Volume 70, Issue 4 - Themenheft: Kompetenzorientierung im Religionsunterricht – Chancen und Grenzen

About one and a half decades after the beginning of the debate it is time to ask about the implementation of competence orientation in the curricula for religious education in Germany. The focus is on the characteristics of competence orientation as well as its being embedded in the basic religious orientation of the curricula. The official guidelines and basic statements of the two major denominations in Germany were examined as well as all the curricula on the Protestant side in an exemplary selection. Competence orientation has been implemented in very different forms and proportions but at the same time, the focus has been on internal religious issues. This should be consciously reflected and the curricula should be opened in relationship to the whole of reality and society and connected with a consequent competence orientation – in the framework of its limited possibilities.

This article discusses the task of lesson planning in RE in relationship to the recent approach of competence-oriented RE and the traditional concept of learning aims. First, the author describes a number of related difficulties experienced in teacher training concerning competence-oriented lesson planning as the background which motivates the discussion in this article. Second, the author points out the different origins of the current understanding of competences which goes back to research programs like PISA, on the one hand and of learning aims in the actual planning of lessons on the other hand. In the final section, the article describes a number of steps which should be taken in lesson planning for RE and which draw upon both, the competence approach as well as the concept of learning aims.

This article analyzes the potentials and limitations of measuring competences in religious education and religion teacher education. Therefore the general educational discourse on competence orientation is recapitulated and its specific potentials are shown. Then how this discourse has found its way into the discussion on religious education and religion teacher education is summarized. Against the background of the specifics of the discourse on religious education the potentials and challenges of the competence orientation which may arise from a general educational perspective on the field of religious education are discussed. In conclusion, competence orientation can be considered as necessary but not as sufficient for religious education and religion teacher education.

Didactics of German has been tackling the challenge of devising and implementing competence-based models of learning, as well as supporting ‚competence-oriented teaching‘, in a heterogeneous way. Whereas Didactics of Language experts approached this challenge unexcitedly, experts on Literary and Media Learning are still expressing reservation, although (or rather, because) they have long been discussing competences as basic anthropological abilities (according to Habermas). Moreover, disseminating an extended literature concept and integrating visual media made the discourse on competences more difficult. Individual critics go to such lenghts as to doubt the adequacy of the competence concept established by Weinert altogether.

The aim of this article is to present the system that governs Swedish RE in terms of curricular requirements, national tests and their outcomes, and discuss this in light of the current critical debate on an outcome-focused school, as well as the debate on the need for ‘powerful knowledge’. The debate on educational achievements and measurements can be seen from different angles. On the one hand, there are reasons to take the criticisms seriously, for instance concerning how such a focus tends to instrumentalise and superficialise knowledge and education. On the other hand, from a societal perspective, one has to ensure that all students, through their education, have opportunities to develop powerful knowledge that helps to explain the world so that school can contribute to social justice. Against such a background, the Swedish system is described as a rather strongly steering system that regulates schools through curricula but also monitors them through national tests. Through a brief presentation of empirical findings from the EthiCo project, it is shown how this system in practice limits the students’ chances of acquiring a multidimensional ethical competence and instead highlights a one-dimensional argumentative competence. Such a teaching runs the risk of reducing rather than widening students’ ethical competence.

So far, religious education has been dominated by the paradigm of plurality. This is relevant because it can capture the processes of pluralization of religion in late modernity. The focus of this article concerns aspects of difference and identity. However, this has also set a desideratum. The interaction with issues of inequality and injustice cannot be adequately addressed within this paradigm. However, a student-oriented religious education must consider these questions to the same extent. But this is at the center of the category of heterogeneity. The following considerations, against this background, seek to unfold the mode of thinking of enlightened heterogeneity. This places identity and equality issues in strict reciprocal interrelation and is at the same time so self-critical that it seeks to elucidate its own entanglements in hegemonic relationships of power in the normative definition of religious education.