Many approaches within subject didactics have in common that they highlight the importance of perspective taking, precisely describe the benefits of this skill and develop didactical scenarios in which this skill is crucial. Nevertheless, there is a diagnosed lack of a differentiated didactical model on how to teach perspective taking step by…

Under Communism, the Catholic Church in Poland played the role of guarantor of preserving the national traditions and defender of freedom. Such was one of reasons for removing religion from the state school curriculum by the government of Poland in 1961. The political transformation of 1989 changed the concept of the Polish state. Religion as a…

The primary goal of religious education (RE) in Germany is to enable students to develop a personal worldview. According to the literature, this goal can best be achieved when RE a) presents material from various worldviews and b) relates this material to the student's daily life. Denominational RE, which is the organisational format of this…

Pedagogue's fallacy occurs when epistemological principles are applied by educators that in fact do not tell of, or explain, or help understand, the subject at hand. It is identified and introduced in this article to raise an important issue in the construction of pedagogical models of religious education: knowledge is reduced and/or distorted to…

This article overviews the contemporary context for teaching Religious Education (RE) in Ireland and profiles changing religious demographics in an increasingly secular context. It presents the findings of a two-year mixed-methods study undertaken in two third-level Catholic colleges in Ireland, investigating four hundred third-level Initial…

This article presents analyses of curricula in religious education (RE) for public schools in Austria, Scotland, and Sweden. A curricula is the plan that outlines the goals, content and outcomes in education. A critical discourse analysis approach (CDA) is used to explore how each national RE curricula constructs (a) the aims, status and purpose…

A strong current in contemporary Catholic thought -- the theology of interreligious or interfaith dialogue -- stresses the importance of dialogue and collaboration with followers of other world faiths. This article proposes that religious education in Catholic schools, particularly at post-primary level, needs to engage more with this theological…

Background: In the Netherlands, most of the academic curricula for teacher training in religious education (RE) focus on shortfalls of students, like a lack of knowledge about the plurality of worldviews and the diversity in interpretations of the Christian tradition. In our research project, the focus is not on the students, but on the university…

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…

This article gives voice to students of minority faith and worldview regarding their lived experiences of attending Irish post-primary schools with a Catholic ethos. The importance of listening to students' voice is supported by Article 12 of the United Nations Charter on the Rights of the Child (1992). The research methodology was qualitative,…

The purpose of this paper is to consider some reasons why philosophy, in its current highly pluralist state, can be a valuable means of creating, with the help of divine grace, an opening for faith. My paper begins with (1) the challenging conceptual diversity that besets the very idea of Catholic higher education, i.e., the theme of this issue of…

In this article the method of Scriptural Reasoning (SR), a text-based approach to interreligious dialogue between participants of the three Abrahamic religions, was implemented for a teacher education setting at a German university. Not only students with an outspoken religious conviction but also agnostic and atheist students, preparing…

In the project "Learning for Life" we developed a hermeneutical--communicative model for worldview education that answers the European challenges of worldview diversity and worldview illiteracy. We implemented the model in a participatory action research project at nine schools for primary education in the Netherlands and monitored the…

Religious educators today are called upon to enable young people to develop as fully-rounded human beings in a multicultural and multi-faith world. It is no longer sufficient to teach about the history of religions: religion is not relegated to the past. It is no longer sufficient to teach about the observable outward phenomena of religions:…

"The Wiley Handbook of Christianity and Education" provides a resource for students and scholars interested in the most important issues, trends, and developments in the relationship between Christianity and education. It offers a historical understanding of these two intertwined subjects with a view to creating a context for the myriad…