Mira Cataya Rodriguez

Spiritual experiences are common across religious and nonreligious faiths, but schoolchildren are often afraid to share these because they fear ridicule from peers who are convinced religion is irrational. The need to speak about spirituality in religious education is increasingly recognised. Signposts suggests that intercultural understanding implies recognising religious students' perception of reality and helping others understand it. Religious education in Norway now includes exploration of existential questions as a core element, and in England, making sense of religious, spiritual and mystical experiences has been suggested as a big idea. In this paper, we discuss how the dualistic paradigm of modern science makes it difficult to take spirituality seriously as lived experience and empirical phenomenon. Instead we suggest a transrational approach to explore our multidimensional reality in an intercultural dialogue where insiders and outsiders learn from each other. We also explore examples of transrational research on spiritual phenomena.

Læreplanene for grunnskolen endres igjen i år, og det nye tverrfaglige temaet livsmestring har skapt debatt. Denne artikkelen fokuserer på krle-faget, som har blitt endret mye de siste tjue år i takt med endringer i livssynsmangfoldet og religionens rolle i samfunnet. Vi stiller spørsmålet om faget nå tar en subjektiv vending i retning av livsmestring og selvutvikling – i tråd med postmoderne religiøsitet og pedagogiske strømninger som vektlegger at elevene selv skaper mening og kunnskap.