Hela världen i klassrummet : En kritisk läsning av samtida religionsdidaktisk litteratur

Sammanfattning: With the whole world in the classroom teachers are confronted with pupils from different backgrounds and with different worldviews, a fact that entails pedagogic challenges on a daily basis. One of them, stated by contempora- ry research, is the gap between a secular educational system and religious faith. Religious citizens are excluded from the public arena in western secular societies according to philosopher Jürgen Habermas and contemporary rese- arch demonstrate that religious pupils experience that today’s secular religious education is incompatible with their religious faith and practices. The ques- tion is, how are RE teachers to handle this gap? What advice is being given to them? And for whom is the educational system actually made? This bachelor thesis turns, with Habermas’ theory as point of departure, to contemporary Swedish and British literature in the pedagogy of religious education to find answers. The literature has been analysed from the perspective of an ideology critic in order to reveal the underlying ideologies and shed light upon alternative courses of action expressed in the material as well as their pedagogic and democratic consequences. The analysis shows that the Swedish literature maintains and promotes a secular perspective on religious education whereas the British literature criticises a secular educational di- scourse and complements the secular perspective with a postmetaphysical and possibly a religious perspective. The answers as to how teachers are to appro- ach the problematic situation described above are therefore strictly limited to either a secular or a postmetaphysical ideology, though the British literature offers more wide-ranging alternative courses of action in its criticism of the prevailing secular discourse. As a consequence the Swedish literature confirms and reinforces Habermas’ theory about western societies, presents almost no alternative courses of action and is less including and less democratic than the British literature. The advice given by the British literature is mostly concerned with acknowledging and inviting religious language, religious expe- rience, religious faith and practice in the classroom. That is, to open up for a pedagogy of religious education that teaches about God(s) as a possibility.