Transition in RE in Finland

In this chapter, we will discuss key questions regarding religious education in Finnish state schools today. Recent years have shown that issues related to dialogue, citizenship skills, social integration have moved into the forefront when discussing religious education (Jackson 2014a). Similarly, several researchers have analysed the challenges that diversification, secularisation and post-secularity create for education in religions and non-religious worldviews in Finnish state schools (Ubani et al. 2019a). When we refer to Finnish society in a post-secular context, we do not wish to overstate the rising impact of religion in Europe, but acknowledge the resurgence of public religion and the emergence of an increasingly pluralistic public sphere in Finland too. We convey criticism of the secular normativity of schools and of the liberal-secular foundation of the mainstream approaches of multicultural education, which have emerged against a backdrop of the notion of post-secularity (Coulby and Zambeta 2008; Ubani 2013a). In the Nordic context too, scholars have criticised the othering of non-secular and non-Western worldviews in educational thinking and practices (see e.g. Berglund 2017; Poulter et al. 2016).Peer reviewe

Keeping doors open: transnational families and curricular nationalism

This paper reviews sociological literature to explore the challenge transnational populations pose for nation-based curriculum, and vice versa. With increasing access to dual citizenship and temporary migration, more people are living transnational lifestyles. This poses new challenges in raising the transnational child. Transnationalism has emerged ‘bottom-up’ from individualised choices and circumstances rather than ‘top-down’ through institutional strategy. As a result, education sectors are yet to respond with a reoriented curriculum that can accommodate polycentric lives. This paper adapts Beck’s critique of methodological nationalism and proposes a parallel concept in the curricular nationalism underpinning much official curriculum. It then reviews literature reporting on three curricular experiments that seek to cultivate citizenships above and beyond the nation. While such transcendent designs on citizenship unsettle curricular nationalism, they fail to address the specificities of transnational child’s memberships both here and there. The pedagogic principle of ‘connectedness’ is retooled as a pragmatic way forward

Intercultural education: religion, knowledge and the limits of postmodernism

This paper commences with an examination of some of the destructive aspects of religion, past and present. Against this it sets the knowledge and tolerance advocated in the Enlightenment. It goes on to consider the current role of religion in some school systems. It concludes by considering the challenge that the institutionalization of religion in schools poses to intercultural education and to postmodernity