This session explores how religious education (RE) is negotiated within diverse national and postcolonial contexts shaped by competing norms, legal frameworks, and differing pedagogical approaches. Bringing together case studies from Norway, Germany, France, the United States, and Hong Kong, the session examines how RE curricula and school systems construct understandings of religion, values, and student autonomy. Papers address the persistence of Protestant epistemologies in Norwegian textbooks, the use of the Islamic concept of maqāṣid for values education in German Islamic RE, tensions between parental choice and state authority in French and US alternative schooling, and the shifting role of freedom of conscience in Hong Kong’s postcolonial curriculum. Together, these contributions highlight how RE remains a key site where pluralism, governance, decolonization, and citizenship take shape. They also offer insights into new models for more inclusive and reflexive educational futures.
Recent scholarship has highlighted how modern religious education remains shaped by Protestant assumptions about what religion is and how it should be studied. Drawing on Jenny Berglund’s concept of the Protestant “marinade” of Scandinavian religious education, this paper analyzes Norwegian RE textbooks published after the 2020 curriculum reform (LK20). The reform partially sought to move beyond the traditional “world religions paradigm,” but textbook analysis demonstrates that religions such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism continue to be constructed through categories historically derived from Protestant Christianities, including scripture, doctrinal belief, and theological concepts such as salvation and messianism. These frameworks implicitly position Christianity as the normative model for understanding religion and therefore present other traditions through a Christian lens. The paper concludes by proposing a pedagogical shift to relocate these categories within the study of Christianity, allowing other traditions to be presented through categories more closely aligned with their own internal logics.
This dissertation project focuses on developing an integrative approach to values education for Islamic Religious Education (IRE) in Germany. In a pluralistic society, teachers face the complex challenge of reconciling genuine Islamic theology and normative teachings with socio-political educational mandates. This study addresses the research gap at the intersection of ethics and Islamic religious pedagogy. As a solution, the legal-philosophical concept of maqāṣid (intentions of Sharia) is didactically modeled. Methodologically, the work combines discourse-analytical hermeneutics with a qualitative content analysis of core curricula (North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg). Embedded within a Design-Based Research (DBR) framework, the research aims to construct and test a criteria-oriented guideline as an educational intervention. This theory-driven, real-world approach empowers Muslim students to develop religious dialogue and judgment skills, contributing to peaceful coexistence in a secular constitutional state.
This paper analyzes the regulatory, surveillance, and operational infrastructures in the US and France that affect religiously oriented private, independent, or otherwise alternative-to-public schooling projects. Rather than strictly comparative, a juxtapositional approach is used for this analytical review to better observe the contrasts and surprising "overlaps between, across, and within” these different systems (author redacted). I argue that these divergent systems reflect each country’s relationship with religion, as well as undergirding national attitudes about whether parents or the state is most responsible for the education of children. With an eye toward the future of education, this analysis offers insight into trends emerging in both countries, which converge with respect to demands for increased diversity of schooling options, and diverge in terms of what kinds of options come to fruition.
This paper examines how freedom of conscience is configured in postcolonial Hong Kong’s curriculum, focusing on the Ethics and Religious Studies (ERS) subject as a hinge between constitutional guarantees and classroom practice. Drawing on a distinction between freedom of conscience and freedom of religion (Trigg, 2010; Maclure & Taylor, 2011) and on debates about “Asian values” in education (Bell & Ham, 2003; Cummings, 1996; see also Pye, 1985), I argue that Hong Kong’s Basic Law and denominational school system offer thick protections for religious institutions while providing thin safeguards for students’ autonomy—the right to believe, not believe, and change belief. Through qualitative analysis of ERS curriculum guides (2007, 2014, 2019, 2024) and Basic Law articles, paired with comparisons to Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand, the paper shows how school systems promote civility, harmony, and orthodoxy while leaving conscience largely implicit, and sketches what a conscience-centred religious education might entail.