Religious Education (RE) encompasses both teaching about religion and teaching from religion, making it a broad and diverse field. Consequently, approaches to RE vary significantly across the globe. The theorization of religions, beliefs, values, and their associated practices influences the pedagogical methods, learning objectives, curricular materials, and outcomes linked to their teaching, and vice versa. Moreover, these aspects are highly contextualized, reflecting local, national, and international priorities and norms. This session brings together papers that examine case studies from around the world to explore how schools in different countries across Europe, Africa, and Asia approach RE in its multiple forms. By examining these diverse cases and the contexts in which they are situated, these papers seek to shed light on the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which RE is approached, implemented, and taught within distinct cultural, societal, and educational frameworks.
The inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflicts of the 1990s and the subsequent Dayton Accords signed in 1995 led Bosnia and Herzegovina to a clear division in public space between Bosnian-Muslims, Serbian-Orthodox and Croatian-Catholics. Today, the country is governed by a tripartite structure and organized in a ‘separate school system’: students of different ethnic and religious groups have hardly any opportunities for confrontation about issues related to religious diversity. The paper aims to offer an overview on the evolution of religious education in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the adoption of the Vidovdan Constitution (1921) to the 2000s OECD experimentation of the subject Religious culture. The contribution also aims to illustrate some projects and teachings about religions in Bosnia and Herzegovina proposed by some Catholic institutions as peacekeeping and reconciliation tools, but also as a means of strengthening the mediation role of the Catholic Church in the political dynamics of the territory.
The head teacher of Zanzibar’s largest Islamic school described his experience at the Islamic University of Medina: “We swallow the sweet and spit out the bitter,” Founded within an Indian Ocean Sufi order, his school mirrored East African cultural customs such as communal prayer and ancestor reverence. However, in Medina, he was taught that these practices were polytheistic and apostate in Islam. He returned home with conservative Salafi textbooks authored specifically for Africans which derided amulets, divination, and magic, considered stereotypical practices within “African Islam.” This paper analyzes the Arabic curriculum of Saudi’s program of Islamic propagation in Africa, alongside the Swahili teacher-talk that transforms it in the classroom. In contrast to narratives of “blanket radicalization” from study in Saudi Arabia that present African Muslims as passive recipients of the new orthodoxy, East African teachers engage in creative adaptations that “sweetens” Salafism for integration within communal Sufi ethical formations.
Hong Kong, a key Asian and global city, is academically recognized for its distinctive sociocultural and religious composition. Its entrenched religious education—apparent yet ambivalent, "Asian" yet "Western"—exemplifies this distinctiveness. "Ethics and Religious Studies" (ERS) is an elective subject in the three-year senior secondary curriculum. In its design, ERS comprises three parts: compulsory "Ethics," elective "Religious Traditions," which includes five specific modules (Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Islam, Taoism), and elective "Faiths in Action," consisting of two options, "Learning to serve and serving to learn," and "Learning from religious practices."
Three editions of the ERS guideline (2007, 2014, 2019) were examined to evaluate and interpret the curriculum, prioritizing the latest version. The study reveals "Ethics and Religious Studies" as an inherently secular subject, while numerous secular narratives permeate the reviewed documents. For example, there is a limited application of entire religious systems (specifically, Islam) despite its inclusion in the framework.