Boys in Religious Education – a difficult relationship?! Considering perspectives of boys in a gender-balanced pedagogy of diversity

Abstract

Pedagogy of Religion has been, for a long time, pedagogy of skipped gender difference. In a wrong generalization, students were talked about sweepingly. However, Religious Education (RE) never was neutral to gender; when it pretended to be so it actually supported male dominance. Crucial for the pioneer work of feminist theology was to reveal the gender veil (Pissarek-Hudelist, 1981, p. 47-71): The silence about the significance of gender supported an unreflected acceptance of maleness as the standard. Feminist religious pedagogy tried to overcome androcentrism, the dominance of male perspectives in religious education in contents, aims, and interactions (Jakobs 1994, p. 97-106; Kohler-Spiegel, 1995, p. 204-211; Pithan, 1993, p. 421-435). Outcomes of research in Feminist Theology and feminist approaches to Religious Education have led to a necessary emphasis on structural discrimination of girls in school education and contributed to increasing awareness of gender bias in RE-approaches. The feminist perspective was bitterly needed and still is. But while the way of looking at girls, their life situations, needs, and gender-related educational approaches could become more differentiating, the perspective on boys has remained strangely bleak, being stuck in the criticism of male dominance.