Multi-faith School Research Articles

Students’ Perceptions of a Multifaith Environment and its Challenges: Exploring a Way Forward in a Maltese Independent School

This paper examines students’ perceptions about the possibility to educate beyond Religious Education and the curriculum in a bid to enhance a multifaith environment. The findings reported in this paper derive from the qualitative component of a larger sequential explanatory mixed methods study carried out with both educators and students in an independent school in Malta. The study revealed significant differences among participants who hail from different faith communities. Student participants in the focus groups specifically noted their school’s endeavour towards inclusion and respect towards all faiths and suggested that more diverse multifaith initiatives for all members of its community should be identified and put into practice in order to better address the needs of a multifaith school. Students claimed that they felt respected as persons at school, although they believe that many faiths remained largely invisible at school. The paper concludes that schools must gradually adopt new multifaith initiatives while remaining faithful to their own identity.

Transformative conflict mediation in multi-faith schools in South Africa

Contradictions and contestations with regard to the implementation of religion policies have become a worldwide phenomenon. Research suggest an increasing number of costly and protracted court and legislative battles between schools and parents over religion in schools. In this article, I aim to highlight some of the conflicting issues that need to transformation while implementing the National Policy on Religion and Education of 2003 in some selected South African schools. Based on mediation theory, the study used individual interviews to gather data from twelve purposively selected school principals to investigate how they implemented the religion policy in their respective schools. The findings show that despite the implementation challenges of this policy, the majority of the school principals displayed the qualities of a transformative mediator by transforming conflicting religious interests of stakeholder groupings in their schools. I therefore recommend that universities should consider training school principals in the use of transformative mediation as a strategy to transform conflicts in schools as it holds potential benefits for fields such as education.

Educating Religiously in the Multi-faith School

Educating Religiously in the Multi-faith School

Pupils’ views of religious education in a pluralistic educational context

This article examines Finnish pupils’ views of religious education (RE) in a pluralistic educational context. The focus is on pupils’ views of the aims and different approaches to RE in a multi-faith school. The study utilised a mixed method approach, combining quantitative and qualitative data. It employed a survey (n=1301) and interviews (n=38) of pupils from grade levels 3, 6, and 9 (age groups 9–10, 12–13, 15–16) in Finnish comprehensive schools located in Helsinki and Pori. This article focuses on the data sets from the sixth and ninth grades. Besides the overall description of the pupils’ views, the influence of gender, age group and the place or residence were examined. Many differences were found between the genders, age groups and between the pupils living in the more diverse capital city and those growing up in a smaller and less diverse town context. In presenting the findings, statistical analyses are presented together with some interview extracts.

Religion in the multi-faith school

Religion in the multi-faith school