Who are you, who am I, and how can I make judgments when our worlds meet?

On the potential of Religious Education to contribute to the development of students’ judgment formation

Abstract

The article deals with the potential of religious education (RE) to contribute to the students’ development of critical judgment. The purpose is twofold: 1) to discuss the role of judgment in relation to RE, based on two dominant trends in religious didactic research and theory, and on previous research on ethics teaching, and 2) to outline a narrative approach to RE, based on the above discussion, where models and analytical tools taken from narrative theory and analysis, are proposed to promote the development of students’ critical judgment.

The article is a theoretical investigation. It starts with a review of previous research on Jackson’s interpretive approach to religious education, education for religious literacy and ethics teaching. The material consists of central texts from international and Swedish research on didactics of religion.

For the second purpose, the material is taken mainly from Benhabib’s narrative approach to the understanding of cultures, actions and identities, Arendt’s understanding of political phenomena as constituted by a plurality of perspectives, and from Arendt’s model of judgment as an ‘enlarged mentality’. The understanding of enlarged mentality is deepened by Young and Stone-Mediatore. The concluding part of the article intro­duces analytical concepts from Stone-Mediatore’s narrative theory, with the help of which personal experience-based stories can be related to the religions’ “grand narratives”, as well as tools to identify which personal stories that can contribute to further discussion and “enlarged mentality”. The conclusion is that the approach seems to offer a potential for students’ development of critical judgment, but that this needs to be further explored through classroom research.