Reading religion in Norwegian textbooks: are individual religions ideas or people?

ABSTRACT

Different religions are treated in different ways in Norwegian sixth form textbooks. We carried out an exhaustive content analysis of the chapters devoted to individual religions in textbooks for the Religion and Ethics course currently available in Norway, using rigorous indicators to code each word, image and question according to whether they were treated the religion as a set of ideas or a group of people. After adjusting for trends in the different kinds of data (word, image, question), we found that Buddhism and Christianity receive significantly more attention for their ideas than Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, which are treated more as people. This difference cannot be explained by the national syllabus or the particularities of the individual religions. The asymmetry also has implications for the pupils’ academic, moral and pedagogical agency for which teachers play a critical role in compensating.

KEYWORDS:

• Textbooks
• religion as idea
• religion as people
• Norway
• asymmetry

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank members of Østfold University College’s “ETIPP” research group for their perceptive comments on previous versions of this article. All remaining errors are of course our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Thomas

Andrew Thomas teaches at the Faculty of Education, Østfold University College. He has several years of experience teaching Religion and Ethics, history, philosophy, social sciences and English at secondary schools in Norway as well as in higher education. His previous research includes work on church history, asceticism and forms of contextual theology.

Alf Rolin

Alf Rolin teaches in religious studies at the Faculty of Education, Østfold University College and currently leads the postgraduate teacher training programme. He has qualifications in both religious studies and pedagogy, and has published widely on issues in religious education as well as new forms of religiosity.