This article seeks to engage with the contention that, given the dilemmas of the self purportedly raised by these aspects of modernity, teachers of religious education need, ethically as well as professionally, to urgently revise their often traditionalist view of society, of children and of appropriate pedagogy for their subject. The aim of such…

In three Canadian provinces Catholic schools receive full government funding. This funding is premised on Catholic schools providing a distinctive educational environment based on the religious beliefs and practices of, among others, the teachers who work in these schools. A variety of official documents underline this notion of teachers playing…

This study set out to examine the differences in attitude toward Christianity among year seven secondary school pupils who had undertaken their primary education either in a Church of England voluntary aided school or a non-denominational state-maintained school. Data were provided by 492 year-seven pupils attending three Church of England…

CREATe (Christian Reflection on Ethics And Teaching) groups are peer support groups which use an action research model to facilitate reflection and to promote the development of thinking about Christian ethics in teaching. This report summarises the findings of a pilot research project commissioned by The Stapleford Centre to offer a preliminary…

In response to the article by Dan Moulin it is argued that the representation of Christianity in British religious education relies on central beliefs and practices that are widely shared. In contrast to Moulin we consider that the teaching of doctrine is important in order to prevent serious misunderstanding of Christianity. Focussing on a…

Aggregated attainment data for each of the four Key Stages of the National Curriculum during 2006-07 are used to compare the performance of schools having differing proportions of ethnic minority pupils on roll. The data are for all maintained primary and secondary schools that completed the 2007 Annual Schools' Census. There are noticeable…

In the wake of globalisation, multiculturalism, and the "marketisation" of schools the education-for-citizenship question in relation to state and independent schools seems increasingly relevant. This paper is based on a comparison of beliefs and values related to civic and moral issues among students in Swedish mainstream and Steiner Waldorf…

Nietzsche accused Socrates of being degenerate. The question is posed whether practitioners of contemporary religious education may be suffering from this condition, in particular through the modern practice of associating religion with secular philosophies or "beliefs". Through the examination of tolerance and "respect for all" in the…

The question explored in this article is whether religious schools can contribute to the formation of the civic virtues in pupils by means of citizenship education. It is commonly agreed that civic virtues are needed in pluriform Western societies to promote social cohesion and reduce hostile attitudes. However, some argue that religious schools…

How do pupils in dialogical classroom communication understand the otherness of peers who belong to religions different from their own? We distinguish between three aspects of dialogical communication that are conducive to understanding pupils' otherness: orientation, appropriation, and evaluation. To what extent do teachers apply these three…

In an educational environment it was recently found that some faculty leaders of religious education managed curriculum change by paying attention to the spiritual dimension in order to help teachers to engage in implementing change. Attention to the spiritual dimension in this context provided opportunities for those likely to be alienated by…

Drawing primarily upon interview and observation data, the aims, admission policies, and curriculum of two "strong" Christian schools, one in the Netherlands and one in England, are compared and contrasted. Analysis of the beliefs and values of children, parents, and school leaders challenges assumptions about "strong" Christian schools that are…

"The Way ahead" report proposed that Church of England schools should be distinctively Christian and Anglican and recommended a number of practices that schools could adopt to exemplify their distinctiveness. However, the notion of distinctiveness is not well developed and has not been widely researched. An empirical investigation comprising a…

This research begins to operationalise eight institutional core values at a mid-sized, Midwestern Catholic university. The survey sought examples of ways in which the graduate students in a master of arts in teaching and leadership programme had and/or had not experienced the institutional core values with the same professor during their…

The religious thought of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy is a well documented but often overlooked example of unorthodox Christianity. This paper uses the example of Tolstoy's religious thinking to question the integrity of the current representation of Christianity in UK schools. It also uses Tolstoy's criticism of orthodox Christianity to suggest a…