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The formation of identity in a secularized world is different from formation in a religious oriented society. In this situation, educating young people and guiding their personhood formation is even more a task of connecting to the pupils from out of your own heart. A Catholic religious teacher can be a mirror for these young people when answering three questions for her or himself and share these openly with her or his pupils. At the micro level: Who am I as a person? What is in my soul?; at the meso level: What am I doing as a professional and religious teacher?, and at the macro level: Where do I work? What is my context? And how do I deal with that? This article addresses the question of "Who am I, the religious educator?" It concerns both the teacher in secondary education and the instructor in tertiary education teacher training. The teacher or instructor's very self plays a significant role when the formation of (mostly young) people is the central goal. This immediately means something for the attitude and skills of the educator. The educator needs receptivity her or himself if the students are to open up and become more receptive. This openness and authenticity are an essential part of religious education (Baumfield 2015). Something is learned when those who take the role of educator upon themselves hold their experiences up as a mirror, or as an invitation to the students. Pupils will have to be formed in such a way as to equip them to deal with the many choices that they have to make every day. In other words, they have to develop a moral compass. This compass will have to be a conscious set of values and motivational reasons that young people construct for themselves in today's world and which they can use in the future when faced with difficult choices. This article focuses particularly on the role religion, tradition and worldviews can play in secularized classrooms, whether the school subject is 'citizenship education', 'worldview education' or 'religious education'. Traditions that are rooted in the past have to be openly discussed in a genuine dialogue in the classroom. The argument for this formation process will be based on research carried out by sociologists, practical theologians, and religious studies scholars in the Netherlands. The concept of subjectification (Biesta 2018) is central to religious education. This means that the pupils are challenged to think who she or he wants to be as a person, as a subject. This is the third element in personhood formation inside religious education, along side formal qualifications; getting the knowledge you need and socialisation; getting connected to the world you live in and add positively to it. To that end, the religious educator must therefore know her or himself as a person and understand how s/he wants to stand in the world as a person; in other words, go through that process of subjectification. This is not just a theory, a cognitive process in the head, but it is about one's heart and soul; about the whole person. It is precisely there that the distinction emerges whether it is purely knowledge transfer, teaching about religion, and therefore in the head, or the formation of the whole person, teaching through religion, and therefore from and to the heart. When the later occurs, it is about the soul, the core, who you really 'Are' as a person, with an uppercase A. However, it will not work to ask this of pupils or students if you have not gone that way yourself. So that is why in this article we first look at the micro level: who am I as a person? What is in my soul? Who do I want to be in the world? Who am I as a Catholic religious educator? I will look back to my own biography as an example and through my own story talk about my life and the formative and transformative aspects and the religious and spiritual influences that worked in it. The second question is: What am I doing? Who am I as a religious educator? This is the meso level of our professional being. It is your vocation to do what you do, how and why you act in your occupational life as you do, and how the first micro level of your biography inspires and leads this professional being. It is from the heart and head to the hands; what you are actually doing. The third part, the macro level, is the context in which you live and work, where you are. It is the organisation you work in, the church you belong to, the country you live in and the way you respond to this context. Your biography (micro) and your profession (meso) direct your actions towards this context (macro) and is also influenced by the context. Especially the way you act and think in this context completes your way of being. Becoming aware of the connection between the three levels and the choices you make in life is the essential goal in this article. One's talents, one's actions and one's thoughts and judgments are one's moral compass. The three levels, micro, meso, and macro, will be presented step by step allowing the possibility for the reader to consider those steps for themselves. The intent is that the religious educator begins to recognize elements of their own biography, profession and context in order to begin to respond to the question of who you are as a religious educator. Answering this question and following the three steps will make you aware of your own moral compass and in turn will provide the openness for others, such as your students, to do the same. Engaging with this in the classroom will stimulate a genuine dialogue and religious thinking through learning (Kienstra et al. 2018). Obviously, how to engage in this action, reflection and experience needs thorough attention, and the model of the hermeneutic space described by Sharkey might be helpful (Sharkey 2019). This article hopes to assist religious educators into a deeper level of understanding of themselves and their professional being in their own context, and moreover make them aware of the rich diversity in context and biography that is often gathered in the educational space in which they work and how to deal with this fruitfully. The group can learn much from each other in the encounters and I hope educators will be inspired to allow to take these views into account when preparing for religious education in their own contexts.

Interreligious education should support cultural and religious diversity in the classroom by inviting new perspectives. Four contexts are important in this regard, as follows: auto-interpretation of one's own religious tradition, auto-interpretation of foreign traditions, allo-interpretation of one's own religious tradition, and allo-interpretation of foreign traditions. Previous empirical research in the Netherlands has indicated that interreligious learning is not possible in the classroom. However, this study investigated interreligious education from the teaching perspective by conducting an exercise among twenty-four religious and worldview teachers. Specifically, a combination of student teachers, schoolteachers, and teacher trainers took part in a secondary school workshop before answering interview questions. Most participants discussed their own or foreign traditions using auto-interpretation. However, approximately half of all teacher trainers discussed their own traditions using allo-interpretation, although none discussed foreign traditions from the same perspective. In addition, student teachers reached the highest level of interreligious learning available in this study by using multiple perspectives to promote inquiry and engage in productive debate. Although interreligious education is problematic at multiple teaching levels, these results indicate that interreligious teaching practices may be improved through increased training.

Searching for new methods to start a genuine dialogue in secondary school classrooms, bibliodrama as an active form of putting religious stories in action was used. The research focused on examining relationships between student learning activities and teacher behavior; six lessons were analyzed in a qualitative cross-case analysis. A dialogue in the classroom aims to evoke theologizing by the students, also to be called religious-thinking-through. The effectiveness of religious-thinking-through was operationalized into three learning activities (testing positions, producing criticism, and reflecting) and six teaching scaffolds, building stones used by teachers to gear active learning. A quantitative correspondence analysis yielded a scale that contrasts more from less effective lessons. The specific contribution of an effective religion teacher is to show understanding, give space and listen. When he asks meta-cognitive questions in a debating way of connective truth finding this leads to a higher level of religious-thinking-through by students.

Being a religious educator in Western Europe, especially in the highly secularised Netherlands, is a complicated job. There are concepts to be taught to a generation that is mostly religiously analphabetic. Religion is subject to many discussions that foremost include the media's coverage of extremist versions of religion. It has become more difficult to teach children about religion and to have a narrative dialogue with them. In our research, we focus on different types of young people that can be found in the classroom; mixed patterns of commitment to religious institutes and variable amounts of concern with religion in forming their identity. A five yearly survey gives insight into values that pupils find important in their lives and shows whether they think of themselves as religious or believing, or not. Secondly, together with theological students and secondary school teachers, we have created and developed possible strategies for religious education. Developed lessons, activities and materials can be practiced and used by religious education teachers to educate the pluralistic but spiritual classroom they are faced with.

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