Christian-Islamic Religious Education through Team Teaching

In recent years the Austrian society has become more and more diverse due to various migrational movements. In schools people from different ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds meet. The increasing politicization of religion can lead to irritation, rejection and conflicts when being confronted with the Islamic religion. Therefore, its necessary to promote mutual understanding through interreligious education in schools ideally through personal encounters, which are an essential part of this project. Encounters usually take place in everyday school life and not in the denominational religious lessons. Nevertheless, it is the task of religious education to deal with religious diversity. This is why it offers optimal conditions for the project to examine encounters between people from the two largest religious communities in Austria. As part of the project, a teaching setting is being developed that expands denominational religious education through interreligious cooperation. In a Christian-Islamic Team teaching, Catholic and Muslim students are taught together by their respective religion teachers for some teaching units. Through this teaching format, the teachers act as experts and institutionalized representatives of their religion and represent role models regarding the communication between different religions. Students, on the other hand, can share their individual religious biography and their practical experiences in a protected professional surrounding. In addition to researching the possibilities and limits of Christian-Islamic Team teaching, the project is also dedicated to other aspects of interreligious education: That is, it furthermore surveys the legal possibilities of interreligious cooperation in schools, the competencies, and attitudes of religion teachers as well as the learning requirements of students for encounters with people of other religions. A major role play religiously motivated prejudices and attitudes of pupils, as they can have a negative influence on constructive teaching processes. The results obtained are intended to help develop local teaching and learning theories, which flow into the further development of interreligious didactics and into the religious teachers training.

The project 'Christian-Islamic religious education in team teaching' consists of various sub-projects. In this specific teaching setting, one teacher of Catholic Religion and one teacher of Islam each taught religious education in team teaching, which was subsequently evaluated by an interreligious research team. As part of the project, the legal framework and prerequisites of such a teaching model were clarified, specific learning requirements of Christian and Muslim pupils were identified, the habitus of Islamic religious education teachers was clarified and an interreligious competency model was developed. The central result are twelve theses on the didactics of interreligious learning processes. These can be summarised as follows: Interreligious school projects should take into account the social framework conditions, in particular external circumstances such as politics and the media. High expectations are often placed on such learning processes, such as respect and encounters at eye level, which, however, require sensitisation to majority and minority relationships. The initiation of such projects requires an awareness of the normative framework conditions, fundamental rights and freedoms as well as transparent communication. In addition, an intensive joint religious didactic preparation phase is necessary for the teachers involved in the lessons, whereby questions of everyday life are preferable to content-based religious lessons. The roles of the teachers must be clarified precisely in advance for all teaching steps. In interreligious contexts, pupils find themselves in different roles that they have not necessarily chosen themselves. Their ideas and prejudices towards other religions should be addressed and thematised as learning prerequisites. It should be noted here that the explicit thematisation of religious difference can lead to forms of religious 'othering' - i.e. the construction of the 'others' as deviant groups: The aim must therefore be to create sensitivity for possible devaluations. In the dialogue about religious interpretations of the world, teachers should introduce differentiated positions without fear of differences in order to promote a deeper understanding and contribute to the deconstruction of simple dichotomies. Teacher training must impart skills for interreligious teaching, although deficits in professionalisation are currently still evident. Interfaith teaching strengthens acceptance and respect and improves coexistence at school. Such educational processes should also be offered in religiously homogeneous environments in order to prevent prejudice. The theoretical considerations offer suggestions for didactics in interreligious teaching that can also be applied to other educational contexts.