Evangelische Hochschule Nürnberg
Education institutions in European immigration societies must struggle with a lot of challenges. About one-third of the refugees are school-age children and youth. Every third child has a migration biography and many of the refugee and displaced children and youth come from Arabic countries. They bring along their various religious affiliation and culture into secular societies formerly molded by Christianity. This situation requires a lot of special accommodations for educational institutions like schools, kindergarten, and religious communities. Besides language barriers and being mindful of their traumatic experiences, educational actors need to be sensitive in particular with intercultural and interreligious conflict situations, anti-Semitic or Islamophobic positions and radicalization tendencies of cultural and/or religious identity.
The background for this topic is provided by the experiences of children and youth, who give us an insight into the clash of different religions and cultures in immigrant educational systems, into the significance of faith, the complexity of hybrid identities, but also the experience of being subaltern. That there is the importance of religious literacy for coping with the impacts of migration in educational work in schools, churches and religious communities will finally be discussed.
Religious Literacy in Early Childhood Education as a Societal Resource in Immigrant Societies
(2022)
Western immigration societies are struggling with numerous of educational challenges. Every third, sometimes every second child has an immigration biography and teachers working in early childhood education are often minimally prepared to deal with the resulting diverse and complex conditions of cultural and religious diversity. Children and Childhood studies show that religion is an essential reference point for migrant families and their children. How could these empirical settings be transformed into intercultural and inter-religious competences and spiritual well-being in early childhood education? In which ways religious education in pre-schools provides a “safe place” or space of negotiating (religious) identity, value building, resilience, and the capacity to deal with pluralism and otherness? On the basis of empirical and theoretical results, the opportunities of religious education in early childhood education for developing an attitude of global citizenship should be taken into serious consideration
This paper deals with the question, to what extent, in the German context, have biblical didactic implications and systemic requirements in religious education led to social inequality in heterogeneous classrooms. Based on four different case studies in elementary, middle, and vocational schools, an empirical insight is provided that sheds exploratory and descriptive light on the construction of reality in the context of biblical learning. The analysis clearly shows that physical as well as socialization-related limitations, structural and systemic conditions in the German school system, and also strangeness and existential irrelevance, are obvious barriers that prevent students in heterogeneous settings from accessing biblical learning. In the synopsis, with theological–pedagogical implications as well as didactical challenges, it becomes clear how necessary difference-sensitive Bible didactics in the context of heterogeneity and social inequality is. Finally, based on the empirical evidence of the analyzed case studies and the theoretical framings, concrete expectations for biblical learning in religious education, in relation to heterogeneity and social inequality, are highlighted.