Towards dialogue

This study deals with the use of dialogical communication in religious education by teachers and students from different religious backgrounds at Catholic primary schools in the Netherlands. Until recently interreligious communication did not occupy a very prominent place in religious education. This changed as a result of the growing number of immigrant students, an increase in religiously mixed classes and new awareness of and sensitivity to interreligious relations. In recent decades there has been a growing body of literature on the challenge that religious diversity poses for religious education. Increasing religious diversity also raises new questions that have not yet been properly analysed and for which no satisfactory answers have been found. One such question concerns the content and method of dialogical communication in the context of interreligious and intercultural learning: what communicative and cultural practices acknowledge and appreciate otherness and difference, yet at the same time cultivate awareness of the interdependence of self and other? Questions like these are central to educating a generation with a truly social outlook and a truly social will (education for citizenship). To this end the author investigated the implications of the dialogical principle in (inter)religious education.