Meta-concepts, thinking skills and religious education

Abstract

This paper proposes that the acquisition of meta-concepts and thinking skills in order to facilitate scholarly religious thought should be the principal aim of religious education in schools. As a result, the aim of religious education is primarily stated in cognitive terms and religious education is understood as closely related to education about religion. The educational value of this approach is explained in a cultural–historical perspective on learning. It is shown that there is a close connection between learning and development and that school learning especially contributes to development of pupils’ higher cognitive functions, if school learning aims at the acquisition of subject-specific meta-concepts and thinking skills. In order to apply these insights to religious education, the aim of religious education is reconsidered and some examples of meta-concepts and thinking skills that may serve as the content of religious education are discussed.

Keywords:

• meta-concepts
• thinking skills
• education about religion
• school learning
• cultural–historical perspective
• study of religion

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Professor Ulrich Riegel of the University of Siegen, Germany, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. This is also a fundamental difference between the approaches of Piaget and Vygotsky. Piaget understood development as a process of biological maturation, which cannot be influenced by education. Instead, according to Piaget, education has to follow the development of the child. That is to say, the content of education should be confined to what the child is able to understand at its level of cognitive development. Vygotsky, by contrast, argues that education facilitates development if the educational content is just above what the child can understand, Vygoysky’s famous ‘zone of proximal development’, which thus challenges and extends the child’s mental constructions (Vygotsky 1978, 79–80, 84–91; cf. also Van Parreren 1988, 17–25; Rogoff 2003, 50–1).

2. For a correct understanding of Hermans’ approach, it is important to emphasise that the aim of participatory learning is not to enhance the level of participation as such. Hermans (2003, 265–8) considers participation in religious practices a means but not an end. The educational aim is not to socialise pupils in a religious community through participation in religious practices, but to facilitate religious identity formation (for a discussion of learning as participation also see Wardekker and Miedema 2001).

3. In the past, I defended the idea that religious education should facilitate the formation of a religious identity and, in addition, criticised the education about approach for being too cognitive (cf. especially Vermeer 2004). However, on the basis of the arguments developed in this paper, and particularly the insight that learning subject-specific meta-concepts facilitates the development of higher cognitive functions, I no longer consider the education about approach as educationally inadequate, nor do I consider the formation of a religious identity as the only appropriate aim of religious education. The latter, I now regard as a possible unintended learning outcome, but not as the primary aim of religious education in schools.

4. What is actually needed is a scientific religious meta-language. Developing such a meta-language is very difficult if not impossible. For the problems attached to developing a scientific religious meta-language, see for instance Stolz (2001, 225–31).

5. In the work by Oser and Gmünder, these seven polar dimensions collectively construct a complex, interpretive framework for determining a person’s stage of religious development. I disregard all developmental claims here and only cite these dimensions as illustrations of generic psychological dimensions of religiosity.

6. Erricker (2010, 82–5) also presents a methodology for conceptual enquiry consisting of five elements: communicate, apply, enquire, contextualise and evaluate. However, it remains unclear if this methodology is primarily a pedagogic strategy (i.e. primarily a model for planning religious education lessons) or if students should acquire this methodology as an analytical tool for understanding religion. Only in the latter case, I would regard it as a teachable (complex) thinking skill.

7. This learning task was designed for the higher grades of secondary education by Richard de Keyzer, one of my students in the teacher training programme for religious education at Radboud University Nijmegen.

8. Grimmitt, in part following the insights of Vygotsky, rightly emphasises that pupils only learn effectively ‘(…) through making links between their own experiences, needs, interests, questions and beliefs and the content being used’ (Grimmitt 2000, 215). Collecting pros and cons for building a mosque is one way of establishing such links. Another way is using lifelike situations, as we did in this learning task. At the time this learning task was carried out in class, the question of where to build the mosque was a real issue in the neighbourhood of the school and was probably much debated in the homes of many pupils. Moreover, the use of this lifelike situation made the information about Islam the pupils had previously acquired contextual and meaningful (i.e. pupils became aware of a real situation to which this information applies), which is also likely to promote retention of the learning content and motivation for undertaking a learning task (Vermeer 2004).