Uncomfortable Knowledge in the Classroom: Teaching Cults and New Religious Movements in Saskatchewan Contemporary Educational Contexts

This paper advances the argument that a College of Education is not merely an alternative institutional location for teaching about cults and new religious movements, but a pedagogically and politically necessary site for rethinking how contested religious knowledge is produced, negotiated, and taught in contemporary universities. While Religious Studies, History, and related disciplines have generated extensive scholarship on new religious movements, largely focused on classification, historical development, and sociological explanation, they have paid comparatively little attention to the pedagogical and relational challenges that arise when these movements are taught within increasingly polarized and publicly scrutinized educational environments. As teaching religion at the post-secondary level has become more visibly politicized, the central challenge is no longer only how new religious movements should be defined or analysed, but how they should be taught, by whom, and for what educational purposes. A College of Education provides a distinct institutional and intellectual context in which these questions can be addressed directly, because education as a field is fundamentally oriented toward curriculum design, learner experience, professional responsibility, and the social consequences of teaching practices.