Fostering critical religious thinking in multicultural education for teacher education

Abstract

Religious diversity as a consequence of global immigration has become a cultural phenomenon of pluralism in society. The fear of indoctrination and the desire for religious freedom fuel the debate on whether to remove religion from school education. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed offers a positive perspective on the debate by calling attention to the pedagogy of religious education in the pursuit of religious freedom for all human beings. Rather than transferring religious knowledge to students, the challenge for religious education is to foster critical religious thinking in them. Unfortunately, many teachers lack the confidence to address religious issues, as well as lacking support in the professional development of critical religious thinking. Hence, this article proposes a tentative model for fostering critical religious thinking that might fit into a course in multicultural education for teachers.

Keywords:

• Religious education
• critical thinking
• teacher education
• multicultural education

Acknowlegements

This paper is completed under the sponsor of National Science Council, Taiwan (Project No. NSC-101-2918-I-018-002), and under the Scholar-in-Residence Program at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada. Special thanks to faculty of Regent College: Gerry Schoberg, Iwan Russell-Jones, Craig Gay, and John Stackhouse, Jr.