Teaching about the Others in Christianity and Islam - Research on interreligious Studies in higher Education

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Oliver Reis
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology ; Protestant Theology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 535337310

The research network relates to the research field of interreligious study components in Christian and Islamic religious teacher education. Due to the lack of institutionalization of interreligious studies in Jewish religious teacher education, an integration of the Jewish perspective is waived at this point in time. The Network was established to initiate a structured discourse which, for understandable reasons, has not developed in the field as yet, but which is absolutely necessary for further development of the quality of interreligious learning in schools. In analyzing the research to date, it becomes clear that the research is primarily designed as evaluative research of specific teaching projects at universities. Generally certain concepts are tested that are conceived from the perspective of school requirements or innovations in higher education didactics with no particular relation to religious differences. That this form of evaluation research is not sufficient to develop teaching more effectively is shown by current studies on the one hand of the behavior of school teachers and on the other hand of university teaching itself. In recent years, school teachers have been sensitized to the significance of religious differences. Progress is evident in attitudes and knowledge about other religions, but teachers struggle to deal with latent conflicts and religiously motivated marginalizations, or to use strong positions of difference as enrichments in class. University teaching is partly responsible for these results due to both its focus on religious knowledge structures and to an attitude of mere positional tolerance. The Paderborn-Osnabrück research group, which also forms the team of applicants, was able to show that there is an interplay of the university as context and social and theological-didactical expectations of action, which is both very complex and which has to be organized in concrete teaching situations. At the meetings of the network we focus on five main areas, which will lead to research impulses for a structured discourse about how university education - and not just school education - is an independent research area of interreligious learning: 1. university/school level: analysis of tasks to professionalize teacher education which stem from the school context. 2. theological level: requirements for a concept to deal with (religious) differences from the perspective of Islam and Christianity 3. conceptual level: cultural and social basis of content-related-religious differences with the inclusion of postcolonial theories and discourse-analytical approaches 4. implementation level: investigation of relevant contextual and didactic factors for mapping effective teaching and learning environments 5. methodological level: development, school- and university-based learning expectations that are empirically viable

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Naciye Kamcili-Yildiz