In divided societies, the promotion of cross-cultural contact through the education system has been central to efforts to improve intergroup relations. This approach is informed by an understanding of the contact hypothesis, which suggests that positive contact with a member of a different group should contribute to improvements in attitudes…

Professional ideals arise from personal worldviews and specify teachers' professional identities. This study aimed to explore how faith is present in the professional ideals of Christian teachers. The professional ideals of 107 Dutch teachers from conservative Protestant primary and secondary schools were explored using an open-ended…

Drawing on perspectives from sociocultural theory, this article investigates how Christian denominations are represented in Norwegian textbooks of religious education and by young believers. The main finding is that textbooks and young adherents present religion in substantially different ways. While textbooks relate religion to global and…

Background: Integrated schools were established in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s. With an explicit intention to build better relations between Catholics and Protestants, it has an intuitive appeal in a society which has long experienced sectarian division. Whilst the sector has attracted considerable research, less is understood about how…

Societies which suffer from ethnic and political divisions are often characterised by patterns of social and institutional separation, and sometimes these divisions remain even after political conflict has ended. This has occurred in Northern Ireland where there is, and remains, a long-standing pattern of parallel institutions and services for the…

Initiatives in intercultural education have frequently involved the promotion of contact between members of different groups as a means of improving intergroup relations. Experience from Northern Ireland suggests, however, that such schemes have often been organised and delivered in such a way that opportunities for sustained, high-quality contact…

The focus of this article is on 9th grade students' (N = 9) perceptions on aspects that make them feel authentic in integrated religious education (RE) lessons among students of various faiths. All of the students had previously studied RE in segregated groups. The data was collected in a collaborative teaching experiment in Finland with student…

The purpose of this paper is to examine how teachers teach and students learn about citizenship education in two faith-based schools in Northern Ireland. The data show that participants in the Catholic school were confident in their own identity; teachers encouraged active engagement with contentious, conflict-related debates and students…

In this article, we examine how narratives of religious traditions are used as resources in religious education (RE) and compare practices from Evangelic Lutheran religious education (LRE) and Islamic religious education (IRE) in Finnish public schools. The sacredness of narratives from holy books entails that there can be contestations over their…

It is generally accepted that education has a significant role to play in any society transitioning from conflict to a more peaceful dispensation. Indeed, some have argued that the education system potentially represents the single most effective agent of social change with the capacity to bridge ethnic division in conflict affected countries.…

This study explores the current understanding of cross-sectoral collaboration between schools in a divided society. The paper provides the context surrounding inter-school collaboration in Northern Ireland then presents findings based on a qualitative study of five post-primary partnerships made up of schools from the various sectors in Northern…

This article explores understandings of minority group representation in citizenship education in Northern Ireland and Israel, from the point of view of students, teachers, and policy makers. It is set against the background of the minority-majority group dichotomy within societies divided along ethnonational lines, and the challenge of delivering…

As the funding environment for higher education and theological education changes, an increasing number of graduate theological students hold student loan debt that will follow them well into their postgraduation working lives (Delisle, 2014). This study reports the attitudes about money voiced by master of divinity students at one mainline…

This qualitative study aimed to develop theory about psychological constructs relevant to spiritual development in diverse adolescents. Exemplar and Consensual Qualitative Research methods were used to explore 30 interviews of adolescents aged 12 to 21 years ("M" = 17.73 years) representing eight religions and six countries from around…

In this article, the author describes a qualitative field study designed to test the effectiveness of Forum Theatre (FT) as a cross-disciplinary approach to Biblical parabolic literature analysis for students enrolled in a Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Academy. The author provides a brief overview of the theoretical framework of the study, the study…