Visiting the local church is said to be a powerful case of participa tory learning. Inside the church the students have an actual, multi-sensory encounter with Christian practice. Moreover, leaving the classroom to visit some artifact nearby is attractive and is said to raise the situational interest of the students. An empirical study on the effects of such field trips, however, is still missing. This volume addresses this research gap in religious education. It provides insight into the theoretical background, the empirical design and the results of a project about field trips to the local church in compulsory Catholic religious education in German primary schools. It draws a comprehensive picture of such effects by identifying the benefits of scholastic field trips as well as the obstacles of this didactic set-up. The volume closes with a description of didactic principles and methods which help to improve scholastic field trips to the local church. Ulrich Riegel ist Professor für Religionspädagogik am Seminar für Katholische Theologie der Universität Siegen.

This book brings together two topics which have both been of increasing interest in different countries. The first refers to the quality of Religious Education as a school subject (RE) in general, the second is about the education of teachers of RE and its possible contribution to better quality RE. There have been many public, and often controversial, debates concerning both of these topics. The chapters contained in this volume, however, are not meant to continue such debates (even if it is inevitable that they will contribute to these debates as well), but to make use of research, especially research on teacher education in the field of RE, in order to provide insights based not just on political or personal opinions, but on rigorous academic scholarship.

Early modern Protestant scholars closely engaged with Islamic thought in more ways than is usually recognized. Among Protestants, Lutheran scholars distinguished themselves as the most invested in the study of Islam and Muslim culture. Mehmet Karabela brings the neglected voices of post-Reformation theologians, primarily German Lutherans, into focus and reveals their rigorous engagement with Islamic thought. Inspired by a global history approach to religious thought, Islamic Thought Through Protestant Eyes offers new sources to broaden the conventional interpretation of the Reformation beyond a solely European Christian phenomenon. Based on previously unstudied dissertations, disputations, and academic works written in Latin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Karabela analyzes three themes: Islam as theology and religion; Islamic philosophy and liberal arts; and Muslim sects (Sunni and Shi‘a). This book provides analyses and translations of the Latin texts as well as brief biographies of the authors. These texts offer insight into the Protestant perception of Islamic thought for scholars of religious studies and Islamic studies as well as for general readers. Examining the influence of Islamic thought on the construction of the Protestant identity after the Reformation helps us to understand the role of Islam in the evolution of Christianity.

This book presents eight distinctive historical chapters that explore the complex relationship between politics, professionals and practitioners in a range of different educational contexts. It offers a timely contribution to current debates about the contested place and status of educational professionalism in modern society. It is grounded in a firm commitment to the value that a historical perspective might bring to current and recurrent educational concerns, of which educational professionalism remains key. With fresh examples from nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century education, as well as a diversity of methodological approaches and sources, the book addresses a range of fundamental questions about educational professionalism. These include the wider politics of professionalism; issues of professional knowledge and expertise; what and who counts as professional within various power discourses; professional training, socialisation and accreditation; and professional identities, power, agency, autonomy regulation, accountability, and control. Overall, there is a sense from these chapters that there is something fractured and disconnected in current discourses around educational professionalism, but that there have been particular moments in the past when there was the promise of something different and possibly something more authentic. Moving beyond a narrow focus on schoolteachers as professional practitioners, to embrace a wider conceptualisation of educational professionalism within higher education, the churches, educational leadership, and quasi-professional and voluntary organisations, the book represents a rich and novel contribution to the field. The chapters in this book were originally published in various issues of History of Education and the British Journal of Religious Education.

This book empirically reconstructs the relationships of Muslim children to God demonstrating that Muslim children in Germany already show a broad spectrum of different images of God and relations to God already at the age of ten.

Society is a complex phenomenon, characterized by constant change, often entailing conflict. This is seen in our own times where philosophies and movements of individualism, pluralism and globalization intersect and often collide. Still, even in this fast-moving and highly materialist world, religion and spirituality remain crucial aspects of human and social living, and therefore must be among the many focusses of the modern school. Teachers of Religious and Spiritual Education (RSE) are therefore expected to support students’ religious and spiritual understanding as well as their overall development. How can they best meet this challenge? This book is comprised of various interdisciplinary research findings drawn from international scholarship. The findings are of a different order from each other but all have in common an element of surprise, sufficient to impel reflection and re-thinking of many of the assumptions that normally underpin RSE. The book therefore constitutes a contribution to ongoing understanding of the role played by religious and spiritual education and of the proper interface between RSE and the modern school, contemporary curricula and the teacher of today. Contributions by Robert Crotty, Ola Erik Domaas, Michael Fricke, Liam Gearon, Adrian-Mario Gellel, Eija Hanhimaki, Laura Hirsto, Tapani Innanen, Terence Lovat, Klaas Macha, Emanuel P. Magro, Adil Mamodaly, Fritz Oser, Ulrich Riegel, Inkeri Rissanen, Sturla Sagberg, Kirsi Tirri, Theo van der Zee, Karen Wenell

In religious education, digitization and mediatization processes result in the transformation of conventional media formats. This leads to the development of new media formats, which in turn necessitates a redefinition of the relationship between religious education and the media. Keeping this in mind, this volume first examines the importance of media for specific theological disciplines, and then discusses current media-pedagogical and media-didactic approaches. Later in the book, the authors develop didactic perspectives on various methods; these include internet-based archive work and the use of digital teaching materials. They also deal with current questions regarding religious education, such as inclusion and cyber bullying, etc. Finally, they identify some of the main didactic challenges for religious instruction in a mediatized world. This volume is a plea for a wider understanding of education, and is based in part on a German-Swedish teaching and research cooperation. Following this example, it focuses on a future-oriented networking of plural forms of education. This resource is designed for students of theology and religious sciences as well as for religious education teachers.