Reading religion in Norwegian textbooks: are individual religions ideas or people?

Different religions are treated in different ways in Norwegian sixth form textbooks. We carried out an exhaustive content analysis of the chapters devoted to individual religions in textbooks for the Religion and Ethics course currently available in Norway, using rigorous indicators to code each word, image and question according to whether they were treated the religion as a set of ideas or a group of people. After adjusting for trends in the different kinds of data (word, image, question), we found that Buddhism and Christianity receive significantly more attention for their ideas than Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, which are treated more as people. This difference cannot be explained by the national syllabus or the particularities of the individual religions. The asymmetry also has implications for the pupils’ academic, moral and pedagogical agency for which teachers play a critical role in compensating.acceptedVersio

A nine country survey of youth in Europe: selected findings and issues

A nine country survey of the life orientations, values and institutional trust of 8948 young people at the upper end of the secondary school age range was set up at the University of Würzburg in the year 2000. Key findings demonstrate that these young people value personal autonomy and are orientated to success in their professional lives and that they especially trust human rights and environmental groups. Religion is associated positively with humanitarianism and in some countries negatively with modernity. These findings provide an indication of the typical life stances of future opinion-formers and illustrate methodological issues thrown up by international research

Crucifixes in classrooms: The pedagogical assumptions of the European Courts

Increasingly, courts across Europe are passing judgement on issues of religion and education, but the pedagogical assumptions that often underpin their decisions have not been fully explored. This paper considers the 2011 decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Italy v Lautsi, which concerned whether the display of a crucifix in a classroom wall infringed the pupils’ right to freedom of belief. First, the increasing juridical involvement in issues of religion and education is outlined, and the challenges this presents. Next, I describe the particular circumstances of the Lautsi case and consider the pedagogical issues raised by the judges, both in the Italian and European Courts, suggesting three broad positions. These are then reviewed from a socio-cultural perspective so as to examine the different judges’ pedagogical assumptions about religious symbols. Their differing assumptions about the spatial and symbolic contexts of classrooms are outlined, and finally the implications of these assumptions for judicial decisions on religion and education are evaluated

Spatial and temporal explanations in researching religious education

One of the important theoretical shifts in recent decades has been a move away from linear process-driven accounts of social development, e.g. Marxism, Hegelianism or Liberalism, which often depend on the allocation of societies to particular ‘evolutionary’ phases, and towards a greater awareness of different concurrent local, global and globalising phenomena. In her chapter in this book, von Bromssen points to the significance of the Frankfurt school in this development. However, in this piece two other research perspectives are explored, and then some of the implications of this shift for research and scholarship in religious education are examined, especially for conceptualising space, place and location