Previous studies suggest that small rural schools experience a range of challenges relating to their size, financial difficulties and geographical isolation, as well as potential opportunities relating to their position within their communities. In Northern Ireland, these schools are situated within the comparatively rare context of a religiously…

The developing science of cathedral studies has focused mainly on Anglican cathedrals. The present study argues for drawing Catholic cathedrals into this field. Employing data gathered from the websites of the 22 Catholic cathedrals in England and Wales, alongside data gathered from the diocesan reports submitted to the Charity Commission, this…

This article examines the place of evolutionary science in protestant and Catholic residential colleges associated with Australian public universities across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although faith-based universities are a relatively recent phenomenon in Australia, a quasi-federal model of secular teaching and accrediting…

Past research has shown that intergroup contact can be a promising intervention to improve intergroup relations and that contact-based interventions might be most effective during adolescence. In postconflict Northern Ireland, widespread residential segregation and a largely separate school system limit opportunities for intergroup contact between…

Schooling for Northern Ireland children has over decades been in denominationally separate schools, until an integrated system was instigated by concerned parents in the late 1970s amidst growing political violence. By educating together Catholic and Protestant pupils and those of other religions or none, the hope was to contribute to peace in a…

As emerging adult college students ponder their religious/spiritual beliefs and identities, those in religiously diverse countries (e.g. the USA) often encounter beliefs different from their own. These encounters can prompt new perspectives on their own beliefs and elicit responses from rejection to incorporation of the diverging belief, thus…

This paper examines debates over the nature, purpose, and reform of geographical education in schools in the eighteenth-century German-speaking territories. Attention is paid to contemporaries' concerns over the cognitive content of geography -- what geography was -- and, in greater detail, to their views concerning how the subject might be…

A recent global reconnaissance of Christian higher education found a number of key themes that shaped current developments, such as the pressing challenges of secularization and nationalization but also the advantages of privatization and massification. This article provides an update to this older analysis by taking a birds-eye view of trends…

In recent years, many scholars have drawn a distinction between procedural and programmatic secularism. Procedural secularists seek to build communities wherein 'competing concepts of the good life' are afforded opportunities for expression. Programmatic secularists seek to limit the influence of religion within the public sphere. The 1870…

Three fundamental scientific works on the pedagogy of Comenius will be considered from new perspectives. These are the works of the East German comeniologist Franz Hofmann and the two West German comeniologists, Klaus Schaller and Andreas Lischewski. Germany has produced numerous scientific analyses of Comenius since 1945, but these three…

As a post-communist country still transitioning from a culture of segregation of people with disability, Romania marks a distinct cultural space for studying the attitudes towards intellectual disability. In the current study, we investigated a prediction model which included age, gender, and religiosity as variables accounting for the variations…

In the years either side of Federation in 1901, Australia's Irish Catholics balanced two often contradictory impulses: their determination to retain their cultural and religious links with Ireland in the face of an often unsympathetic Protestant majority, and the desire to become 'good' Australians in order to make 'a go' of their lives in the new…

A long tradition of both State and religious interest and support characterised provision for education on the island of Ireland from the 1700s. Following the partition of Ireland in the 1920s, the newly created political entities of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland forged separate and distinct education policy trajectories that largely…

This paper explores the process of negotiation, lobbying and parliamentary debate that brought the Irish universities legislation into being in the early 1900s against a backdrop of political and religious conflict. The complex interaction between British ministers and Catholic bishops before and throughout the legislative process dictated the…

Society in Northern Ireland can be characterised as being underpinned by an enduring cultural, religious and political divide between two dominant communities: Catholics and Protestants. The educational system largely reflects and contributes to the reproduction of this separation. Teachers are generally deployed in schools that are consistent…