Study of Special Religious Education and Its Value to Contemporary Society

Study of Special Religious Education and Its Value to Contemporary Society PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 18

Get Book Here

Book Description
Australia is a dynamic contemporary society comprised of a diverse range of cultures, faiths and beliefs. While the number of Australians identifying with Christianity has been declining in recent decades, two in three Australians currently identify with a religion or have spiritual beliefs, with Christianity being the largest religion. Faith and belief continue to be an integral part of contemporary Australian society and therefore need to be supported in the public arena. Special Religious Education (SRE) provides an important opportunity to integrate religious education into the Australian educational system. This report outlines the importance of maintaining SRE while ensuring that programs are developed within a reflective and critical lens. Programs should also consider the Australian Government's nine key values and all the key recommendations from the 2015 government review. Implementing these recommendations will strengthen young people's personal identity and convey the importance of special religious education for their moral and ethical development. [Executive summary, ed]

Study of Special Religious Education and Its Value to Contemporary Society

Study of Special Religious Education and Its Value to Contemporary Society PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 18

Get Book Here

Book Description
Australia is a dynamic contemporary society comprised of a diverse range of cultures, faiths and beliefs. While the number of Australians identifying with Christianity has been declining in recent decades, two in three Australians currently identify with a religion or have spiritual beliefs, with Christianity being the largest religion. Faith and belief continue to be an integral part of contemporary Australian society and therefore need to be supported in the public arena. Special Religious Education (SRE) provides an important opportunity to integrate religious education into the Australian educational system. This report outlines the importance of maintaining SRE while ensuring that programs are developed within a reflective and critical lens. Programs should also consider the Australian Government's nine key values and all the key recommendations from the 2015 government review. Implementing these recommendations will strengthen young people's personal identity and convey the importance of special religious education for their moral and ethical development. [Executive summary, ed]

Special Religious Education in Australia and its Value to Contemporary Society

Special Religious Education in Australia and its Value to Contemporary Society PDF Author: Zehavit Gross
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030679691
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the advantages of and challenges concerning Special Religious Education (SRE) in multicultural Australia and argues for the need for General Religious Education (GRE) as well. Through the lens of the most recent scholarship, and drawing on an in-depth qualitative study and specific case studies, the book examines the current debate on the role of religious education within government schools. It addresses key concepts of values education, spirituality, health and wellbeing, and cultural and religious identity. It analyses why it is important to retain SRE, together with GRE, as government policy. It explores highly relevant, controversial and contested issues regarding SRE, including the 30% of Australia’s population who declare themselves as having “no religion”, and brings fresh insights to the table. While secularization has increased in both the national and international spheres, there has also been an increase in fundamentalism within religious beliefs. Events such as the September 11 terror attacks and the more recent mass shootings by white supremacists and eco-fascists in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Pittsburgh and San Diego in the USA are reminders that religion is still a major actor in the twenty-first century. This poses new challenges for the relationship between church and state, and demonstrates the need to revisit the role of religious education within government schools. While the importance of GRE is generally acknowledged, SRE has increasingly come under attack by some researchers and teacher and parent bodies as being inappropriate and contradictory to the values of the postmodern world. On the other hand, the key stakeholders from all the faith traditions in Australia wish to retain the SRE classes in government schools. The book addresses this burning issue, and shows that it is relevant not only for Australia but also globally.

Reimagining the Landscape of Religious Education

Reimagining the Landscape of Religious Education PDF Author: Zehavit Gross
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031201337
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book brings together new thinking and research on religious education’s complex and evolving role in the multicultural, diverse postmodern era. It facilitates new realism and understanding of the current situation from empirical and reflective accounts relating to a variety of countries and political contexts, as well as providing innovative methodological approaches to the study of education and religion. In different contexts around the world, at different levels of education, and from different theoretical lenses, religious education occupies a contested space. The ongoing, changing nature of the world due to increasing secularization, rapid technological change, mass immigration, globalization processes, conflict and challenging security issues, from inter to intra state levels, and with shifting geopolitical power balances, generates the need to reconceptualize where religious education is positioned. It claims that religious education on its own can be an agent of moral, social and spiritual transformation are disputed. There is significant controversy about whether special religious education, that is in-faith education, still has a role within the post-modern world.

Religious Education in a Plural, Secularised Society. A Paradigm Shift

Religious Education in a Plural, Secularised Society. A Paradigm Shift PDF Author: Leni Franken
Publisher: Waxmann Verlag
ISBN: 9783830975434
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Get Book Here

Book Description
Many European societies are characterised by increasing forms of secularisation and religious diversity. This results in a paradigm shift with regard to religious education. For a long time, the main aim of religious education was, clearly, to educate children in their own religious tradition. Today, the aims of religious education are much broader: contributing to pupils’ general education (Allgemeinbildung) and preparing them for participation as a citizen in the future, multicultural society. As a result, the following question arises in many countries: how can ‘teaching into religion’ be transformed into or complemented by ‘learning about’ and ‘learning from (the study of) religions’? This book brings several distinguished authors in the field of religious education together to reflect on this paradigm shift. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is rather descriptive and gives an informative and up to date overview of the different discussions about religious education in several European countries. The second part is a normative reflection on the question of how religious education should be organised in plural secularised societies. “This book is very important for the discussion about religious education. Its comparative approach combined with the interdisciplinary dialogue between the different schools in the field of religious education, make this book highly recommendable for everyone who is interested in the state of the art and the future of religious education in Europe.” Didier Pollefeyt, full professor in theology and religious education at the Catholic University of Leuven

Religious Education in the Mirror of a Life Trajectory

Religious Education in the Mirror of a Life Trajectory PDF Author: Abdulkader Tayob
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429813260
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book Here

Book Description
The study of religious education is of great interest in analyzing how schools and educational authorities address the demands of multicultural and multi-religious societies and states. As diversity increases through migration, globalization and conflicts, schools are faced with equally diverse challenges, one of which is the religious and cultural diversity that characterizes schools and communities. While many studies have focused on this change and its impact in politics, school and classroom, relatively few have focused on how teachers and educators have fared. Sitting between the new policies and school demographics, teachers and educators have shaped the policy in their engagements. The study of life trajectories shows that the lines between religion and religious education are blurred in personal life histories, and that positions can shift due to personal and contextual developments. They point to the innovative and unexpected turns that individuals trace in their personal life journeys. This book reminds us that we need to pay more attention to the teachers, principals, managers and public intellectuals who shape and are shaped by the changing context of religion and religious education. This book was originally published as a special issue of Religion & Education.

Education, Religion and Diversity

Education, Religion and Diversity PDF Author: L. Philip Barnes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317806921
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book Here

Book Description
"In this thoughtful and provocative book Philip Barnes challenges religious educators to re-think their field, and proposes a new, post-liberal model of religious education to help them do so. His model both confronts prejudice and intolerance and also allows the voices of different religions to be heard and critically explored. While Education, Religion and Diversity is directed to a British audience the issues it raises and the alternative it proposes are important for those educators in the United States who believe that the public schools have an important role in teaching students about religion." Walter Feinberg, Professor Emeritus of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "Philip Barnes offers a penetrating and lucid analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of modern religious education in Britain. He considers a range of epistemological and methodological issues and identifies two contrasting models of religious education that have been influential, what he calls a liberal and a postmodern model. After a detailed review and criticism of both, he outlines his own new post-liberal model of religious education, one that is compatible with both confessional and non-confessional forms of religious education, yet takes religious diversity and religious truth claims seriously. Essential reading for all religious educators and those concerned with the role of religion in schools." Bernd Schröder, Professor of Practical Theology and Religious Education, University of Göttingen. "What place, if any, does religious education have in the schools of an increasingly diverse society? This lucid and authoritative book makes an incisive contribution to this crucial debate." Roger Trigg is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Warwick, and Senior Research Fellow, Ian Ramsey Centre, Oxford. The challenge of diversity is central to education in modern liberal, democratic states, and religious education is often the point where these differences become both most acute and where it is believed, of all curriculum subjects, resolutions are most likely to be found. Education, Religion and Diversity identifies and explores the commitments and convictions that have guided post-confessional religious education and concludes controversially that the subject as currently theorised and practised is incapable of challenging religious intolerance and of developing respectful relationships between people from different communities and groups within society. It is argued that despite the rhetoric of success, which religious education is obliged to rehearse in order to perpetuate its status in the curriculum and to ensure political support, a fundamentally new model of religious education is required to meet the challenge of diversity to education and to society. A new framework for religious education is developed which offers the potential for the subject to make a genuine contribution to the creation of a responsible, respectful society. Education, Religion and Diversity is a wide-ranging, provocative exploration of religious education in modern liberal democracies. It is essential reading for those concerned with the role of religion in education and for religious and theological educators who want to think critically about the aims and character of religious education.

Religion and Education

Religion and Education PDF Author: Gert Biesta
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004446397
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Get Book Here

Book Description
Religion and Education: The Forgotten Dimensions of Religious Education? explores fundamental questions about the role of religion and education in contemporary religious education. Drawing from a range of educational and religious traditions and perspectives, it investigates the future of religious education for all.

Does Religious Education Matter?

Does Religious Education Matter? PDF Author: Mary Shanahan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131714869X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the current climate, and in an age of increasing hostility towards religion and the study of religion, religious education is a much-debated area. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of contributors from the USA, Britain and Ireland, and Australia, representing a variety of religious perspectives, Does Religious Education Matter? provocatively demonstrates that it is vital that religious education is presented as it ’really’ is: a valuable and rich resource that, when taught and engaged with appropriately, stimulates essential qualities for global and responsible citizenship: critical thinking, tolerance, respect, and mutual understanding.

Religion, Education and Society

Religion, Education and Society PDF Author: Elisabeth Arweck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134918356
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume presents findings from recent research focusing on young people and the way they relate to religion in their education and upbringing. The essays are diverse and multidisciplinary - in terms of the religions they discuss (including Christianity, Islam and Sikhism); the settings where young people reflect on religion (the classroom, youth club, peer group, families, respective religious communities and wider society); the different perspectives which relate to religious education and socialisation (the teaching of RE, the role of teachers in pupils’ lives, the way teachers’ personal lives shape their approach to teaching, school ethos and social context, and the place and rationale of RE); the contexts within which the authors work (different national settings and various academic disciplines); and the methodology used (qualitative, quantitative and mixed-method approaches). The authors make important contributions to the debate about the role of religious education in the curriculum. They demonstrate the crucially important formative influence of religious education in young people’s lives which reaches well into their adulthood, shaping religious and other identities, and attitudes towards the ‘other’ - whatever that ‘other’ may be. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Beliefs & Values.

Contemporary Challenges for Religious and Spiritual Education

Contemporary Challenges for Religious and Spiritual Education PDF Author: Arniika Kuusisto
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317290100
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
From being on the margins of scholarly debate for much of the past century and a half, religion is being recognized once again as an area of concern for scholars, politicians, and public policy makers, and thus, the role of religious and spiritual education has taken on a new importance. Apart from its socio-political ramifications, the place of religiousness and spirituality in the make-up of individuals has been given renewed prominence through updated brain science, and neuroscientists regularly refer to elements of this brain science in terms such as spiritual intelligence and even mystical consciousness. This book explores many of the new directions being taken in the field of religious and spiritual education, as new developments challenge the priorities of formal education, and open up new avenues for incorporating religion and spirituality into the modern curriculum. It asks whether the educational aims of teachers should be focused on specifically personal development, or whether religious education should be used to develop understanding of more global and social issues such as citizenship, conflict, and ethics. The book also addresses neuroscientific insights, which suggest a need to engage with cognition and emotion in order to create a rich learning environment, something to which a particularly contested subject area like religion and spirituality is well-placed to contribute. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Beliefs & Values.