Japan, Religious Education And Critical inTerculturalism. Approaches from the Study of Religions and Didactics.

ongoing

The JREACT Project wants to provide a non-confessional model for teaching about religions in schools, i.e. Religious Education (RE), that eschews ethnocentrism and promotes critically self-reflection, diversity and inclusiveness. It does so by engaging the case-study of RE in Japan from the point of view of the academic Study of Religion (SoR). In the last 20 years debates and developments on RE and Intercultural/Citizenship Education (ICE) have increasingly intersected, especially in Europe. However, the SoR has since long criticized the modern, Christian and ethnocentric biases inherent in the concept of “religion”, thus highlighting an intrinsic intercultural weaknesses in RE. Nonetheless, International/European research aimed at the creation of SoR-based RE didactics still lacks a thorough engagement with non-western contexts. This hinders the creation of a full-fledged intercultural and inclusive RE. JREACT want thus to improve European SoR-based RE through a comparative analysis with the Japanese case. The reasons to choose Japan are its peculiar religious situation (which often eludes Eurocentric views on religions), its long scientific tradition (for and non-European country) in the modern study of religion, and an ongoing debate on the role of RE in schools. It will contextually compare Japanese and European SoR-based RE theories and methods, looking for unnoticed biases, mutually reinforcing points, uncharted areas and contrasting points. From this it will elaborate innovative concepts and methods for RE and articulate them into guidelines. Its interdisciplinary approach combines SoR, Didactics, Anthropology of Education and ICE. JREACT will establish my position as an expert in intersecting fields: comparative RE; society & religion in contemporary Japan, theoretical issue in SoR, Didactics and ICE. At the societal level, it will innovate the debate and the practices concerning RE in European schools from the perspective of critical ICE.