In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was famously advocating for sign language to be the language of instruction for deaf children in the United States, European philosophers were founding modern linguistics. Gallaudet was not able to benefit from their breakthroughs, however, because his upbringing,…

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…

In this article, we consider the relationships between schools and their local religious contexts and develop a new empirically-informed middle-level theory for analysing these relationships as a complex framework of negotiations. This framework is based on a meta-synthesis of qualitative data from forty-five case-studies of schools in Great…

Colombia has been immersed in wars and violence for many years; some scholars say that the country has been in conflict since 1962. The reality is that the country began its development with multiple wars and power struggles, the latter incited by political parties. In the midst of multiple conflicts, religion has played an important role in the…

Religion as a school subject--Religious Education (RE)--is handled differently in various national contexts. This article discusses two different systems of managing (or avoiding) RE: those used in non-denominational Swedish and Indian schools. The article focuses particularly on what is allowed in the classroom with regards to religion. Both…

The Controlled Schools' sector in Northern Ireland is usually described as de facto Protestant. By examining its history and current context, this article considers the veracity of that statement. In many schools RE is often 'squeezed out' of an already overcrowded timetable. This results in the quantity and quality of RE teaching varying widely,…

This article explores the use of a constructivist pedagogical approach to cultivate reflective dispositions during small group Bible study. Conducted in a local church Bible class setting (n = 12), the instructional design emulated the reflective thinking process, while adopting collaborative knowledge-building as its pedagogical framework.…

The focus of this article is on 9th grade students' (N = 9) perceptions on aspects that make them feel authentic in integrated religious education (RE) lessons among students of various faiths. All of the students had previously studied RE in segregated groups. The data was collected in a collaborative teaching experiment in Finland with student…

Starting his work as endowed Hendrik Pierson Professor for Christian Education at VU University Amsterdam in 1993 the author focused on the relationship of education, pedagogy, and religion. However, his attention was rather exclusively directed to Protestant schools. The argument was that in academia at that time, even in the faculties of…