Hanna de Jong-Markus

Beyond Right-or-Wrong Thinking 7 123 The law on citizenship education describes, among other things, that education must focus on “teaching knowledge about and respect for differences in religion, worldview, political affiliation, ethnicity, gender, disability or sexual orientation, as well as the value of treating equal cases equally” (Eerste Kamer der Staten-Generaal, 2020, p. 1; translation by the authors). In current study, we focus on the obligatory attention to differences in religion and worldview. In our earlier study among OPPS teachers, we saw that it is important to distinguish between internal and external religious diversity. Internal religious diversity refers to diversity within Christianity or—for some participants—within orthodox Protestantism. External religious diversity refers to orthodox Protestantism or Christianity in relation to other religious denominations and worldviews in society (Markus et al., 2020; cf. De Wolff et al., 2003). Teacher education on religious diversity We examined literature since 2011 about teacher education on religious diversity. We used OCLC WorldCat and Google Scholar69 with the following key words: “teacher education OR preservice teacher” and “religious diversity OR cultural diversity”. Studies dealing with cultural diversity were added, because cultural diversity includes religious diversity (cf. Anderson et al., 2015; Aronson et al., 2016; Jackson & Everington, 2017; Yemini et al., 2019). Additionally we did a search with “teacher education OR preservice teacher; AND global citizenship education”, and consulted some other articles that closely matched our issue and were tracked down by previously found literature. We found that in teacher education, attention to religious diversity has two distinctive, but related perspectives. First, it is about how trainee teachers are prepared to effectively deal with pupils of different backgrounds themselves (cf. Akiba, 2011; Bell, 2002; Cherng & Davis, 2017; Civitillo et al., 2018; Haworth, 2015; Obidah & Howard, 2005; Subedi, 2006). Second, it is about how trainee teachers are prepared to train their pupils to interact well with others (cf. Anderson et al., 2015; Aronson et al., 2016; Estellés and Fischman, 2020; Yemini et al., 2019). It appears that for both perspectives similar factors are significant in teacher education (cf. Akiba, 2011; Yemini et al., 2019). Initially, it is important to consider trainee teachers’ backgrounds (such as gender, age or being part of a minority group) and their prior experiences of diversity, because these have a major impact on what they learn about diversity and how they learn it (Akiba, 2011; Castro, 2010; Cherng & Davis, 2017). For example, trainee teachers with more prior experience of interacting with cultural others, are more likely to have a greater 69 https://www.oclc.org/en/worldcat.html; https://scholar.google.com/

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw