The purpose of this study was to find out what kind of worldviews Finnish principals identify in their schools and the kind of lived realities of worldviews that are affecting schools from the perspective of school leadership. The issues were considered using a wide worldview framework, which includes religious and non-religious worldviews and…

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 discusses some of the experiences gained from three students studying ethics in integrated and collaborative RE lessons. The data comes from a teaching experiment devised especially for research purposes. In this experiment students from Lutheran, Greek Orthodox, secular humanist backgrounds studied ethics-related contents together.…

This article examines how two Finnish religious education (RE) teachers, one in Islamic and one in Lutheran RE, seek to construct openness when dealing with religious truth claims and religious commitment, the key areas in which indoctrination might take place. It also observes how these constructions work in the classroom and explains them in the…

This article examines social practices within classroom discourse in two different Finnish religious educational contexts. The article critically observes the construction of certain positions and identities as part of the school discourse and the inclusive vs exclusive practices of language. The research material consists of classroom…

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…