Schenkenzell religious teachers discover faith in Mongolia!

Schenkenzell religious teachers discover faith in Mongolia!

A tour operator from Schenkenzell organized a training trip for religious teachers to Mongolia. The experienced tour guide Reiner Lehmann, deacon and school dean, has been running such trips for many years. The initiative aims to encourage participants to broaden their horizons and experience lived faith in different cultures. It is also about authentic conversations between religions.

This trip is part of a series of study trips that also included destinations such as Syria, India and Georgia. The teachers spend the night in traditional yurts where Mongolian nomads live. Here you can experience the simplicity and silence of the steppe, completely removed from urban noise and digital accessibility. During their stay, they will have conversations with Buddhist monks, nuns and local families about religious identity in Mongolia.

Interreligious competence in religious education

Deacon Lehmann pursues a holistic understanding of education. Theory about religion, culture and history is made tangible through direct travel experiences. It is the hope that the experiences the religious teachers have gained will be incorporated into their lessons. This concern is in line with the promotion of interreligious competence, which plays a central role in religious education, especially in vocational schools. Social, educational and economic reasons are important here, as many companies rely on solutions to integration issues, as the University of Tübingen emphasizes.

Despite its relevance, there have so far been hardly any empirical studies on promoting interreligious competence in professional religious education (BRU). A nationwide intervention study aims to clarify the definition of interreligious competence and examine whether it can be promoted through specific teaching units. As part of the study, two teaching units were developed: “Handling money in Christianity and Islam – Islamic Banking” and “Religions and Violence”.

Results and course of the study

The teaching units were evaluated using a self-developed questionnaire, which was applied to the students at three different measurement points. The preliminary stages of the study included the development and optimization of the treatment strategy and the questionnaire. The main study took place in the 2014/2015 school year in around 90 banking and industrial classes from Baden-Württemberg. One of the two teaching units was carried out in 60 classes, while 30 classes served as a control group.

The project was funded from 2013 to 2016 by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and realized in cooperation with the Protestant Institute for Vocational Religious Education (EIBOR) at the University of Tübingen. The results were published in 2017 by Waxmann Verlag under the title "Interreligious learning through perspective taking. An empirical study of religious didactic approaches." In addition, there are numerous publications on the subject of interreligious learning in the BRU, for which religious teachers and business schools were particularly thanked, as the University of Tübingen notes.

For his next trip, Deacon Lehmann plans to choose Ireland as his destination next year. The diverse experiences of these trips contribute to the further development of interreligious dialogue and to increasing the professional skills of religious teachers.