The professionalisation of Islamic religious education teachers

ABSTRACT

Although Islamic religious education (IRE) has been offered in Austrian public schools since 1982, public opinion and the general opinions of several stakeholders in the school system tend to be negative. One of the main reasons is the shortage of professionals, which led to recruiting personnel from different disciplines, who often lack the proper qualification for IRE. Public discourses do not consider the possibility of professionalisation after lateral entry into the career as an IRE teacher. Based on empirical research considering the biographical experiences and professional development of IRE teachers, the present paper examines how IRE teachers themselves perceive and asses their professionalisation and professionalism. The study’s findings show that professionalisation and recognition as a professional depend on many factors, such as the degree of teachers’ training and education at academic institutions, their work schedule, state accreditation, different types of employment contract, and more. The research results reveal, moreover, the different beliefs and views of IRE teachers regarding their profession and subject. This article focuses on the concept of performative competence staging as part of the professionalisation processes of IRE teachers in the Austrian context and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamic religious education
• Muslim teacher
• teacher education
• teacher professionalisation

1. Introduction

Muslims in Austria have had the opportunity to offer Islamic Religious Education (IRE) in secular public schools since 1982–83. Despite IRE’s long history and the demand for qualified IRE teachers, the first higher education institution for the education and training of IRE teachers, the Islamic Religious Education Academy (IREA), was only founded in 1998 in Vienna. In 2007, the University of Vienna established a Master programme and, since 2017, has offered Bachelor as well as Master programmesfor IRE (University of Vienna 2017). Most recently, the University of Innsbruck established Bachelor and Master programmes for the training and qualification of future IRE teachers (Sejdini and Çakın 2018). A special feature of Innsbruck is that it offers a secondary school teacher training programme in which students can study IRE in combination with another school subject (University of Innsbruck n.d.).

The long neglect of the training and education of IRE teachers resulted in employing unqualified or only partly qualified Muslims as IRE teachers (Khorchide 2009a, 20). Academic contributions in Germany and Austria discussing the topic of IRE in public schools primarily focus on the profiling, institutionalization, and evaluation of IRE, as well as the institutionalization of IRE studies in higher education institutions, such as universities and colleges (Uçar, Blasberg-Kuhnke, and Scheliha 2010; Uçar and Sarıkaya 2009, 98–99). They rarely address the professionalisation of IRE teachers in general or after lateral entry into the profession, despite reports and research that indicate a high percentage of students opting out from IRE (Potz 2005; Tuna 2014) and criticise the quality of IRE as well as of the quality of teachers (Khorchide 2009a, 2009b). Socio-politically speaking, politicians, the media and academics focus on IRE’s promotion of integration or lack of integration (Berglund 2015; Uçar and Sarıkaya 2009). Most of the stakeholders expect from IRE – and consequently from IRE teachers – to promote the integration of Muslim adolescent boys and girls into Austrian society, while ignoring institutional, academic, educational and professional requirements of IRE and of the teachers’ professionalisation.

This article analyses how IRE teachers contribute to enhancing their profession by making their competences visible to the stakeholders of IRE and society. To understand the problems that IRE currently faces in Austria, the second section of this paper briefly introduces its history and framework, followed by an overview of the theoretical perspective of the research regarding the terms ‘profession’ and ‘professionalisation’. The fourth section explains the research design and methodology employed. After presenting and discussing the research results, illustrated by interview quotes, the concluding section introduces different approaches of performative competence staging and examines them critically as part of the professionalisation process of IRE teachers.

2. History and framework of IRE in Austria

The Republic of Austria has a secular but appreciative approach towards religions within its society, which includes incorporating religions into the public sphere. For example, each recognised religious community can provide ‘denominational’ religious education for its own community members in public schools and denominational religious education and theological studies at state universities and colleges (Rees 2018, 50). Obtaining state recognition for a religious community requires that a religious community has a long history as a registered religious community and constitutes at least 0.2% of the Austrian population according to the last census (see RGBl. Nr. 68. 18742020; oesterreich.gv.at 2019).

Currently, the government officially recognises 16 religious communities that have the right to provide religious education in public schools (oesterreich.gv.at 2019). Due to various reasons not all of them make use of their right. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses refrain from providing religious education in public schools, as they ‘consider religious instruction to be the very own task of parents’ (Hetzenauer 2017, 100). Only the Catholic, Islamic, Evangelical, Orthodox, Free-churches, Alevi and the Buddhist community – here sorted by number of participating students – provide religious education in public schools (Nimmervoll 2017a). People of other religious communities and secular people without a confession can choose to visit one of the mentioned religious education classes or ethics education (Rees 2021, 193–194). In 2001, ethics classes were launched, first as a school experiment and, starting in the school year 2021/22, as a compulsory subject for all secular students and those not visiting a religious education class (Nimmervoll 2017b; Rees 2021, 193–94). Opt out numbers have consequently decreased, while the number of participants in IRE has increased (Tuna 2014).

This denominational or ‘confessional’, approach is based on the principle of ‘liberal secularism’. In other words, the state does not get involved in the internal affairs of religions and vice versa (Maclure and Taylor 2011, 34). For ‘confessional’ religious education, this means each religious community is responsible for its own religious education subject, including the supervision of the confessional triad consisting of students,³ i. e., curriculum/content design, and teachers’ authorization. In return, the state takes care of implementing each religious education subject in the public-school system and funding its costs (see RelUG. BGBL. Nr. 190 1949).

The Muslim community received state recognition in Austria in the course of the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. Subsequently, the Austro-Hungarian monarch pronounced the ‘Islam law’ in 1912, which recognised Muslim citizens and declared Muslims to be a religious community of equal rights and responsibilities. When the Central Powers lost the First World War, Austria witnessed the resolution of its pluralistic monarchy and the rise of the nation state(s). After the country lost almost its entire Muslim population, the Islam law was forgotten in Austria until the 1960s and 1970s. The state-initiated labour migration of the sixties led to an increase in the Muslim population in Austria and other European countries. In the seventies, Muslims in Austria made their first attempts at obtaining state recognition of their community and therefore founded the Islamic Religious Community in Austria (IRCA), which gained state recognition in 1979. After only three years, the IRCA employed the first Muslim teachers and started to teach IRE in public schools (Heine 2005; Rayachi 2018, 581–82).

Since there did not yet exist higher education institutions providing Muslim or Islamic education, the main initial issue was finding qualified and trained professionals for IRE. Until recently, universities and colleges in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland provided mainly Middle Eastern and Oriental Studies, but hardly any Muslim or Islamic education that could serve to train teachers and instructors for Islamic religious education, be it in public schools or mosques.

After this brief introduction of the framework and the history of IRE in Austria, the theoretical framework of the research will now be discussed.

3. Theoretical framework: profession and professionalisation

The theoretical framework of the research in this paper is shaped by the concepts of profession and professionalisation, which will be understood in the following manner. The term ‘profession’ refers to

the structural, occupational and institutional arrangements for dealing with work associated with the uncertainties of modern lives in risk societies. Professionals are extensively engaged in dealing with risk, with risk assessment and, through the use of expert knowledge, enabling customers and clients to deal with uncertainty. (Evetts 2003, 397)

Professionalisation in turn describes, regarding individual terms, the process of passing from an occupation into a professional form of employment and, institutionally, the process in which occupational groups institutionalize themselves and become an organised and acknowledged profession (Mieg 2005, 2016).

The term ‘professionalisation’ in this paper refers to the definitions of Mieg and Evett described above: a process in which individuals or groups of individuals develop and acquire competences for the management and organization of a professional activity, and become an institutionalised and recognised profession(al). Following this definition, the present paper seeks to discuss the contemporary professionalisation of Austrian IRE teachers, based on a qualitative empirical investigation.

4. Research design: data collection and analytical interpretation

The research results and the empirical data discussed in this paper are drawn from the research project ‘Islamic religious education teachers on their way to professionalisation’, carried out between 2015 and 2018 (Tuna 2019). The empirical study followed a qualitative approach based on Clarke’s (2005) situational analysis – a further development of grounded theory, building, among other things, on:

• taking the complexity of postmodern life into account and developing systematic and flexible research design;

• implying that postmodernity characterised by ‘partialities, positionalities, complications, tenuousness, instabilities, irregularities, contradictions, heterogeneities, situatedness and fragmentation – complexities’ shapes knowledge and findings (Clarke 2005, xxiv);

• leaving positivistic social sciences behind and embracing the postmodern turn;

• expanding social action with an ecological guiding metaphor of social worlds, arenas, negotiations and discourses as an alternative conceptual infrastructure;

• supplementing Grounded Theory analyses with cartographic situations analysis – so-called ‘Mapping’ (Clarke 2005, 291–94).

According Clarkes approach the postmodern context characterises and shapes the immediate situation and the framework of research and consequently has an impact on the research findings. Against this background, twelve IRE Teachers in Tyrol, Vienna, Styria, and Salzburg were questioned, utilising problem-centred narrative interviews. The problem-centred interview offers a great deal of openness and flexibility despite the fact that it focuses on the object of communication centring the communication process on the object under investigation. Through the animating introductory question: ‘Tell me, how did you become a teacher?’ and additional key questions asking for their role, tasks, skills, understanding and challenges of IRE, conversation signals, and ad-hoc questions, narrations were generated from the beginning of the interview. At the same time, the interview was focused on the research subject (Witzel 2000; Witzel and Reiter 2012).

With the exception of two interviews, the conversations proceeded fluidly, without interruptions or restraints. In these two interviews, the interviewees repeatedly voiced concerns about their anonymity. They were afraid that detailed information about their situation and their personal characteristics would make it difficult to guarantee their anonymity.¹ These concerns could only be allayed after reassuring them that anonymisation would include all characteristics and information that could be used to draw conclusions about them. Another interviewee, in contrast to all the others, was very cautious in raising certain issues very carefully or even presented them in a positive light. Perhaps his reticence was also owed to possibly concerns about anonymity or due to concern about reactions in the Muslim community, where critical statements could have had negative consequences were they to become known.

The sample was gathered according to the principle of ‘theoretical sampling’ (Glaser and Strauss 1998, 148–165). Over the course of successive sampling, interview candidates with different educational and professional backgrounds were searched for and selected, which made an explorative investigation possible. It included trained as well as untrained or partially trained people, who nevertheless, due to training-related issues described in Section 2 ‘History and Framework of IRE in Austria’, got the ijazah licence to teach IRE from the IRCA.² The individual interviews were transcribed, evaluated in parts, and used for the search for and selection of further candidates. The selection criteria were, among others, IRE teachers’ educational level, state certification, entrance into the profession, and professional experience. Following this procedure, five female and seven male IRE teachers were interviewed. By the tenth interview, a ‘theoretical saturation’ emerged (Dimbath, Ernst-Heidenreich, and Roche 2018) – meaning no additional views, information, and insights could be found in further data. Therefore, the data collection was discontinued at the twelfth interview (Tuna 2019, 68–69).

The interview data was sequence analytical, interpreted by groups of doctoral students and sequence coded with the help of MAXQDA (Kuckartz and Rädiker 2019) analysis software. Then, the data was analysed and grouped into categories according to Clarke’s situational analyses and her analytical mapping elements such as “individual human elements/actors, nonhuman elements/actors, sociocultural/symbolic elements, spatial elements, discursive constructions of nonhuman actants etc. (Clarke 2005, 90).

5. Findings: contemporary professionalisation of IRE teachers

Participants in the qualitative survey examining the professionalisation (narrative) of current IRE teachers frequently stated that their professional activity and development were restricted by a lack of resources and insufficient support from stakeholders. The analysis of the survey data provides the following themes in this regard: 1. IRE teacher professionalisation and freedom of action: influence of stakeholders, and 2. professionalisation through performance and making competencies visible.

5.1 IRE teacher professionalisation and freedom of action: influence of stakeholders

Several IRE teachers noted in the interviews that the framework for their profession and subsequently their professional activity depended on the decisions and actions of stakeholders such as school principals, school inspectors, teachers of other subjects, parents, the Islamic religious community, and students. These stakeholders had, according to the participants, an influence on the subject itself as well as on the professional activities and development of the teachers. They had, for instance, a say in organising the timetable, determining the composition of the IRE class, providing teaching materials, planning and organising projects, and setting teaching topics and classroom assignments. It can be assumed that this dependency and the claims about the lack of resources certainly also apply to other subject teachers. In this context the IRE teachers see themselves at a disadvantage compared to the situation of their colleagues of other subjects. This is reflected in the example of the interviewee Isa,⁴ a forty-two-year-old male teacher with ten years of teaching experience. In his school, another teacher claimed a classroom reserved by Isa, without any reasoning or negotiation, and in so doing cast doubt on Isa’s position in the school. Isa describes this as follows:

Next time: I came to this room and saw that the same teacher was back in there. And he said: “Yes, Mr. Isa, now I am here, I am now registered, this room has been registered for me”. I made a joke: “Yes, have you paid more or what, for you to get this room? What is special about this room? You could also get another room.”

Isa lost his classroom without any information or explanation, although he was registered for the classroom in the first place. Isa and other teachers surveyed saw such cases as a sign of the degradation of their profession and of a lack of acknowledgement and recognition. In this context, Nur, a thirty-nine-year-old female teacher with eight years of experience, spoke of difficult and exhausting enforcement and recognition processes:

You get deported to the library. Because you do not need a room, the library is enough. What is the point of that? I actually had to fight for a room, so that I get a free classroom, where there is a board where I can pin something, where I also get a cupboard where I can put my things. So certain things are not easy with the school principal.

Nur and other teachers interviewed pointed out that the issue here is the stakeholders’ perception of IRE and its teachers. Their perception of IRE and of those who teach it is, as mentioned in the introduction, generally negative. The interviewees stated that their freedom of (professional) activity and their recognition as professionals depend on (changing the negative perception to) a positive perception from stakeholders and from society. In short, being acknowledged and respected by stakeholders and by society is part of the professionalisation process and part of being a professional. This seems to be an ongoing issue in the professionalisation of IRE teachers. After this brief illustration of the current situation of IRE teachers, IRE teachers’ approach towards and experience with this issue will now be articulated.

5.2 Professionalisation through staging and making competencies visible

In IRE teachers’ experience, the stakeholders’ negative and restrictive perception changed when the IRE professional could perform and make their own competence as a teacher visible. By showcasing their skills, IRE teachers were able to convince the stakeholders and members of society of their professional competence and give them reassurance that IRE (teachers) could make a valuable contribution to the education of Muslim students (the future generation), to the life of the school, and to society. For example, projects and major exams could serve as ‘stages’ for performing and presenting one’s own professional competence. One teacher, Hud, described his experience during major exams in front of the examination committee in the following terms:

If the religion teacher asks a really great question, and there are also colleagues in attendance, the chairpersons are present, that also matters for a good picture of religious education. Not only does the student present himself there, but also religious education presents itself.

The achievement of the student is perceived as a result of the teacher’s professional teaching competence, so not only is the student performing, but indirectly also the teacher. Some teachers interviewed, such as Amr, used this kind of perception and attribution to counteract negative prejudices in schools, with, for example, projects making the professional competence of IRE teachers visible and thereby promoting the acceptance and recognition of IRE and IRE teachers as professionals, as follows:

In a school I felt like I wasn’t wanted. Yes, then I made a project, the project is called “XY”. This made me feel I am somehow integrated in the school.

Other IRE teachers also underlined the value of school projects, especially the value of interfaith/interreligious or interdisciplinary joint projects, events, and lessons. For the interviewees like Isa, such projects served as stages for promoting their recognition in the respective school. In Isa’s words:

Perhaps it also comes from the fact that we organize joint lessons in the schools with the non-Muslim, i.e., Catholic classes. We also organize farewell or graduation ceremonies. And, when you are on stage, then they also see, six hundred, seven hundred students at once: That’s the Islam teacher.

This perception and attribution involve IRE teachers being under constant scrutiny from the stakeholders. Nevertheless, the interviewees indicated that they used every possible means of seeking professionalisation, understood as recognition and acknowledgement in school and society. This kind of cooperation is, as elaborated in previous works of Rayachi (2018) or Sejdini, Kraml, and Scharer (2020), also important for living together in a pluralistic society. IRE teachers can promote and help students, school masters and colleagues to understand religious and cultural differences and help them to develop interreligious literacy and sensitivity for living together in a diverse society. However, the present article particularly focuses on the aspects of professionalisation such as: self-empowerment, self-efficacy, acceptance and recognition as a professional through staging and making professional competencies visible.

6. Discussing the aspects of IRE teachers’ professionalisation

According to Evett, professionalisation includes the aspect of creating and maintaining regulatory ‘professional values or moral obligations’ as well as promoting ‘professional practitioners’ own occupational self interests in terms of their salary, status and power as well as the monopoly protection of an occupational jurisdiction’ (Evetts 2014, 37). The history of teacher education in Germany and Austria and academic discussions about the degree of professionalisation among teachers, (Horn 2016) demonstrate the significancy of becoming a ‘recognized’ professional. Against this background, the examples of Hud, Amr, and Isa show three different aspects of IRE teachers’ professionalisation:

1. Firstly, professionalisation of IRE teachers by means of self-empowerment and self-efficacy. Hud and Amr not only experienced a change in the stakeholders’ perception of them, but they also unconsciously experienced freedom of action; they were able to change their action framework by changing the perception of the stakeholders.

2. Secondly, promoting professionalisation in terms of acceptance and recognition. IRE teachers, like other professionals, depend on being perceived as ‘competent’ by their ‘clients’. The literature usually refers to pupils (students), but as the interviews showed, IRE teachers are not only dependent on students, but also on stakeholders such as school management and colleagues, which arrange constituent elements of teaching and school, such as space, timetabling, teaching materials, and internal school structures and rules – both formal and informal. Thus, the IRE teachers need to convince the named and unnamed actors in the school system of their own competence by working performatively. Stefan Kühl (2010) speaks in this context of the ‘presumption of competence’, with which the clients (students) would have to encounter the service-providing IRE teachers.

3. Thirdly, IRE is different from other subjects because students can opt out. IRE thus relies on the participation of the students and their perception of the IRE teacher. Earlier studies (Tuna 2014) indicate that students and parents tend to perceive IRE and its teachers as being non-professional in comparison to mosque imams. Therefore, it is crucial for IRE teachers to seek professionalisation through staging and making competencies visible, seeking recognition and acknowledgement from students, parents, and the Muslim community in general.

These aspects of professionalisation will be discussed in detail in the next sections, beginning with self-empowerment.

6.1. Self-empowerment

Concerning the question of individuals’ ability to act, research on professions takes up the concept of empowerment, which is briefly described here and discussed with regard to the presented empirical results. The concept of empowerment involves extending maturity, according to Ulrich Bröckling (2003) empowerment is:

[…] based on the maxim of always acting in such a way, that this action promotes the maturity [understood as autonomous and self-determined action] of its addressees (including the actor himself).

In profession theory, in general, the empowerment of the addressees (empowering people) is considered a component or feature of professional activity and less a matter of self-empowerment, which is often used in connection with the professional self-development of teachers. In this context, feelings of powerlessness or a sense of powerlessness, caused by asymmetric power relations and disadvantages, are of especially great importance. These feelings are fostered by ‘experiences of foreign regulations, denial of recognition and deprivation’. The result is ‘that remaining autonomy and participation potential [options for action] remain unused’ (Bröckling 2003, 327). These feelings of powerlessness and the factors favouring them also appear in the empirical investigation of IRE teachers’ professionalisation. For example, the IRE teachers mentioned the feeling of being on their own, or they reported alienation, appropriation, or a refusal of recognition. When they felt they had been left on their own without sufficient structural and institutional support, IRE teachers such as Nur reacted with resignation:

[…] structural changes must be enforced from top to bottom so that the children and the parents can gain more. So, nowadays everyone saves their own lessons (class), but whether that’s 100 percent is […]

The concept of empowerment offers possibilities for understanding such attitudes and phenomena as well as strategies for dealing with them. One strategy is promoting the problem-solving competence of the individuals, and another is increasing awareness of influencing factors, resources, and structures. Awareness is the first prerequisite for restoring one’s own ability to act and for changing the circumstances and limits of one’s own actions.

6.2 Agency: a social perspective on taking action

An additional perspective on perceiving and dealing with constraints and limitations is provided by (social) agency theory, which addresses the question of ‘how individual and collective ability to act is socially limited and formed’ (Scherr 2013, 232). Agency theory, in this regard, deals not only with restrictions, but also with enabling. Thus, it is assumed

that individual and collective actors are endowed with certain (economic, cultural, social) resources that both enable certain actions as well as limit which actions are possible, but do not determine how to act. (Scherr 2013, 235)

In the light of this, agency, according to Emirbayer and Mische (1998, 963–964), may be understood as the ability to acquire, reproduce, and potentially change conditions of action on the basis of personal and collective ideals, interests, and convictions.

Here – similarly to the concept of empowerment – the realisation or the reproduction of conditions of action is decisive for the successful handling of restrictions to or possibilities for action. Based on the empirical data of the study, concepts such as empowerment or agency in the sense of professionalisation should find their way into the further education of the IRE teachers in order to give them awareness of and sensitivity to the factors influencing their occupation that are understood as options for action. What action is taken is decided by the IRE teachers themselves. Such awareness or sensitivity would allow the IRE teachers to reproduce, reflect on, and, if necessary, redesign the conditions of their actions.

6.3 Professionalisation understood as performance and making competencies visible

Being recognised and perceived as a professional IRE teacher is, as discussed above, an essential aspect of professionalisation, which relies on a performative presentation of one’s own competence. The difficulty in presenting, and convincing others of, one’s own competence is (according to Kühl) a balancing act between credibility and offensive ‘posing’ or ‘self-praising’. If the performance of competence is seen as staged, it will cause ‘irritation, mistrust and ostracism’. In this case, the question of whether the professional is really competent or not becomes irrelevant. Thus, Kühl states that successful ‘presentation of competence usually takes the form of indirect communication’ (Kühl 2010, 280).

The IRE teachers interviewed intuitively followed a matching communication pattern in their attempts at performing and making their own competence visible, seeking acceptance and recognition as professionals. They showcased their competence indirectly through successful projects, student exams, and the achievements of the students. Stakeholders attributed the output of these to the competence of the IRE teacher.

Furthermore, the question arises of what to do if individuals working in a profession do not sufficiently possess or present the competences expected of the profession. In such cases, according to Kühl, ‘competence hygiene’ is required; this continues to ensure the reputation and the presumption of competence among the clientele. Professionals using this method make their clients responsible for incompetence and failure (Kühl 2010, 287). In terms of the teaching profession, this means that poor grades or failures of the students are not attributed to the teacher but, for example, to the students’ laziness.

Competence hygiene builds on the profession already having a reputation, something that is largely lacking in IRE, judging by media discourses and the results of this study. This makes the presentation of competences for IRE teachers all the more important, since being perceived as competent is a basic prerequisite for shaping your own professional environment. Once the reputation has been established, the necessity of representing competences decreases automatically and the paradox of competence presentation comes into effect. This means that the less one relies on presenting one’s own competences, the higher the probability of being perceived as competent (Kühl 2010, 283).

6.4 IRE teachers’ profession in the face of the history and market of religions

The licence to teach (ijazah), in the history of the Muslim tradition, was mainly based on acceptance and recognition from students and parents. Students could freely choose their teachers and put their own curriculum together. Therefore, it was (and still is) essential for teachers to prove themselves and to convince pupils and parents of their professional competence, knowledge, and expertise. Anyone who succeeded in doing so could become a religion teacher, but only those who were able to build up a reputation and a teaching and learning circle were able to remain teachers in the long term. Most Medreses and teachers were funded by charitable trusts or fees were paid by the students or parents. This approach led to a market-oriented system, which was initially very fruitful, keeping up productive academic competition, but was corrupted over time until it deteriorated to favouritism (Aydın 2001, 66–69).

The religious plurality and the religious education system in Austria are leading to a similar market orientation to the aforementioned traditional Muslim orientation. Students cannot choose their own curriculum or their teacher, but they can opt out of denominational religious education provided for their community. In some cases, they can join a religious education class for another (Muslim or non-Muslim) religious community. Market models see such religious plurality as a necessary requirement for an attractive religious offer (Iannaccone 1998).

However, religious education as an ‘option’ depends largely on the professional performance of the teacher and the perception of this performance. Students will join religious education only if the teacher can convince them of his or her professional competence, offering them helpful approaches to deal with existential questions and issues; otherwise people tend to opt out (Tuna, 2014). But it is not just a matter of students opting out: this also concerns the teacher–student relation as well as the teaching and learning of IRE. If students and parents do not perceive, accept, and recognise the teacher as a professional, this could lead to a rejection of IRE (and its teacher). Students in attendance could reject the teacher and the subject, or part of the teaching content (Tuna, 2014), without fearing any major school administrational consequences, because in the end they can opt out. In the past, high numbers of people opting out of IRE were often linked to the lack of professionality of IRE teachers (Khorchide 2009a, 2009b). However previous studies show that the decision to opt out depends not only on the professionality of the teacher but also on factors such as timetable, religiosity, teacher-student relationship, or recognition of the IRE teacher (Tuna 2014; Potz 2005).

7. Perspectives and conclusions on the future of IRE

The results of the study show that with regard to the professionalisation of IRE teachers and their further education and training, a holistic understanding of education is required, which includes both enlightened and humanistic aspects (such as individual self-knowledge, self-development, maturity, autonomy, emancipation, and self-determination), as well as the acquisition of competencies, understood as professionalism or employability. Nevertheless, professional IRE teachers are much more reliant on the recognition and perception of the stakeholders, students, and the Muslim community. Being a professional and being recognised and perceived as a professional are dependent on each other. Being a professional promotes recognition and the perception of IRE teachers as professionals, and at the same time being recognised and perceived as a professional helps the teachers to unfold, display, and develop their professional competences.

Recognising IRE teachers as professionals has also an impact on the quality of IRE classes, as people are more willing to learn and work with a recognised professional IRE teacher than a non-professional or one who is not officially recognised as a professional. This will also influence the numbers of people opting out of IRE.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mehmet H. Tuna

Mehmet H. Tuna is senior researcher at the Department of Islamic Theology and Religious Education, University of Innsbruck. His research focuses on Islamic religious education, teacher education, teacher professionalization, and religious education pedagogy.

Notes

1. These concerns were, due to the small number of IRE teachers, very legitimate and had to be taken seriously. There are according to reports about 600 IRE teachers (Nimmervoll 2017a). Thus, narratives could easily lead to alleged suspicions about the people behind interviews. Therefore, all information, places, etc. were anonymised.

2. Some of the participants were trained as IRE teachers, others were trained as teacher but not as IRE teacher and others had no training as teacher but as Imam. The different background of the participants did not stand out in relation to the results presented here but in relation to other results, especially when the interviewees discussed other aspects of professionalisation and professionality such us their understanding of being a professional or the goals of IRE, then they presented different views and understandings (Tuna 2019).

3. As part of freedom of religion and conscience, students of the respective religious community can opt out within the first five school days of each school year.

4. All interviewee names are pseudonyms.