11 - Religious Education: Exploring Pluriliteracies through a Deeper Learning Episode on Modern-Day Prophets

Summary

Stefan Altmeyer and Johannes Kerbeck explore religious education as a means for enabling learners to build life-relevant knowledge and critical understanding. They argue that religious literacies are underpinned by an awareness of inter-religious views ranging from the neutral to critical and ultimately leading to positioning individual decisions and identities within religion-aware thinking. Learners are guided along a pathway from understanding ‘religious language’ to actively engaging in religious dialogue and using the ‘language of religion’ in appropriate, critical and reflective ways. Investigating the differences between subjective and objective positionality involves learners in facing changing perspectives that build on developing basic religious knowledge, applying their understanding to lived experiences and constructing critical yet relevant evaluations of arguments and counter-arguments. When these evaluations demonstrate appropriate use of the ‘correlative’ or ‘dialogic’ principle of religious learning, students exhibit deeper understanding. The learning episode focuses on a national initiative on global development featuring a video-streamed inter-religious panel discussion with experts from different creeds. Drawing on issues of diversity, empathy, solidarity and responsibility and using digital media, learners are invited to prepare for, actively participate in and connect personally with issues through deep reflection informed by religious literacies development.