Böcker i Religion, Education and Values-serien

This is a book of conversations with researchers working across Europe, the USA and Africa. It aims to illuminate the lived reality of educational research on a wide variety of topics, including family life in rural South Africa, support for self-harming students in the UK, character development in the USA and Korea, educational leadership in the UK and China, philosophical analysis of education policy, and much more. The book is for and about researchers and is built around a set of conversations with the author - a fellow researcher. Researchers work at the frontiers of our knowledge and understanding of the world, and frontiers can be dangerous places. How are the researchers' personal qualities - virtues such as courage, honesty and kindness - tested and exemplified in their work? The conversations presented here explore the experience of research and ask what qualities are needed, or wished for, in order to successfully face its challenges. There are many books that include lists of what to do and what not to do when carrying out research. Here, in contrast, we find out what really happens and why - and what it takes to keep going.

This book proposes an alternative, Dominican Thomist vision of a procedurally secular society that comprises three realms, namely sacred, secular and profane. Derived from experience and classroom research into dialogic RE interventions; a socially productive pedagogy is advocated as a starting point for the development of a procedurally secular society.

This volume brings together 15 studies reporting the latest international research on developments and trends in religious education. These studies illustrate recurrent themes affecting the development of religious education in diverse locations.

Islam is the fastest growing religion in Ireland. Given the debate over the role of faith-based schools in secular societies in the twenty - first century, this book provides deeper insight and understanding into the role of ethos and the teaching and learning of Islamic religious knowledge (IRE) in two primary Irish state funded Muslim schools.

Presents hard evidence from hundreds of self-identifying Buddhists in the UK, that the diversity of Buddhists, previously described in terms of ethnic dichotomy, is better explained in terms of Psychological Type preferences.

This volume brings together three key and contested areas facing educationalists within schools, colleges and universities: values education, religious education and human rights education. Challenges and opportunities within each of these three areas may be illuminated and explored by bringing them into creative dialogue.

This book starts from the premise that human rights are grounded in the dignity and worth of the human person. Drawing on key philosophical and theological sources on dignity, it builds a vision of human rights and religious education that seeks to square the impossible circle of universal human rights education in a religiously diverse world.

Church schools are booming, becoming increasingly popular with parents across the world. However, research shows that teachers face considerable challenges as they try to offer a distinctively Christian education within a church school context. This book is the account of a qualitative research project investigating the joys and difficulties experienced in English church school classrooms. The research team spent a year working alongside fourteen teachers from Catholic and Church of England secondary schools, introducing them to What If Learning, a pedagogical initiative designed by an international team of educationalists to support teachers in developing Christian approaches to teaching and learning. The highs and lows of the teachers' experience are documented in this book and the lessons that emerge are explored in detail. The findings of the project are highly significant for all those involved with church school education and point towards valuable new ways of thinking about Christian faith and learning.

Contemporary impressions of Islam - especially in the post-9/11 world - are creating daunting challenges for Muslims everywhere. Muslim women, because of their specific mode of attire, seem to be at the forefront of the growing skepticism surrounding Islamic education. Ironically, it would appear that the same detailed attention devoted by Islamic scholars to the conduct of Muslim women now surfaces in contemporary debates, focusing on the exclusionary practices they remain subjected to in their communities. Yet because these debates seldom move beyond continued diatribes against Muslim women's subjugation to entrenched societal norms of male chauvinism, little is known about what has given shape to their identity and sense of belonging. This book attempts to further the debate in two ways: Firstly, it offers an insight into how some Muslim women engage with one another and with society more generally, and how their practices reflect the plurality of interpretations constitutive of Islam both within and outside the spheres of cosmopolitanism. Secondly, it offers the opportunity to consider how a renewed Islamic education informed by the principles of democratic citizenship education can begin to reshape multifarious forms of engagement by, with and among Muslim women.

Analysing loneliness and solitude in schools and exploring how to deal with them is a vital task. In recent research for the author's Spirit of the School project, a number of pupils, teachers and headteachers described times when they felt lonely and times when they felt the need for healthy solitude. The causes of loneliness are numerous and its consequences have a significant unrecognised impact on education. How do schools deal with people when they are lonely, and how can they overcome loneliness? How can they create opportunities for healthy solitude, a welcome alternative to loneliness? Schools can sometimes try to include people by being intensely social, but end up making them feel even more excluded. A school that teaches solitude well and helps individuals deal with loneliness can be called an 'enstatic' school: a school in which people are comfortable within themselves. The objective of this book - the first comprehensive study of the subject - is to help us all understand loneliness and solitude and thereby to reinvigorate debates on personal, character and values education.

The scholarly reflections in this volume, drawing upon historical, theoretical and empirical perspectives, provide a wealth of insights into past, present and potential future developments in religious and values education in a range of national contexts, including Germany, Israel, Norway, Canada and South Africa.

What opportunities and challenges are presented to religious education across the globe by the basic human right of freedom of religion and belief? What contribution can religious education make to freedom in the modern world? This volume provides answers to these and related questions.

This book explores what the role of religion should be in the education process of a modern, secular society, investigating a recently established network of small independent Christian schools in the UK. The research is based on an extensive survey of the attitudes and beliefs of the teenage pupils attending these schools.

Religious educators today are called upon to enable young people to develop as fully-rounded human beings in a multicultural and multifaith world. In this title, religious educators shaped by both Christian and Islamic worldviews discuss the problems and opportunities that now face educators and believers alike.

Principled arguments are frequently made for and against faith schools, without evidence from empirical research. This book attempts to address this issue by offering a rich in-depth ethnographic case study of Catholic secondary schools, exploring pupils' perceptions of life in the Catholic secondary school in twenty-first-century England.

This volume brings together two core concepts - intersectionality and diversity - that are central to the understanding of the social and public significance of religions and theologies in the contemporary world. It represents a unique collection of international perspectives on these interlocking themes.