Teaching for social impact: integrating generational goals and concerns into religious education

Abstract

Claims of everyone a changemaker and calls for social and environmental responsibility resonate with today’s young adults. Less religious than preceding generations, they tend instead to draw their values and purpose from consumer, cultural, and employment affinities. They also rely on their connectivity, digital or otherwise, for the ability to make an impact in the direction of social change they deem necessary. Yet they are less connected than previous generations to some of the most fundamental means that support change, especially faith, family, and institutional leadership. To have a hand in shaping their generational desire for change, religious educators can design curricula to achieve not just traditional student learning outcomes, but social impact outcomes, too. Toward this end, the article proposes that religious educators approach students of religious education as engaged practitioners of change on a contemporaneous basis as well as in anticipation of their future agency. Doing so would instantiate teaching for social impact as a particular form of the praxis already prevalent in religious education. The article explores this potential through a survey of the cause–concerns and desires of young adults in Australia and the United States; a conceptual analysis of the engaged practice that is grounded in studium, or the zeal for coherence; and a description of what it might look like for religious education to integrate social impact outcomes into curricular considerations on the basis of such studium.