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This study aims at determining the science concepts and subjects used in the "religion courses" taught in secondary schools and the contribution of science to religion courses, which is not a widely studied topic in the relevant literature. Like qualitative research, this study is a multiple case study. The data were collected using a semi-structured interview with five Muslim religion teachers working in an eastern city of Turkey. The interview data were analyzed using the basic descriptive and content analysis methods. The findings showed that religion teachers benefit from the concepts and subjects of science in their courses; using life sciences in their religion courses had a positive impact in teaching religious subjects better to the students; the use of the concepts of life sciences in religion courses enabled students to perceive the subject better; students enjoyed the use of science concepts in religion courses and also students asked questions to their teachers about many subjects of life sciences. Religion teachers expressed that they did not feel competent enough in the life sciences. Some recommendations, such as organizing in-service training have been made for religion teachers to feel competent enough in life sciences.

Teachers' understanding and teaching of argumentation is gaining more attention in science education research. However, little is known about how science teachers engage in argumentation with teachers of different subject taking an interdisciplinary perspective that may inspire new pedagogical ideas or strategies. In particular, the positioning of argumentation at the juncture of science and religion is rare. This paper reports an empirical study involving science and religious education (RE) teachers who collaborated on teaching argumentation in three secondary schools in England. Their interdisciplinary collaboration was sustained by a series of professional development sessions over 18 months. Analysis of the interview data unfolds how the teachers' collaboration impacted their understanding of argumentation and views of teaching their subject. Through working relationally in exploring and teaching argumentation, the science teachers reflected more notable changes than their RE counterparts. Science teachers came to appreciate student voice in the learning process and the role of argumentation in fostering students' scientific reasoning. The paper is a salient step to researching argumentation in a cross-curricular terrain, particularly in relation to RE. It also sheds light on how collaborating with teachers of another subject bolstered science teachers' professional development and broke subject barriers.

Scholarly definitions of student success have become increasingly transactional and thereby reflect a specific form of modern utilitarianism. In this paper, we use a theological map to explore the terrain of contemporary student success scholarship and practice in an effort to re-imagine how the Christian faith might animate a vision of student success for scholar-practitioners. First, we review the current scholarly landscape, second, we show where it falls short. Third, we use the practical theological method to outline a theological vision of student success. Finally, we propose ways to bridge the gap between current practice and theological vision.

Purpose: The current study explored the process of emotion regulation among Ultra-Orthodox female teachers in Jewish educational system in Israel. Design/methodology/approach: The study employed a semi-structured interview comprising 13 Ultra-Orthodox female teachers in single-sex education for girls. Findings: The teachers preferred to suppress their positive and negative emotions rather than displaying them in their interactions with students, emphasizing the importance of self-restraint and self-control in their professional work and in their religious society. Originality/value: The paper sheds light on the connection between traditional societies whose culture is grounded deeply in their religious faith and teachers' modes of emotion regulation. The findings may enhance the understanding of cultural and contextual influences on teachers' emotion regulation and shed light on the ways in which female teachers balance their personal feelings with emotional rules in the religious society in which they live and work.

In Poland, a country with a very high level of religiosity, religious education at school is confessional but not compulsory: it is an optional subject chosen by the student. In this article, we explore attitudes regarding participation in religion classes and explanations of the purpose of religious education as provided by adolescent students. We refer to the findings of our research on the rationality of school education and apply them to research on religious education. Rationality is defined as the logic of justifying the purpose of school education and four rationalities: praxeological, emancipatory, hermeneutic, and negational are distinguished. In a large and representative sample of secondary school students (N = 2,810), we examined the relationship between types of rationality and students' attitudes and opinions towards religious education in school. We observed that high school students perceived religious education as highly conservative and declared the strongest support for more dialogical and liberal religious education. Moreover, students' hermeneutical rationality was the primary factor associated with their lack of satisfaction with the current religious education and postulates to change it into a more dialogical one.

This study analyses discourses of Pakistan's national curriculum textbooks for grades 9-12 in the context of developing students' national belonging vis-à-vis inclusive education and global interdependence. Drawing on teachers' interviews and students' focus groups and participatory tools, it also problematises teachers' classroom practices and resulting students' responses in this backdrop. Theorising national belonging as a discursive social practice, the study benefits from Foucault's approach to discourse analysis. The findings highlight a complex interplay of several education system actors for constructing students' national belonging, emphasising an essential relationship between Pakistan and a particular version of Islam. Discursively positioned, the students perceive the world as Muslim versus Non-Muslim and display self-righteousness, evincing strong ethnocentricity towards fellow non-Muslims. The study underlines the implications for not employing education for fostering inclusivity and international collaboration and its consequences for long-term global sustainable development goals (SDGs), 2030.

This paper provides a response to B. Davis' and H. Alexander's article "Israel Education: A Philosophical Analysis," (EJ1384540) published in this same issue of the Journal of Jewish Education. The authors provide a valuable conceptual map of six distinctive, sometimes intersecting and sometimes conflicting ideologies and purposes that different educators and educational institutions take in teaching Israel to Jewish learners outside of Israel. They then argue for an educational approach described as Mature Zionism. While their educational strategy appears laudable, it is rooted in a premise that claims the ethical liberalism of many American Jews is incompatible with instilling a rich conception of Jewish life. This paper challenges Davis and Alexander to begin from a more value neutral premise, rather than claiming the ethical liberalism of American Jews as weakness that needs to be corrected by offering alternative paradigms. This paper offers another approach described as "teaching towards ambivalence. While similar in some ways to the framework of value pluralism proposed by Davis and Alexander and Davis, this approach begins with accepting that a wide range of views, understandings, and relationships with Israel are possible in American Jewish life. It also recognizes that a commitment and connection to Israel in a vision for the "good life" is not a prerequisite for rich cultural vitality in liberal American Jewish life.

This paper reviews the taxonomies and characteristics of Israel education articulated by Benji Davis and Dr. Hanan Alexander while suggesting that their specific educational philosophy, Mature Zionism, ought not be siloed only to educating about Israel but rather extended to Jewish education writ large. Developing a framework of Israel literacy provides an opportunity for Israel educators to develop skills and knowledge about Israel while applying it to the context of Israeli history and society. Futhermore, this paper proposes reclaiming the ethnos identity of Jews, as a tribe or a people, allowing for this concept to be integrated more fluidly within Jewish educational contexts.

Everyone seems to agree that Israel education is complex. But all too often, the concept of "complexity" becomes a euphemism for the existence of unpleasant truths about Israel that challenge students' preconceived notions. I propose that instead of focusing on cultivating attachment to Israel, Israel educators should offer students an account of Israeli history grounded in careful historical research while preserving a vision of the Jewish future that remains compatible with national pride. Drawing on the work of Richard Rorty, Maxime Rondinson and James Baldwin, I suggest a new perspective on some of the tensions in israel education. National pride can be maintained by presenting a narrative that honestly acknowledges a nation's past, but inspires students to strive for a better future.

The work of numerous authors discussing the integration of Christian faith and practice in higher education has been presented in the scholarly conversation to date. Simultaneously, literature abounds regarding the Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) "Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education," its application by academic librarians and teaching faculty in the classroom, and how this framework is being utilized by scholars espousing critical information theories to analyze information. This article proposes an intersectional approach to these distinct scholarly discussions and attempts to answer the question: How can Christian educators equip students to navigate the information ecosystem of a fallen world with a Christ-centered perspective? Reasons for undertaking this work are evidenced by the three commitments articulated by the Council for Christian College & Universities (CCCU) to which the organization's 185+ member institutions adhere; additionally, the ways in which educators can achieve this goal are founded in the guiding document on higher education information literacy concepts, the ACRL "Framework."

Despite the increased interest and research into the concept of vocation or calling, students are still prone to a reductionist understanding of vocation as primarily their job or career (Kleinhans, 2016; Moser & Fankhauser, 2018; Setran, 2011). Christian higher education institutions have a unique opportunity to help students navigate these potential pitfalls and think more deeply about both their vocation and their occupation. This article highlights shortcomings that result from overly identifying one's vocation with one's work and advocates for a mindset of vocational living, which is rooted in a more holistic perspective that recognizes vocation's broader connection to foundational Christian concepts such as humanity's creation in the image of God and the call to salvation in and discipleship to Christ (Pfeiffer, 2014; Shatzer, 2019; Waalkes, 2015). This article challenges leaders to ask probing questions and seek opportunities to align the organizational life and practices of the university with this concept of vocational living. Finally, this article also seeks to encourage further research into conceptual perceptions of vocation, as well as into institutional practices that equip students to respond to their calling throughout their lives.

Bible studies are one of the foundations of Israeli education. Nevertheless, this content area has been neglected for many years and it is now bordering on crisis. Passive learning style and classroom discussions that lead to predetermined conclusions are prevalent in Bible classes in both elementary and high schools. In this article, we present the Teaching Thinking in Bible Studies Initiative that seeks to facilitate active Bible studies where students construct the meaning of the text autonomously. The initiative also encourages students to use core thinking strategies when reading the Bible. Our model proposes a Bible lesson directed at well-defined thinking goals that unfold throughout the lesson, and that includes explicit discussions of thinking processes and strategies. The first section of this article explores theories and research, identifying the characteristics and principles of teaching thinking, and reviews previous studies about Bible education. In the second, we present the initiative's pedagogical principles and the structure of a thinking-based Bible lesson. In the third section, we provide two examples of teaching thinking in Bible lessons focused on argumentation and asking questions. Finally, in the discussion, we examine how our initiative corresponds and adds to other initiatives and the teaching thinking literature.

"Pularity" has emerged due to the rapid communication and interaction of different religions, languages, and cultural elements with the effect of globalization, modernization, secularization, and the necessity to live together. It has affected not only the politics of countries but also education and imposed new duties and responsibilities on it. In particular, the coexistence of individuals with different religious and cultural backgrounds raises the question of how to teach "religion," which is one of the determining elements of their identities, also becomes one of the main problems in the science of religious education. In the context of this study, the role of religious education in secular and multicultural societies is emphasized, and the 'Post-Confessional Inclusivist Religious Education' model is mentioned as a new proposal. The main purpose of this model is to contribute to the training of individuals who can understand the phenomenon of "pularity" correctly and finally manage to live in peace and reconciliation by preserving their differences. However, it is aimed not to exclude and marginalize the "differences" exterior to the individual's religious tradition but rather to have a "cultural pluralist" understanding because people's will and choices are as effective as their choices in choosing their beliefs.

This paper attempts to analyse the role of solitude and selflessness in promoting consideration for the person and the possibilities offered by liberal and religious education in this regard. The empirical point of departure is the Polish system of public education, where liberal education takes the form of general education while religious education is pursued as catechesis. The theoretical grounding for the characterisation of selflessness as the goal of education and solitude as its method are provided by Roman Ingarden's phenomenological conception of personal and moral values and Erasmus of Rotterdam's Christian humanism. I propose that firstly, liberal education may provide significant aid to religious education for the cultivation of selflessness; secondly, that solitude in normal conditions may be a unifying factor for liberal and religious education; thirdly, that selflessness and solitude, being two complementary parts of consideration for the person, constitute the test of good education understood as the cultivation of humanity.

A recontextualising approach in religious education has been adopted in the newly revised religious education curricula of the four dioceses in Victoria: the dioceses of Melbourne, Ballarat, Sandhurst and Sale. This approach requires a radical change to the teacher's role from knowledge transmission to one which supports students to grapple with their own identity formation in dialogue with the Catholic tradition. This article describes a collaborative research project undertaken by Catholic Education Office leaders of the four Victorian dioceses seeking to understand learning conditions and processes for leading teacher professional learning around a recontextualising approach. This study illuminates the description of recontextualisation in five criteria as proposed by Leuven Professor Pollefeyt (2017) by situating them in the practical context of teacher professional learning in Catholic schools. Using an Action Research methodology, the project engaged system leaders and teachers in Catholic schools in cycles of collegial dialogue and reflection on practice and theory to develop and refine understandings and classroom practices of recontextualisation. The findings challenge a system to consider how it intentionally positions itself in relation to the schools it serves.

This article shows how discussion of the 'world religions paradigm' in integrated natural and social science teaching affects how religious plurality is handled. A concrete case study is used to illustrate how a teacher designs lessons on world religions. Based on this single case study, the article argues that the use of specific teaching materials, which are shaped according to the world religions paradigm and contain a highly essentialised and ahistorical depiction of religions, contrasts with the more nuanced additions made by the teacher in the oral monologue parts of the lesson. It is shown that the world religions paradigm is subtly and implicitly questioned as well as reproduced by the teacher. The analysis is based on de Certeau's theory of strategies and tactics, which allows for a discussion of teachers' scope of action.

This study reports on findings from an online survey which was carried out in Ireland, in May-June 2019, as part of the Adult Religious Education and Faith Development (AREFD) research project being conducted at the "Mater Dei Centre for Catholic Education," Dublin City University. Data provided by 738 respondents to the survey are reported upon in this paper. The three areas focused on are the profile of the respondents, the content areas and skills in religious education and faith development they said they would like to engage with, and the forms and modes of delivery they preferred. The key findings point to the importance of identity, influence, and language, the broad and diverse interests expressed by participants, and the preferences they indicated for blended learning, evening engagement during the week, and local discussion groups. The findings of the study will be beneficial to those involved in developing new and creative approaches to adult religious education and faith development.

Since its establishment, Islamic religious pedagogy at German-speaking universities has primarily faced basic questions like: What kind of methodological and didactic approaches can be employed in Islamic Religious Education (IRE) and how should the structural framework be designed? Analyses concerning these questions are often drafted via top-down approaches, which neither hypothesise from practice nor consider the perspectives of Muslim populations and parents. This paper gives a hearing to those voices from a practice-theoretical research perspective, which is built upon an evidence-based empirical analysis of everyday practical realities. The study of these realities was conducted in Austria, where IRE has been taught within the public education system nationwide since 1982/1983. This article evaluates the importance Muslim parents assign to religious questions among different concepts of education, and also deals with the question of which pedagogical approach they favour. Furthermore, the paper analyses the parents' position concerning religious formation in mosques and schools, and points out their related expectations, aspirations and worries. Consequently, the paper breaks new ground by profoundly illuminating the realms of experience of Muslim students and by providing the basis for pupils to be systematically taken into account in religious pedagogical and religious didactic approaches.

France's secular political culture, Catholic heritage, and tumultuous relationship with Islam have had a significant impact on 21st-century interpretations, perceptions, and politicisations of religious education in French society. Since religious education is relegated to the French private school system, it is decentralised, complex, and vastly plural -- especially compared to France's hyper-centralised public education. Religious education's plurality and decentralisation have deepened with the recent expansion of Muslim and independent schooling. This article offers a comparative analysis of the variety of interpretations and manifestations of religious education across France's private education system. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out in more than fifteen French private Muslim, Catholic, and secular schools intermittently from 2012 to 2020, I illustrate how Catholic school actors and supposedly 'secular' school actors imparting Christian culture can operate with significantly more freedom than their Muslim school counterparts. Despite significant variation in approaches to religious education across the system, religious education in Muslim schools is quite parallel to other schooling communities. Nonetheless, Muslim school actors face disproportionate barriers to equitable treatment. This discrimination is facilitated by the complexities and ambiguities of RE and is representative of efforts to restrict the imparting of Muslim culture(s) to youth in French schools.

Controversy surrounding the teaching of secular education (SE) has fomented recurrent conflicts between liberal states and religious enclave communities (ECs). The current study explored Haredi (Jewish ultra-Orthodox) community-based activism aiming to promote SE in New York Hasidic schools for boys. It sheds light on how Haredi activists' discourse legitimized change within their community, following the activists' efforts to promote policy change through lobbyism, litigation, and media campaigns. The data was derived from documents, observations of social media platforms, and interviews with activists. The findings showed that the activists' discourse was disseminated in various forms to targeted audiences within the Haredi community, circumventing the religious establishment's censorship mechanisms. This discourse's content revealed interrelated facets of legitimacy: pragmatic, religious, educational, rights-based, and sociopolitical. It also combined revolutionary arguments with ideas derived from existing community tradition. The conclusions explicate the scheme of employing creative strategies, targeting different audiences, and combining various facets of legitimacy to produce counter-narratives that undermine power structures in ECs. The study's implications highlight the need for policymakers to understand the barriers Haredi activists encounter upon advocating educational change. The implications also underscore the need to integrate top-down, bottom-up, and bottom-to-bottom efforts to engender change in religious enclave schools.

The promotion of fundamental British values (FBV) and character education in schools can be seen as part of a new policy landscape of values education in England, with significant implications for Religious Education (RE). Research on these policies has tended to emphasise their securitising and constraining effects. This paper shifts attention to teachers' creative responses to this new policy landscape and the generative contradictions within it. Building on findings from a pilot study, the research used focus groups and creative writing workshops to explore RE teachers' responses to the new policy landscape (including their perceptions of whole-school approaches to values education) and their imagined futures within it. The findings illustrate how teachers drew on a range of RE pedagogies in their responses to the new policies and illuminate teachers' feelings about their faith-based interpretation at whole-school level. One key implication is the potential of RE for enacting the new policy agenda in meaningful ways. The research also offers an original contribution to conversations about the faith-based interpretation of FBV and character education at whole-school level, suggesting that the important question in relation to such interpretations may be not whether but how schools are drawing on religion.

In Sweden, ethics education occupies a prominent position in the curriculum, both in the general, introductory sections and as a part of the subject religious education. The aim of this article is to investigate teachers' insights regarding ethics education and to contribute knowledge about opportunities and challenges with ethics education, by analysing interviews with ten teachers. Five of the teachers used a fiction-based ethics education within a research and evaluation project, and five teachers used their ordinary ethics teaching. The analysis shows five different themes, time, the students' background, safe relations, lesson plans, and fiction, to be crucial for ethics education, in relation to both opportunities and challenges. The analysis shows that ethics is a subject that occupies a special position, giving students an education that points to the world and provides opportunities to encounter and explore important situations, in other words, an education that develops a multidimensional ethical competence.

This paper constitutes a study of the lived religious identity and practice of Hindu teenagers in the UK. More specifically, utilising an ethnographic approach designed to give voice to what is academically an extremely unrepresented religious community, this is a study of how Hindu teenagers in the UK experience their religion at home and at school. After outlining the contrast between these teenagers' home life and school experience, I ultimately argue that Hindu teenagers experience a strong sense of cognitive dissonance pertaining to their religious identity: a juxtaposition between their home life and school life whereby the former is a healthy relationship with their religion and the latter is a sense of anger and shame. Finally, I outline what in particular the teenagers themselves believe is lacking in the RE classroom and what they regard as the key features of their Hindu faith.

How are religiously based eating regulations navigated in kindergarten, and how does the pedagogical context influence the children's understandings of religion and nationality? This article builds on a qualitative case study involving observations and group interviews with children in a Norwegian kindergarten. At mealtimes, some children ate different food than their peers due to religiously based eating regulations. Notably, no children connected these differences to religion. Utilising Paul Gilroy's concept of conviviality, I argue that the staff contribute to a "convivial concealment of religion." Their approach avoids reducing children to their religious background, and facilitates connections based on shared experiences and interests. However, it fails to give children a deeper understanding of religious diversity and does not address problematic aspects of some children's working theories. Thus, convivial concealment may contribute to subtle, but significant, processes of exclusion. The study contributes to discussions of everyday religious diversity in educational settings, coining the term 'convivial concealment of religion' and analysing consequences of this pedagogical practice.

When social justice education is conducted in religious education (RE) classes, it can take the forms of education about (concepts and facts), into (enhancing commitment), with (negotiating practices) and through (pupil-led action) social justice. The first three approaches were used in seven RE lessons observed in urban Finnish lower secondary schools. The aim was to find out how different approaches to social justice education fit into RE classes and what kind of social justice identities these create. Social justice identities were combinations of the degrees of privilege and agency constructed in the classroom interaction. The analysis shows that non-privileged identities were often referred to as absent and remote. Construction of agency was also often left incomplete. The exceptions were the instances where the teacher intentionally taught with social justice and encouraged the pupils to criticise school practices. They provided a safe but limited way to address powerlessness and promote pupil agency. RE classrooms are well fitted for cultivating informed and concerned citizens but more attention needs to be paid to fostering agency and addressing minoritized identities.

Religious Education in Zambia and perhaps more widely needs to become more aware of how religion is expressed culturally. 'Learning about' religion or religions, which is a common practice, has limited value. It needs a 'learning from' dimension. It will be contended that this 'learning from' has been extensively neglected in Zambia. A key reason for this is Religious Education's embodiment in a Western cultural framework. With movement towards 'learning from', but approached though Lonergan's intellectual conversion, Religious Education should enable the student to become more sensitive to different forms of the cultural expression of religion and so enhance his/her capacity to understand religion authentically.

Under Communism, the Catholic Church in Poland played the role of guarantor of preserving the national traditions and defender of freedom. Such was one of reasons for removing religion from the state school curriculum by the government of Poland in 1961. The political transformation of 1989 changed the concept of the Polish state. Religion as a subject of school education was restored to state (public) schools in 1990 immediately after the political watershed. It was given a confessional and optional character. Although Poland is a pluralistic country (over 180 denominations) the dominant cultural and political role is played by the Roman Catholic Church. In this article we address the problems that appear in the context of religious instruction taught in world-view neutral public schools of Poland. We are not so much interested in detailed issues related to the teaching of religion sensu stricto, but in the presence of religion as such in state schools. We consider the pedagogical problem formulated in this way in the context of the legal principle of the world-view neutrality of the state in a democratic, pluralistic and at the same time hyper-religious society.

Should the state provide religious education in public schools; if yes, what form should it take? I argue that alertness to epistemic injustices that religious persons can suffer can help us answer those questions and can provide grounds for fostering religious literacy. I argue that, if religious persons can suffer testimonial injustice, we should reject inadequate religious education and that, if religious persons can suffer hermeneutical injustice, we should also reject an absence of religious education. That leaves us with the remaining option to have a proper form of religious education which I suggest religious literacy can provide.

The Seminary to Early Ministry (SEM) Study is a mixed-method, prospective study designed to provide high-quality empirical data on student formation in theological education. The study will use a series of surveys and in-depth interviews to track three cohorts of divinity school students from matriculation into the early years of their careers. As a result, the study hopes to compile the most comprehensive longitudinal dataset on theological education to date, enabling researchers to better understand who attends seminaries, how seminaries form students, and how the training of future religious leaders can be improved.

The REA Annual Meeting 2023 theme is organized around the question, "Whose children are they?" as a way to explore diverse and intersecting ways that we take and/or assign responsibilities for children's religious education. In this essay, the Program Chair reflects on personal and scholarly experiences and questions that have framed and continue to shape her responses to the question. She suggests that the guild can take multiple approaches (descriptive, normative, imaginative, hybrid) to develop potential answers and invites participants to consider how contemporary research in child development and educational theory might helpfully support constructive discourse.

The design framework of the value education model integrates natural sciences (NS), social sciences (SS), Islamic religious education (IRE), and extracurricular activities. This model is an effort to lay the foundations of the correct educational philosophy in a curriculum that contains the values, morals, and ethics that students should possess during the learning process.

This paper looked at ideological dilemmas for Orthodox Bible teachers in pluralistic Jewish high schools in North America. A phenomenological approach was used to identify sources of tension and drew on data from 30 semi-structured interviews conducted with teachers of diverse Orthodox affiliations. Findings indicated that teacher tension resulted from inconsistencies in institutional lived and intellectual ideologies, with regard to hiring practices, goals and missions of the school, and curricular and pedagogical autonomy. Tensions were exacerbated by teachers' outsider status, which caused them to have difficulty interpreting religious, cultural, and social nuances of the school context.

Jewish Schools spend a significant amount of time on the teaching of Halakha--Jewish Law, custom, and ritual. The practice is most prevalent in Orthodox schools, although in truth all Jewish schools spend some time on the instruction of this discipline. Schools differ widely as to the approach they take in the teaching of Halakha, and this submission investigates the different approaches taken to this teaching in Jewish Day schools, with a focus on real quantitative research as to Halakha education in Orthodox Schools.

Early career principals in Jewish day school are frequently unprepared for the role, contributing to attrition in school leadership. This narrative study explores the socialization of ten Jewish day school principals in the first three years of their first position. These leaders have similar feelings of being overwhelmed and unprepared as principals in other school contexts. They also experienced stress factors unique to Jewish day schools, exacerbating the challenges of socializing into their new role. In response, principals seek support structures within and outside of the school. Conscious cultivation of support may contribute significantly to principal retention.

The Israeli state-religious-education system (SRES) held an unfavorable view of Mizrahi religiosity in the 1980s. Text analyses of religious-education heads' writings indicate that they saw Mizrahi religiosity as a primitive relic of the past and as a "low-level religiosity" and regarded Mizrahi students as uncommitted and compromising. The large numbers of Mizrahi students in the SRES and the "melting pot" ideology prevalent at the time led to a systemic view of Mizrahi students as "religiously disadvantaged"--that is, children whose religion was flawed but rectifiable, with the task of rectifying it entrusted to the system.

This article explores how the idea of teachers as agents of change is historically constructed through the institutionalisation, secularisation, and normalisation process of professional teacher knowledges. Authors comparatively examine eighteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy literary sources and nineteenth-century US documents on the formation and expansion of public elementary teacher education institutions. The analysis highlights two points. First, the focus of teacher training was changed from the religious tradition to secularised practices by adopting modern science in teacher education; second, the construction of professional teacher knowledges in the form of "teaching methods" made it possible for the teacher to be a social agent. Despite the differences in time and place, teacher education institutions during the nation-building periods commonly adopted and used modern science for teacher training, emphasising sensory knowledge and empiricism as alternative means of professional development. Highlighting the training of teachers through modern science and methodical practices as a normalising process to make the "ideal(ised)" teacher, this study shows how teachers were constituted as a profession for the nation, whose salvific agential roles still remained in the scientific forms of teaching methods and secularised notions of teacher agency.

The article examines the history of "Casa dos Educandos Artífices" [House of the Artificer Apprentices (1841/1889)] in the Province of Maranhão (Brazil), which received underprivileged boys after the continuous increase of poverty caused by the Rebellion of Balaiada (1839-1841). At the "Casa" children were taught basic literacy instruction, Christian doctrine, and mechanical work at the War Arsenal, government public works and private workshops. As apprentices learned how to read, write and count, they received grammar, singing and instrumental lessons. Professional training included bricklayer, tailor, joiner, welding and copper. This paper aims to recover the history of this institution, which closed in the Republic Proclamation in 1889, drawing from many sources: manuscripts, letters from the directors to the province presidents, reports from the province presidents themselves, regulations, laws and newspapers that circulated in São Luis (Maranhão) from 1841 to 1889. Based on Norbert Elias's theoretical contributions, the analysis focuses on the creation and consolidation of the institution, material space, power relations, flow of subjects and management of school schedules and school actors and regulations. This research aims to contribute to understanding the nature of the professional instruction and the characteristics of a peculiar educational establishment in Maranhão in the nineteenth century.

In the course of the institutionalisation of modern school systems, the originally confessional schooling sector was largely transformed into a system regulated by public law, a process which is interpreted as secularisation. In a historical-comparative analysis, the secularisation paths of the classical educational nations England and France are retraced to identify their causal and path-dependent determinants. While the educational secularisation in France made the Catholic Church and its schools move into private education, in England the Anglican Church and other Christian denominations continue to be involved in the public school system through both religious education in state schools and their own private schools. It is argued that the various configurations of the nation-state context that developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, along with the changing relationship between state and church in the nineteenth century, can explain the course of secularisation.

This paper critically examines the White Paper, "Opportunity for all," published by the UK Government's Department for Education (DfE) in March 2022. This has a number of recommendations for schools in an attempt to 'level up'. In particular, there is a promise to deliver 'a fully trust-led system with a single regulatory approach [and] a clear role for every part of the school system'. Such a system provides a serious challenge to the way that Religious Education (RE) structures in England are currently built: in short, when Local Authorities no longer have schools under their control -- what is the point of a SACRE? Arguing that the 'local settlement' for RE serves two purposes -- a curricular purpose and support and monitoring purpose -- this paper will suggest that future RE curricula will be planned at the Trust level, with the monitoring and support functions being moved from the local to the regional.

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 rationale for their subject in the face of challenges from pupils and parents. In particular, we investigate how and why they teach World Religions in the way that they do. The findings are considered in the light of debates on the role of teachers' beliefs in religious education. In contrast to other studies in this field which offer personal reflection as a way to resolve such challenges, the case is made here for understanding teachers' choices within a wider lens which acknowledges the public nature of the space within which they operate. We argue that the challenges cannot be resolved or mitigated by individuals alone. Changes in policy to provide an inclusive and balanced curriculum with robust pedagogical purposes is needed along with clear ethical expectations around how teachers approach teaching religious education.

Looking at the early educational activities of the anti-caste movement in the Western Indian Bombay Presidency (1848-1882), the article sheds light on the diverse, and sometimes contradictory social effects of the colonial encounter. The military defeat of the Maratha Empire, the setting up of colonial educational governance, and the emergence of missionary education had disrupted social and religious certainties. In this moment of crisis, reformers turned to education to intervene in the ongoing social transformation processes. From the perspective of the shudra-atishudra -- the serving, labouring, and untouchable castes, who formed the lowest stratum of Western Indian society -- the new political situation provided a space to challenge the established structures of caste and gender domination. The article starts with a discussion of colonial-governmental and missionary educational interventions, and proceeds to analyse anti-caste radicals' educational activities against this background. Schools, popular literature, and public performance aimed to create a reflexive knowledge among the "shudra-atishudra" about their own position in society, and the ways to change it. Finally, the article explores the anti-caste movement's varying interpretations of the changes in education and society. While anti-caste writers of the 1850s welcomed the new educational opportunities, their voices were highly critical of colonial education policy in the 1880s. In the nineteenth century's struggles over caste, gender, and education, privileges and exclusions had been reworked in a colonial-modern framework. Still, important steps had been taken towards democratising and universalising Indian education.

Disciplinary Literacy (DL) is a pedagogical- and andragogic-centered academic discipline that has entered its third decade. DL seeks to observe and describe how scholars in a particular field cognitively approach and process what they do while those scholars read primary and secondary literary texts, examine material culture, perform experiments, read and write scholarly articles, and teach and evaluate students. Such observations and descriptions are then used to reverse engineer and backward design the curriculum, assessment tools, and strategies to increase students' success, retention, and graduation rates. Our article seeks to introduce (1) Biblical, Religious, and Theological Studies (BRATS) faculty to DL and (2) DL, post-secondary General Education, and secondary education faculty to BRATS. We will summarize (a) what DL is as opposed to (b) what the disciplines of general academic, developmental, and critical literacies are, (c) why they differ, and (d) what pedagogical and andragogic benefits DL offers. BRATS and General Education faculty can use DL to provide explicit, scaffolded instructional practices to help general education undergraduates interpret the Bible and other ancient, foreign literature critically, rhetorically, and historically more like BRATS faculty do. DL and BRATS faculty would then use the above to reverse engineer and backward design curriculum and strategies for secondary educators to adopt and implement. Suggestions for future research and for overcoming structural obstacles will be presented.

This paper traces the influence of failed Christian organisation Logos Foundation on Australian secular schooling debates across the 1970s and 1980s. Concerned with the changing nature of secular schooling in the 1970s and 1980s, religiopolitical organisations lobbied for increased parental choice in the ethos of education for their children. Logos, a Christian Right group connected to US think tank of the religious right, The Chalcedon Foundation, concentrated their activism on the right to religiously discriminate in schools. Through developing political arguments to justify the formation of Christian schools, pedagogy, teachers, and support for home schooling, Logos developed argumentation for religious discrimination that can still be seen in contemporary legislative debate and Christian schooling policy. This paper argues that far more attention must be paid to the failed political manoeuvrings of the religious right to better understand the secular education policy concessions being made in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century.

This article arises out of work undertaken within the After Religious Education project. It synthesizes the curriculum expertise of established researchers, with the expertise of current teachers of RE in England. A question drives our shared interests: how should we approach curriculum development in RE and how do we justify the approach taken? The article proceeds in three steps. First, we elaborate, contextualize, and justify this question by introducing varied approaches to the curriculum production in RE. We argue that these approaches lack a foundational influence from general didactics: an understanding of subject matter that is informed by distinctively educational theory. Addressing this omission, the second step presents an alternative approach to RE established on the 'Bildung/didactic' tradition, and the specific general didactic analysis of Klafki. Third, we explore this approach in relation to two teaching contexts, modelling these applications, and the principles they exemplify. We demonstrate the value of synthesizing theoretical and practical expertise for RE theory and practice.

Martin Luther is primarily known as a pastor and theologian of the 16th century Reformation. However, he was also a pedagogue passionate about educational reforms that united the spiritual life with the daily lived life. Believing that education served the purpose of equipping students for a life in service of one's neighbor, Luther took a practical and spiritual approach to critically engage content and even left space for teachers to differentiate based on their students' needs. This article provides a close look at the pedagogy and curriculum Luther outlines in the introduction to his Small Catechism and seeks to provide a creative adaptation to the contemporary theological/religious classroom. In the hopes that Luther's method can be of help in a variety of settings and spiritual traditions, the primary teaching method is driven by inquiry and the catechetical question "what is this?"