The community separation of the school system in Northern Ireland limits opportunities for daily cross-community interaction between young people. The deployment pattern of teachers is largely consistent with this divide. Pupils are therefore unlikely to be taught by a teacher from a community background other than their own. Nonetheless, recent…

This paper attempts to look at the Colombian case of secularisation, touching on the current state of religion and Religious Education from three perspectives: the law, the Catholic Church, and the wider society, to determine the challenges acquired by the gap developed between religion, religiosity and secular legislation. With this in mind, the…

Teaching sensitive histories in post-conflict societies makes particular demands on educators to understand students' identities and their relationships to the past. This paper expands our understanding of post-conflict youth identities and experiences of history education through a small-scale study of students' life stories in Northern Ireland…

The debates surrounding the reform of national education in Britain and Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century were often framed as a binary struggle between the religious establishment, which sought to retain control of the national schools, and dissenters who viewed education reform as an important step towards dismantling the state churches'…

From its very beginning, the Protestant Reformation adopted the theatre as one of its educational tools. Together with choral music, visual arts, and preaching, Luther, Melanchthon, Oekolampad, and other Reformers promoted both the cultivated school theatre and the popular street theatre in order to spread the new faith, create a community ethos,…

Previous studies analyzed how personality traits relate to education, but not in relation to technology implementation. Limited knowledge can lead to inadequate professional development. This study provided insight on the "level of technology implementation" (LoTi) and the personality traits of private school principals. The theoretical…

We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students' religiosity as adults. We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in models with state and cohort fixed effects. Using three different datasets, we find that abolishing compulsory religious education significantly reduced…

The purpose of this article is to discuss the role of religious education and ethics instruction in the development of worldviews in public education using empirical data. The research question of the article is: How is the contribution of RE and Ethics in the development of worldviews perceived among 9th grade students? The study is based on…

American Protestants serving overseas must learn their host communities' "heart" language from the twin moral imperative to minimize their burden on host partners and to embody their faith through their language practice. Language learning thus has moral consequences; not merely proficiency attainment, but faithfulness and calling are at…

This article reports on the impact visits to community-based museums in a divided society, Northern Ireland, had on young people's historical, political, and cultural understanding of the commemorated past. It examines the responses of two student groups, one predominantly Protestant and the other Catholic, to two museums, each presenting its own…

The relationship between the police and communities can be difficult in ethnically divided societies, especially if membership of the police force is largely drawn from one community. This situation pertained in Northern Ireland, which has separate schools for different religious communities. Despite a major reform of the police after the signing…

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…

Focusing on Indonesia's case, this research discusses how booming internet use impacts students' faith, functioning as both threat and opportunity concerning students' religious inherency and sustainable religious education (RE). This qualitative study analyses six public junior high schools and 48 interviewed participants. To reveal various…

Previous research showed that strong religious communities wish for cohesion and cooperation between pedagogical environments in religious socialization. This explorative and descriptive study examines what Dutch orthodox Protestant primary school teachers perceive to be their role in comparison with others, such as parents. We extensively…

This article reports on research into the influence of teachers' religious beliefs in religious education. Drawing on accounts from eleven teachers in Controlled Schools in Northern Ireland, it shows the contested space many of them occupy in relation to handling personal beliefs, teaching about diverse religions and articulating a public…