Norwegian Religious Education Workbooks after World War II: Exploring Teachers’ Workbook Constructions by Interpreting Traces of Textbooks and National Curricula

Abstract

Twenty religious education (RE) workbooks covering half a century were examined in a search for RE teachers’ typical patterns of workbook construction. Three chronological main types were distinguished: “the biblical workbook,” “the workbook of Christian cultural nurture,” and “the RE workbook of diversity.” Of greater interest, however, were the particularities found in a few workbooks produced in the two interims between the chronological types. This article discusses—in the light of collective memory theory, social semiotics, and Norwegian RE history—the meaning of the teachers’ implicit contributions to the typical as well as the untypical workbook constructions. The concept of an “irreducible tension” between active agents and mediating means is found analytically fruitful. Religious education teachers are seen as cultural reproducers, interplaying with the central contextual curricular factors. In times of interlude and change, teachers have had other sets of contextual conditions and contingencies than in times of stability. The relatively quick implementation of a non‐confessional RE after the 1997 school reform is interpreted in line with economic priorities and with a curricular adjustment to the changed “spirit of the times.”