Teachers’ Experiences of Ethics in Religious Education

Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Evaluating Education: Normative Systems and Institutional Practices book series (ENSIP)

Abstract

In Sweden ethics is a part of religious education (RE), and since 2013 all pupils in year nine take a national test in one of the four subjects in the social sciences, i.e. geography, history, RE or civics/social studies. One fourth of the pupils, about 25,000 per year, take the test in RE, of which ethics is a part. Since 2011, when Sweden introduced a new syllabus in all subjects, the national test examines in a sense both the pupils’ skills and the teaching.

As ethics is a subject that gets relatively little attention during teacher education in RE, and as ethics, as a school subject, involves some conflict, it is interesting to investigate how teachers regard ethics and how they handle both the teaching and the assessment. The conflict mentioned above can be described as an opposition between one purpose of the subject that it is supposed to provide pupils with knowledge about moral codes that are perceived as right and praiseworthy and the overall goal in schools to raise citizens who are critical, questioning and able to think creatively and outside the box. It is also interesting to investigate how national tests in RE affect the teachers’ experiences of ethics.

For this study, seven Swedish elementary school teachers, teaching RE in grade 9, have been interviewed about their teaching in ethics. The aim of this chapter is to describe their experiences of ethics, that is, how they talk about ethics as content in RE and about what the national tests have meant to their teaching in ethics and to their assessment of pupils’ abilities in ethics.

Keywords

Ethical Dilemma National Curriculum School Subject National Test Religious Education 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional StudiesUniversity of GothenburgGothenburgSweden

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