This article reports on a small scale study, examining the influence of parental faith belief on parental engagement with children's learning. The literature surrounding parental engagement and the impact of familial belief on children's outcomes is examined. It is clear from work in the US that familial faith belief has an impact;…

The early days of non-confessional, multi-faith religious education in Britain benefitted from close collaboration between academics in universities, teacher educators and teachers. This article attempts to initiate a revival of such a dialogue, by summarizing some developments in religious studies at university level and suggesting possible…

This article is an attempt to provide an educational justification for the British Government-funded project, "REsilience," on addressing contentious issues through religious education (RE) which was carried out by the RE Council of England and Wales. A number of issues relating to the inclusion of religiously inspired violent extremism in the…

The "purpose" of this article is to illustrate how potential learning is related to hegemonic speech genres. This we do through examples from two religious education (RE) classrooms, one Norwegian and one Swedish. By presenting important dimensions of speech genres used in RE classrooms, the article also contributes to developing theory. The…

This article researches work by four pupils in a diachronic collection of Norwegian primary school workbooks. Given signs of a variety of voices and perspectives in chosen representations of central tenets and/or practices in religions and philosophical traditions, how can an analysis and discussion of a few chosen texts shed light on their…

Recent studies have increasingly favoured contextualisation of religious education (RE) to pupils' home faith background in spite of current assessment methods that might hinder this. For a multi-religious, multi-ethnic sample of 369 London school pupils aged from 13 to 15 years, this study found that the participatory, transformative and…

Muslim schools are a growing phenomenon across the world. Muslim diaspora resulting from multiple factors including political, religious and economic enhanced the need among Muslims to maintain and develop their faith identity. Marginalisation of Muslims, in whatever forms and for whatever reasons, particularly in Muslim minority and/or secular…

This study, conducted during the summer of 2008 in Kumasi, Ghana analysed the role of religious and moral education (RME) in ameliorating the witchcraft discourse in three Ghanaian junior secondary schools. Although the syllabus acknowledges the pernicious effects of witchcraft allegations, it adopts a "Thou shalt not" approach that fails to…

This article reports on some of the research findings of a major, multi-site case study of character formation in young people in England. Religion was not the focus of this research, but emerged as significant in each case study. In particular, the religious and spiritual beliefs and practices of young people were positively connected with their…

Structural modelling offers an overall pattern of relationships; this paper looks at differences in students' attitude structures between England and Estonia. Where different coherent sets of beliefs exist in a national sample, factor analysis, which focuses on sets of responses which differ between groups, should be able to separate them out.…

The REDCo project addressed the question of how study of religions and values in schools could contribute to either dialogue or tension in Europe. Researchers in the humanities and social sciences co-operated in order to gain better insight into how European citizens of different religious, cultural and political backgrounds could enter into…

This paper builds on and develops the English findings of the qualitative study of European teenagers' perspectives on religion and religious education (RE), part of "Religion in Education: a Contribution to Dialogue or a Factor of Conflict in Transforming Societies of European Countries?" (REDCo) project. It uses data gathered from 27 pupils,…

Anglican school inspectors will usually be Christian. Is it possible that their beliefs might compromise their inspection judgements? Neutrality is impossible when holding opinions or making judgements about matters of signal importance. Religious beliefs are strongly held. Using the concept of "ordinary theology" I argue that religious beliefs…

The Teenage Religion and Values Survey was conducted throughout the 1990s among young people between the ages of 13 and 15 years. A total of 33,982 young people took part in the survey. As the next phase of this research begins for the twenty-first century, this paper looks back at the survey conducted in the 1990s and considers two aspects of the…

This paper addresses the sensitive issue of the teaching of religions and beliefs in schools by analysing two recent decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. In these cases, the Court asserts that students should be exempted from compulsory courses on religion or from courses that are not conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralist…