Pilot project started: Religious cooperative religious education at Stadtgymnasium Dortmund

At the beginning of the school year 2018/2019, model trying to test a cooperative religion religious education is launched at Stadtgymnasium Dortmund in grade 9.

It takes place within the framework of the lawful clearly defined denominational religious education according to article 7.3 GG and would like to supplement it through didactic profiled phases of interfaith learning, where not only the similarities but also the Differences between the denominations are expressed.
The theological basic ideas of the project are predicated on the methods and objectives of comparative theology (according to Prof. Dr. Klaus von Stosch) and crossed with relevant religion didactic approaches such as interfaith and religious cooperative learning, perspectivity and perspective entanglement (according to Prof. Dr. Jan Woppowa).

The main focus can be defined as religious educational goals:

• the ability to engage in interreligious and intercultural dialogue
• the (re-)understanding of one's "own" confessional tradition
• the (re-)understanding of the "foreign" confessional traditions
• the promotion of one's own religious point of view (confessorial learning)

The methodical approach can be outlined as follows: Regular Islamic, Catholic and Protestant religious instruction is supplemented by regular phases of cooperation. All learning groups in one grade work parallel on the same topics throughout the school year from the perspective of their own denomination. Once per class series the classes are "mixed" for a certain number of lessons. The pupils thus have the opportunity to exchange their religious views and traditions with children of other faiths under the guidance of the teachers.
In this pilot project, which is supported by the Erzbistum Paderborn, the Stadtgymnasium and its teaching staff will be scientifically accompanied by the Centre for Comparative Theology and Cultural Studies, the Institute for Catholic Theology and the Seminar for Islamic Theology at the University of Paderborn and supported in the practical implementation of the project.

A longitudinal pre-post study conducted by the Chair of Religious Didactics aims to investigate the effects of religious cooperative teaching. In particular, the focus is on the question of the extent to which students' values regarding religious self-awareness and external perception change in the course of the school year. In order to decipher to what extent potential effects are influenced by the particular didactic phasing of religious education, the quantitative results of the standardised questionnaire survey are triangulated with qualitative data based on focus group interviews.