Controversial Issues in Catholic and Protestant Religious Education. Quantitative-Qualitative Study of Religious Education Teachers' Subjective Theories.

• Applicant: Dr. Jan-Hendrik Theodor Herbst
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 518876574

According to the curricula, social, ecclesiastical and theological controversies should be discussed in religious education. This promises, among other things, to strengthen religious and political judgment of pupils. However, it is unclear how religious education teachers view these topics and what challenges they associate with them. International studies suggest that they tend to avoid controversies and do not use their didactic potentials. At this point, there are no studies regarding this topic about teachers of Religious Education in Germany. For this reason, our study will empirically survey their subjective theories on controversial topics using a mixed-methods design: Data collection will be conducted using a questionnaire, an interview, and a so-called “Struktur-Lege-Sitzung” (structure laying session). The aim is to reconstruct their understanding of controversy, relevant didactic guidelines as well as what enables or inhibits teaching controversial issues. On the one hand, the aim is to benefit from the teaching practice expertise of the interviewees in order to generate learning effects for the debate in religious education. On the other hand, practical deficits will be diagnosed in order to be able to develop didactic impulses for teacher trainings. For example the case studies used in the interviews and the anonymized data itself can serve as training material.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants