About generating a model and arguments for didactics of a subject-aligned, interreligious education based on cooperating between religious instruction and ethics

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Katja Boehme
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology
• Term: from 2013 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 240782134

Up until now there has been no inter-religious education on the basis of an interdisciplinary cooperation between the different curricular subjects of Ethics, Philosophy and Scripture (including a variety of Christian denominations as well as Jewish and Islamic confessions) that was able to supply in-depth conceptual foundations and a didactically oriented pragmatic evaluation of its results. The current project aims at offering theoretical arguments for the necessity of such inter-denominational teaching, setting out empirical case studies of the approach and developing didactic models for its realisation. At the same time, the project attempts to contribute from a Catholic perspective to the dialogue between the world religions and their cultural worlds in the framework of school didactics and to thus engage with the social responsibilities devolving on educational institutions. In particular, the project wishes to foreground didactic arguments for positive religious freedom and to promote innovative teaching in Scripture classes. By presenting the relevant critical arguments for the creation of an interdisciplinary cooperation from a number of different denominational perspectives, and publishing them in a monograph, the scholars setting up the project aim at producing the necessary preconditions for a practical implementation of the didactic model that has been developed. They will do so by means of sketching a model unit of interdisciplinary teaching and presenting a teacher training programme focusing on the acquisition of interreligious competence among teaching staff from the subjects of philosophy, ethics and Scripture. The overall aim of the project is therefore to allow for this didactic model of inter-religious cooperation to be accessible for all levels of education.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants