Men nu kan jag fatta att det är religion! : En studie i innovativ religionsdidaktik inspirerad av Taves

Sammanfattning

The purpose of this study is to examine a Religious Education teaching unit inspired by Ann Taves’s (2009; 2013) building-block approach, with a focus on how students’ concept of religion, and thereby their understanding of religion, can be broadened and nuanced. More specifically, the study investigates how students reasoning changes when religion is approached as a phenomenon shaped through attribution of meaning. The method consists of a thematic and comparative analysis of an initial and follow-up questionnaire, together with classroom observations from six lessons in a ninth-grade lower secondary class. The teaching unit moved from more recognizable religious examples to more boundary-challenging examples, where students worked with concepts such as specialness, attribution, and building blocks. The results show that students’ reasoning shifted from recognition of established religious expressions toward more contextual and interpretive reasoning. Initially, students mainly associated religion with church, prayer, belief in God, and religious leaders. One of the study’s contributions is that it shows that narrow understandings of religion are not only reproduced through school representations, teaching materials, or teachers. They may also be reproduced by students themselves, including students with their own religious frames of reference. By the end of the teaching unit, students increasingly reasoned in terms of context, purpose, actor, and attributed meaning. The conclusion is that Taves’s building-block approach can function as a didactic tool for broadening students’ understanding of religion and developing religious literacy as interpretive competence. At the same time, didactic challenges emerged, particularly student resistance and the risk that the concept of religion became too open. These challenges can, however, be understood as part of the conceptual renegotiation that occurred when students’ previous understanding of religion was challenged. The study therefore suggests that Religious Education needs to both challenge narrow conceptions of “real” religion and support students in developing analytical tools for distinguishing religious meaning from other forms of meaning-making.