Conference Contribution Details
Mandatory Fields
Sandra Cullen
RE past, present and future...
Annual Meeting of Association of University Lecturers in Religious Education
Newman University, Birmingham
Chaired Session
2019
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Optional Fields
09-MAY-19
10-MAY-19
Turning up the volume: Listening to what young people are saying to religious education This paper will report on some of the data gathered through the Religious Diversity and Young People survey administered by the Irish Centre for Religious Education (ICRE) within the variety of school types in the Republic of Ireland, between 2013 and 2015. This research project replicated a survey that had already been administered by the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit across England, Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and London. The aim of the paper is to turn up the volume on what 13- to 15- year-old students in Ireland are saying about churchgoing, atheism and belief, religious diversity and religious education. Behind every statistic presented in the data is an individual whose voice, views and beliefs have been influenced by particular contexts. The relationship between these young people and their contexts can be interrogated using Boeve’s threefold description of sociocultural developments in Europe that have an impact on religion and consequently on religious education: detraditionalisation, the individualisation of identity formation, and pluralisation. Turning up the volume on the voices of young people reveals that there are significant patterns, idiosyncrasies, dissonances and challenges in their engagement with religion. It suggests that religious education with young people can only be undertaken with them as conversation partners in the imagining of appropriate forms of religious education for contemporary contexts.
Irish Centre for Religious Education