文档介绍：Chapter 3
Pedagogy, Dialogue and Truth: Intercultural Education in the Religious Education classroom
Kevin O’Grady
Synopsis
I draw on data from two research studies of my own, in Sheffield, England, to illustrate the potential of Religious Education (RE) to contribute to intercultural education. I set my argument within Denise Cush’s concept of positive pluralism (1999). I describe the methodology of my two studies, influenced by action research and ethnography. I then present their key findings in terms of RE and intercultural education. There follows a discussion of dialogue and truth in RE in the light of my findings. Finally I offer the conclusion that RE has a very significant contribution to make to intercultural education, provided the subject embraces a dialogical pedagogy (including a dialogical view of truth). RE’s value is in placing students in a dialogical, always plete relationship with religious plurality. I also reflect that I have been able to show this to be true whether a school is relatively monocultural or multicultural, and whether individual students are studying their own or others’ beliefs. In this way, I can say that intercultural education is the basis of RE.
Introduction
My aim is to exemplify the view that Religious Education (RE) has much to contribute to intercultural education, by reporting and discussing two research projects of my own.
The first was a masters’ dissertation (O’Grady 2002, 2003; see also Jackson 2004, 103-5); the second is a doctoral thesis in progress at the time of writing. Both projects have taken place prehensive schools in Sheffield, England, under the auspices of the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit. I will refer to the two projects as study 1 and study 2. Study 1 was undertaken in a school in north-west Sheffield which has an almost exclusively white student population. At the time of the study there was some evidence of racist attitudes within sectors of that population, including graffit