Despite controversies surrounding faith-based schooling, religious schools continue to play a prominent role in numerous education systems. Nonetheless, empirical research on nonstate religious schools operating in a market context remains limited and fragmented. On the one hand, while religious and cultural studies investigate the evolution of…

This article analyses the complexities of religious identity and stakeholder discourse concerning religious education (RE) reform in Scotland and Malawi. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of 'social space', it explicates the extent to which religious identity and conflicts over symbolic power in the social space of RE reform engender polarised debates…

We know little currently about how new digital tools have effected changes in Jewish studies learning environments and processes -- although technologies play a central role in contemporary discussions of learning. This study aims to understand how learners collaboratively interpret Jewish sacred texts using informal online collaborative learning…

Islamic education is a central pivot of Pakistan's educational system; it is taught as a separate subject and purposefully included in many other subjects. The State uses Islam to manage public morality and national identity and there is a 'functionalisation' (Starrett, 1998) of religious education. A culturally lived tradition is transformed into…

Rather than choosing between either catholic identity, or openness to otherness, the catholic dialogue school envisages, through the dialogue with the other, to stir the (re)discovery of one's own identity, and to introduce once again the Christian voice within the conversation. After introducing this project, I reflect more extensively on how to…

This mixed methodology study explored the reasons that teachers in Israel are motivated to become school leaders, and the relative importance of the different discouraging factors that worked against such interest. A cross-national Israeli survey included 39 individual interviews, 2 focus groups of 25 teachers each, and a questionnaire completed…

A recontextualising approach in religious education has been adopted in the newly revised religious education curricula of the four dioceses in Victoria: the dioceses of Melbourne, Ballarat, Sandhurst and Sale. This approach requires a radical change to the teacher's role from knowledge transmission to one which supports students to grapple with…

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…

This paper examines how the religious education of Turkish children in the "old letters" became an area of everyday contestation between the state and families and communities in the late 1920s and 1930s. Since children were seen as the nation's future, state authorities were adamant about teaching the new generation the new alphabet and…

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…

The sacred contours of the nation's colleges and universities changed dramatically since their founding--new human architecture and vocabulary compelled radical reformation of curriculum, policy, and accommodation. But institutional histories and culture remain eloquent and powerful. New competences in religious literacy and convictional identity…

Catholic educational historians note that although preserving Catholic identity has been a constant in the mission of Catholic schools, their curriculum and instructional practices evolved in ways that were similar to public schools, thus enabling Catholic parents to select schools that were both faith based and modern. Since there is an absence…

Reviewing and revising core curricula at Catholic colleges and universities is often fraught, primarily because the core symbolizes so centrally these institutions' identities. Situating core revision as one dimension of a larger shared task in which all Catholic institutions are engaged today-living into and articulating the meaning of being…

Educational reforms, particularly in a contested subject such as Religious Education (RE), have unsettled boundaries principally because actors demand or expect different outcomes of these reforms. In the cases of Scotland and Malawi the present paper examines how different stakeholders have engaged with RE reforms. It thus ascertains whether, if…

Despite being minority religious communities in the Southern African region, Muslims have carved out for themselves a unique identity within a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and a multi-religious region. As a result of the variety of Muslim education programs and institutions that the community had set up over the past few decades its…