, Ethics and Religious Culture (ERC), as a case study, this paper examines the question of whether it is legitimate to teach about the illiberal and discriminatory aspects of religious belief and practice--misogyny, homophobia, racial discrimination and the like--in a religious education…

Religious Studies (RS) is expected to impact students' personal development as well as enabling acquisition of knowledge and understanding of religious and philosophical traditions. But to what extent does this actually occur? As part of a larger quantitative investigation of the effects of A Level RS in students' beliefs, values and worldviews…

This article investigates Greek-Cypriot primary school teachers' challenges to enact critical hermeneutics in religious education (RE) within a confessional context. Critical hermeneutics combines elements from critical and hermeneutical theories, emphasising the importance of grounding the conceptualisation of religious and secular truth-claims…

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…

This article calls for international comparative research on the professionalisation of Religious Education (RE). To this end, it provides a rationale for focusing upon the concept of professionalisation and a theoretical justification for international comparative research, particularly identifying its significance in terms of the development of…

This article provides an historical case study of an abortive attempt to revise policy and legislation relating to Religious Education (RE) in English schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing upon published sources, including parliamentary debates, as well as previously unutilised national archival sources from the Department of…

Character education is important within the Christian tradition but tends to be viewed with suspicion by educators who privilege autonomy as the aim of a liberal education. Equally, Christians may have concerns that character education places too great an emphasis upon good works rather than God's grace. This article reasons that character…

"The Way ahead" report proposed that Church of England schools should be distinctively Christian and Anglican and recommended a number of practices that schools could adopt to exemplify their distinctiveness. However, the notion of distinctiveness is not well developed and has not been widely researched. An empirical investigation…

This is the second in a series of four papers which seeks to articulate theologically and practically the consequences of the ecclesial identity of the Catholic school. The series is based on the principle that the "marks" of the Church--one, holy, catholic, and apostolic--are also marks of the Catholic school, since the Catholic school is within…

This article explores the formational provision within a faith community when faith schooling ends at the primary stage. A case study, part of a larger multi-faith study, examined the Jewish community in the greater Glasgow area--a small, and shrinking, community with a long history of relatively peaceful integration but increasingly pressurised…

Understanding the complexity of religious transformation requires empirical contextualized research on the continuous dynamic relationship between formation and transformation. Narrative study in context unveils the implicit meaning of phenomena made explicit in stories. This article, through a biographical case study of a Mennonite woman's…

This article analyzes the traces and configuration of three syntagmatic interpretation models in the educational text produced by Israel's state religious educational system: the "modus", the "hermetic" and the "gnostic" models, which together add up to a fourth, and unique one: "the messianic nationalist"…