Teacher training for religious education : engaging academics through the Dialogical Self Theory
Abstract
Background: In the Netherlands, most of the academic curricula for teacher training in
religious education (RE) focus on shortfalls of students, like a lack of knowledge about the
plurality of worldviews and the diversity in interpretations of the Christian tradition.
In our research project, the focus is not on the students, but on the university professors and
lecturers who teach the subject of RE: professors and lecturers who train and educate students
to teach RE.
Aim: The main aim of the project was to gain a better insight into the inherent complexity of
the professionalism of academics, that is, their own positionality in the plurality of the Roman
Catholic traditions they adhere to in relation to their capabilities and commitment to the
current curriculum – the ‘old’ one – and the new curriculum to be developed, in the context of
the Dutch plural society.
Setting: Respondents in this research were university professors and lecturers of the Teacher
Training Institute of Tilburg University, located at Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Methods: For this investigation, we used a research instrument based on the dialogical self
theory and its self confrontation method for organisations to gain insight into professionals’
own and their colleagues’ positionality regarding teaching RE.
Results: Preliminary results show that the self confrontation method for organisations has
shown itself to be a challenging instrument to invite academics involved in the process of data
construction and data analysis.
Conclusion: Based on these results, we recommend to include the research population in a
validation process to increase the sustainability of the results and to maximise engagement in
the implementation phase of the new curriculum.