This timely volume addresses current debates surrounding the transition from the teaching of religious education (RE) to the more holistic subject of Religion and Worldviews (R&W) in England, and posits criteria for best practice among educators in varied settings and in a broader international context. By examining empirical sources, governmental reports, and in particular the 2018 final report from the Commission on Religious Education (CORE), the volume suggests key principles needed to guide the transition and ensure that R&W is effectively integrated into curricula, pedagogy, and teaching resources to meet the needs of all student groups. By effectively conceptualising R&W, the volume gives particular attention to the intersections of the subject with democratic citizenship education, intercultural competence, and religious literacy. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in religious education and teacher education as well as the philosophy and sociology of education more broadly. Those interested in education policy and politics, as well as citizenship and schooling in the UK, will also benefit from this volume.

This timely book offers a critically important contribution to debates around the meeting place of religious and secular worldviews in education. Edited by five leading figures in the field, and drawing on expert international scholarship and research, the book provides cutting-edge analysis that bridges the religious and secular in global educational contexts. Considering the role of the United Nations, UNESCO, OECD and PISA in varied international contexts, the book draws on critical analysis of primary empirical research and secondary critique to offer a coherent blend of theoretically complex yet practical analysis of policy implementation. Throughout this accessible and logically structured volume, the authors assert that the meeting place of religious and secular worldviews is one of the most important and pressing issues for religion in education. As a field-defining work of research into education, religion and worldviews, the book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of religious education, religious studies, philosophy of education and international education.

This novel and contemporary anthology brings important topics about race, religion, and identity to the foreground to address the challenges facing Muslim schoolchildren today. Through interviews and case studies, the chapters explore topics such as multiethnic education, teacher diversity, and culturally responsive pedagogy, providing insights into necessary changes and ways to enhance schools. Taking into account cultural touchstones such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the Trojan Horse affair, the book argues for an urgent, transformative accommodation of Muslims to take place within schooling in order to improve the educational standards of Muslim children within the United Kingdom, including several chapters that focus on Muslim education in locations such as Yorkshire, Peterborough, High Wycombe, and Tower Hamlets, and further afield. This book will be of importance to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students studying religious education, secondary education, and multicultural education more broadly. Policymakers interested in education policy and politics, as well as race and ethnicity in educational contexts, may potentially benefit from the volume.

This book offers an account of religious schooling committed to ‘queer-thriving’ and envisions how queer staff and students can live their lives without being ‘accommodated’ within heteronormative religious traditions. Engaging with queer theological perspectives across the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, the book begins by situating queer thriving as a viable part of the work of the religious school, and not just as something reserved for progressive education more broadly. Taking three areas that are typically used to justify religious heteronormativity (religious texts, religious values, religious rituals), it engages queer theologies to showcase how an educational approach committed to queer thriving can be enacted in religious schools in ways that are also theologically sensitive. The book then explores how religious school communities can navigate differences around queerness and religion in ways that are supportive of queer staff and students. It takes desire as an everyday reality in classrooms and applies a queer lens to this to challenge heteronormativity and to imagine alternative modes of relationship between staff, students, and communities that enable queer staff and students to thrive. Showcasing possibilities of resistance for the opposition between religious and queer concerns, it will appeal to researchers, postgraduates and academics in the fields of religion and education, whilst also benefitting those working across philosophy of education and educational theory, sex education, sociology of education, social justice education, queer theologies, religious studies, and sociology of religion.

International knowledge transfer in religious education (RE) is still a fairly new topic. Many scholars in the field consider this discussion of prime importance for the future of both the academic discipline of religious education and the related school subject RE. This book continues this discussion and specifies it in the direction of teacher education. Its focus is on the challenges that teacher students and their trainers are facing in the light of RE in a pluralized and detraditionalized society. The impact of these challenges on RE research is obvious. However, international exchange of research results for purposes of comparison and mutual enrichment is still rare. This book provides insights that can encourage and facilitate this exchange.

Religious Education in Malawi and Ghana contributes to the literature on opportunities and complexities of inclusive approaches to Religious Education (RE). It analyses how RE in Malawi and Ghana engages with religious pluralisation and provides a compelling case for the need to re-evaluate current approaches in the conceptualisation, curriculum design and delivery of RE in schools in Malawi and Ghana. The book explains how a pervasive tradition of selection involving exclusion and inclusion of religion in RE leads to misrepresentation, and in turn to misclusion of non-normative religions, where religion is included but marginalized and misrepresented. The book contributes to wider discourse of RE on opportunities as well as complexities of post-confessional approaches, including the need for RE to avoid perpetuating the continued legitimisation of selected religions, and in the process the delegitimization of the religious ‘other’ as a consequence of misrepresentation and misclusion. Inspired by Braten’s methodology for comparative studies in RE, the book draws on two qualitative studies from Malawi and Ghana to highlight the pervasive problems of religious misclusion in RE. This book will be of great interest for academics, scholars and post graduate students in the fields of RE, African education, educational policy, international education and comparative education..

This book provides insights into new developments and persistent traditions in Zen teacher training and education through the use of historical archival research and original interviews with living Zen Masters. It argues that some contemporary Euro-American social values of gender equality, non-discrimination, rationality, ecumenicism and democracy permeate not only the organizational aspects of the Kwan Um School of Zen case study, but soteriological processes and goals of the training more widely. Each chapter showcases the ways important facets of Zen education—from meditation to curriculum development to school management — have absorbed Euro-American cultural and social ideals in both community and educational practices. Giving dedicated scholarly attention and conceptualising new adaptations in transnational Zen communities, it constitutes an important and timely addition to the literature and will appeal to researchers and scholars of religion and education, Asian pedagogies, contemporary Buddhism, transnational Zen, and Zen education.

Drawing on research conducted at 17 Catholic universities in the United States, making it the largest study of its kind, this volume explores effective practice in improving institutional policy relating to issues of sexuality. The text calls attention to campus cultures of fear, shame, or denial around sexuality and highlights possible points of institutional resistance to changes in policy. Discussing topics such as sexual identity, sexuality education in the curriculum, Title IX, employee termination, and morality clauses, the book shows how staff and faculty are crucial in effecting change across Catholic campuses, providing valuable insight into the “unspoken rules” around sexuality within the shadow culture at Catholic institutions. Moreover, the text illustrates how institutions can maintain fidelity to Church teachings and even embrace notions of human dignity, solidarity, and the common good to achieve sexual inclusivity. A unique study demonstrating how Catholic teaching can help support inclusive change around issues of sexuality and gender in higher education, it ultimately puts forward a practical framework for effecting change and improving student and staff support structures in Catholic institutions. It will thus appeal to researchers and academics working in the fields of Higher Education Management, Gender and Sexuality in Education, Religion, Gender and Sexuality, and the Sociology of Religion.

Religion and Worldviews: The Triumph of the Secular in Religious Education provides the first serious analysis and review of the Commission on Religious Education’s proposed worldviews framework for the subject. It argues that religious education has an important contribution to make to the aims of liberal education and examines whether the shift to a worldview framework is capable of overcoming current weaknesses and initiating a new positive direction for the future. Chapters explore the role of worldviews in Religious Education, covering key debates including: Whether there is need for new legislation on RE The nature of professionalism and the role of ‘experts’ The extent to which there is educational value in study of the personal worldviews of students The role of the religious voice in RE The relation of religions to religious worldviews The aims of RE The relationship between the state and religion Consideration of the nature of a worldview The personal reflections of a member of the Commission on its proposals The chapters provide all that is necessary to understand and to evaluate the current debate on the appropriateness of a worldviews approach to RE. Bringing together leading names in the field, this is essential reading for trainee and practising teachers of Religious Education, RE advisers and schools’ leaders responsible for curriculum development.

Conspiracy theories are a ubiquitous feature of our times. The Handbook of Conspiracy Theories and Contemporary Religion is the first reference work to offer a comprehensive, transnational overview of this phenomenon along with in-depth discussions of how conspiracy theories relate to religion(s). Bringing together experts from a wide range of disciplines, from psychology and philosophy to political science and the history of religions, the book sets the standard for the interdisciplinary study of religion and conspiracy theories.