SASUF Sustainability Forum 2024

This workshop presents work undertaken within the South African Swedish University Forum-project (SASUF) “Religious education for Sustainable Social Development: Exploring, experiencing and engaging South African and Swedish stakeholder voice”. The issue of religion and public education has been widely debated in South Africa as well as in Sweden. We focus in this paper on how national legislation and policies in both countries frame RE in schools at different levels to prepare students to become religious literate citizens in a multi-religiously diverse society. We do this by (a) employing a critical discourse analytical approach (CDA), investigating the framing of RE in national legislation and educational policies. Moreover, we investigate the national curricula concerning (b) specified knowledge content c) the various forms of competences, and (d) what attitudes the processes of learning aim to develop; together, these can be considered to construct students’ religious literacy in the curriculum.  The research shows great similarities in that the RE subject is taking place within national contexts which both safeguards human rights, forbids discrimination on religious grounds and promote diversity by educating students about their religions and those of ‘others’.  However, research evidence suggests a large number of cases reported through the media and through courts of law in South Africa since the dawn of democracy that illustrate intolerance and discrimination to religious diversity in the classroom. In Sweden, the school inspectorate has received notifications regarding denominational expressions in Swedish schools, which according to the law must be non-denominational. Cases from both the South African and Swedish context will be explored in the next step of the project. In the workshop we will present the ongoing project as well as open for critical discussions on religion in education as well as in public spaces.

We would like to present and discuss our current SASUF-project “Religious education for Sustainable Social Development: Exploring, experiencing and engaging South African and Swedish stakeholder voice” with perspectives both from South Africa and Sweden.
We plan for two presentations and thereafter time for discussions in groups and a joint concluding discussion.

Keywords: religious education, laws and national curricula, religious literacy, multi-religious society, tolerance