Enhancing informed empathy as a key to promoting social justice in religious education classes

Abstract

AbstractIn the field of education concerning cultural diversity it has been recognized as vital to address justice in social structures. Although justifications for religious education in non-confessional contexts are heavily based on religious diversity, their advocates have paid little attention to justice and power relations. In this article, I analyse observations of five observed classroom activities on social justice designed for religious education and related pupil interviews. The participants were in the eighth and ninth grades of Finnish comprehensive school. The main question is: how do elements of informed empathy and perception of social justice emerge in interviews and RE classroom activities with Finnish lower secondary school pupils? The results show that the concept of informed empathy well describes the pupils’ emerging awareness of social justice, that pupils’ critical agency should be carefully fostered and that social justice has potential to make religious education more relevant for certain pupils.