Worldviews education: cosmopolitan peacebuilding and preventing violent extremism

ABSTRACT

Since the mid-2000s soft power approaches to counter and prevent violent extremism (C/PVE) have increasingly been implemented by civil society, state actors and UN agencies internationally. Education is a critical and previously undervalued component in PVE, as it has only recently begun to attract significant scholarly and policy attention. This article briefly reviews the emerging field of education and PVE, and argues that it could benefit from drawing on insights from research on education about diverse religious and non-religious worldviews and PVE in Australia. Our research indicates that these types of educational initiatives can assist with addressing religious vilification, discrimination and interreligious tensions, and also with building religious literacy and social inclusion of young people, thereby minimising risks of alienation and vulnerability to extremism. We also argue that a critical approach to education about religions can assist young people to identify religions’ ambivalent role in contributing to both cultures of violence – direct and structural – and cultures of peace. We present a case study on learning about diverse worldviews in Victoria, Australia in this article to illustrate our arguments and finally make a series of recommendations regarding religion, education and PVE, and cosmopolitan peacebuilding strategies more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• worldviews
• religion
• nonreligion
• education
• preventing violent extremism
• cosmopolitanism
• peacebuilding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Two of the authors of this article were core members of GTReC. Anna Halafoff was a Senior Researcher at GTReC from 2006–2012, before joining Deakin University, and Gary Bouma was the Head of GTREC from 2010–2017.

2. We find the cosmopolitan/anti-cosmopolitan binary helpful in understanding the increasingly polarised views present globally in response to current social, economic and environmental issues, and more applicable than other binaries of Left and Right, or conservative and liberal. These views can also of course exist on a spectrum encompassing more inclusive cosmopolitan to exclusivist anti-cosmopolitan positions.

3. Education in Australia has long been managed at a state and territory level with significant variations. The Australian Curriculum, which began to be shaped in 2008, has been implemented differently in each state and territory. This article focuses on Victoria, where the authors are based. For more information about religion and education in NSW and Queensland see Byrne (2014) and Maddox (2014).

4. The Chief Investigators of this project are Professor Mary Lou Rasmussen (the Australian National University), Associate Professor Andrew Singleton and Dr Anna Halafoff (Deakin University) and Professor Gary Bouma (Monash University). Dr Kim Lam also worked on the project as a Research Fellow.

5. At the time the AGZ survey was conducted, Victoria had only recently introduced Learning about Religions and Worldviews in its curriculum. Most students in our sample who had received GRE were attending religious schools rather than state schools. More longitudinal studies are required in order to test the impact of the changes to the 2015 Victorian curriculum, but the AGZ study at least provides a national baseline of data related to religion and education in Australia that can be built upon in future years.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP160102367].

Notes on contributors

Anna Halafoff

Dr Anna Halafoff is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and a member of the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University. She is also a Research Associate of the UNESCO Chair in Interreligious and Intercultural Relations – Asia Pacific at Monash University. Anna’s current research interests include: religious diversity; interreligious relations; preventing violent extremism; and education about religions and worldviews. She is the author of The Multifaith Movement: Global Risks and Cosmopolitan Solutions (Springer 2013) and co-editor of Education about Religions and Worldviews: Promoting Intercultural and Interreligious Understanding in Secular Societies (Routledge 2016) and Re-Enchanting Education and Spiritual Wellbeing: Fostering Belonging and Meaning-making for Global Citizens (Routledge 2017).

Kim Lam

Dr Kim Lam is an Associate Research Fellow for the UNESCO Chair for Comparative Research on Cultural Diversity and Social Justice at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. Her research interests include youth religiosity, Buddhism in the West, contemporary youth participation, minority youth disadvantage, and post-identitarian subjectivities. She has published on these and other topics in the Journal of Youth Studies, the British Journal of Sociology and the Journal of Global Buddhism.

Gary Bouma

Emeritus Professor Gary Bouma AM is the UNESCO Chair in Intercultural and Interreligious Relations – Asia Pacific, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Monash University, Acting Director of the Global Terrorism Research Centre. His research in the sociology of religion examines the management of religious diversity in plural multicultural societies, postmodernity as a context for doing theology, religion and terror, religion and public policy. He is the author or co-author of over 25 books. Recent books include: Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press 2006) and Being Faithful in Diversity: Religions and Social Policy in Multifaith Societies (ATF).