As emerging adult college students ponder their religious/spiritual beliefs and identities, those in religiously diverse countries (e.g. the USA) often encounter beliefs different from their own. These encounters can prompt new perspectives on their own beliefs and elicit responses from rejection to incorporation of the diverging belief, thus…

A long tradition of both State and religious interest and support characterised provision for education on the island of Ireland from the 1700s. Following the partition of Ireland in the 1920s, the newly created political entities of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland forged separate and distinct education policy trajectories that largely…

This article explores adolescents' and teachers' interpretations of shared education through interviews with participating teachers and pupils in one school partnership in Northern Ireland. As an initiative explicitly designed to bring pupils from Catholic and majority Protestant schools together, shared education offers potential for building…

Globalisation, migration, socio-political shifts, and access to the internet are increasing the religious and belief diversity of Irish society. This flux presents challenges for young people who are endeavouring to establish a secure identity. The focus of this research was to understand how the identity development of post-primary students of…

This study aims to provide an understanding of the dynamics of the life of the people of Sorong, West Papua related to the harmony of education in family and community life. Harmony, in this case, is related to the mixing of religions in one household, framed in the philosophy of local wisdom called "One Furnace-Three Stones". This study…

The article studies minority language policy in the situation of an internal division within a speech community. It is based on the example of the Upper Sorbs -- a Slavic minority in Germany. The division within this community is based on language use, the level of assimilation and religion. The Catholic Upper Sorbs have maintained…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the ways in which religious students manage the dual identities of student and member of faith. If an "identity clash" occurs, how is it managed? A total of 17 students from a British university were interviewed to investigate the nature of this identity management. The results show that many…

Variationist researchers are increasingly adopting intersectionality approaches to analyse identity-linked practice. However, the field of sociolinguistic variation is yet to embrace the full ramifications of intersectionality as an analytical framework. The current paper offers a new method for integrating intersectional approaches into…

This paper explores what some have described as a 'crisis in meaning' in religious education (RE). One region, Northern Ireland, is chosen as a focus for exploring the question of meaning-making as it provides an example of 'agreed ambiguity' -- where a common syllabus for RE is believed to be ascribed different meanings by different schools. The…

Studies of schooling in Northern Ireland have examined the benefits and challenges of schoolbased integration of students from culturally diverse backgrounds--principally Catholic and Protestant. Previous studies have focused mainly on two statutory approaches: Integrated Education and Shared Education. This study compared the dynamics associated…

The Controlled Schools' sector in Northern Ireland is usually described as de facto Protestant. By examining its history and current context, this article considers the veracity of that statement. In many schools RE is often 'squeezed out' of an already overcrowded timetable. This results in the quantity and quality of RE teaching varying widely,…

This article examines how two Finnish religious education (RE) teachers, one in Islamic and one in Lutheran RE, seek to construct openness when dealing with religious truth claims and religious commitment, the key areas in which indoctrination might take place. It also observes how these constructions work in the classroom and explains them in the…

This article examines social practices within classroom discourse in two different Finnish religious educational contexts. The article critically observes the construction of certain positions and identities as part of the school discourse and the inclusive vs exclusive practices of language. The research material consists of classroom…

In Ireland primary RE is a fractured, contested, complex and changing territory devoid of a common language and characterised by a proliferation of syllabi and curricula generated for increasingly diverse school types. For centuries the dynamic decolonising process has led to a questioning of former orthodoxies and an attempted de-linking of the…

To what extent does the adoption of consociational power-sharing affect the design and implementation of education reforms? This article maps this territory through rich and detailed interviews collected in Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in 2012-2013. Insights from these interviews are corroborated by…