Investigating the impact of religious diversity in schools for secondary education: a challenging but necessary exercise

Abstract

Both in academic and public discussions, there is an ongoing debate about the pros and cons of religious diversity in education. Until recently, many arguments used in this debate have not had a strong theoretical basis and often lack empirical underpinning as well. In this paper I go further into the reasons why researching the impact of religious diversity in education is so complicated. Reflections on the findings with regard to religious diversity in education from a European research project on religion, education, dialogue and conflict are taken as a starting point to explore further, both from a conceptual and an empirical perspective, why it is so difficult to answer the question about the impact of religious diversity in education. Among the aspects discussed are the fact that a single definition of ‘religious diversity’ cannot be given. This problematises empirical studies on the impact of religious diversity, since the less clear research concepts are, the higher the risk is of making misinterpretations. A further complication is that the influence of school cannot be strictly separated from other factors of influence. The paper concludes with practical implications for empirical research on religious diversity as possibilities to overcome the difficulties described. Special attention is paid to making use of the perspective of students themselves.

Keywords:

• religious diversity
• secondary education
• citizenship education
• REDCo project

Notes

1. See, for instance, discussions in national daily newspapers like Trouw, Nederlands Dagblad and Reformatorisch Dagblad (November–December 2009) on the role of religion in education and the right of existence of Orthodox Christian schools.

2. I was a member of the research team from the Netherlands.

3. Central questions were: ‘What role has religion in pupils' life and in their surroundings (important others, peers, family)?’, ‘How do pupils see religion in school and the impact of religion in education?’, ‘How do pupils consider the impact of religions in society?’

4. For this reason, analysis on the Estonian data focuses more on differences between pupils with regard to the model of religious education pupils have experiences with (and for how many years).