Discover Schenkenzeller religion teachers believe in Mongolia!

Discover Schenkenzeller religion teachers believe in Mongolia!

Schenkenzell, Deutschland - A tour operator from Schenkenzell has organized a training trip for religious teachers in Mongolia. The experienced tour guide Reiner Lehmann, deacon and school dean has been running such trips for many years. The initiative aims to promote the horizon expansion of the participants and to experience a lived faith in different cultures. It is also about authentic conversations between the 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 in which Mongolian nomads live. Here you can experience the simplicity and silence of the steppe, completely away from urban noise and digital accessibility. During your stay, you 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 experienced by direct travel experiences. It is the hope that the experiences of religion teachers obtained will incorporate into their lessons. This concern is in line with the promotion of interreligious competence, which plays a central role in religious education, especially at vocational schools. This is important for social, educational and economic reasons, since many companies are dependent on solutions for integration issues, as the University of Tübingen emphasizes.

Despite the relevance, there have been hardly any empirical studies on promoting inter -religious competence in vocational religious education (BRU). A nationwide intervention study aims to clarify the definition of interreligious competence and to check whether this can be promoted by specific teaching units. As part of the study, two teaching units were developed: "Dealing with money in Christianity and Islam - Islamic Banking" and "Religions and Violence".

results and course of study

The evaluation of the teaching units took place through a self -developed questionnaire, which was used at three different measurement times for the students: inside. The preliminary run of the study included the development and optimization of the treatment strategy and the questionnaire. The main study took place in the school year 2014/2015 in about 90 banking and industrial class 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 in cooperation with the Evangelical Institute for Career -oriented religious education (Eibor) at the University of Tübingen. The results were published in 2017 at Waxmann Verlag, under the title "Interreligious learning through the takeover of perspectives. An empirical examination of religious -didactic approaches." In addition, there are numerous publications on the subject of inter -religious learning in the Bru, for which especially religious teachers: inside and commercial schools were thanked, as the University of Tübingen notes.

For the next trip, Deacon Lehmann plans to select Ireland as a goal next year. The diverse experiences of these trips contribute to the further development of interreligious dialogue and to increase the technical skills of the religious teachers.