Religious Education for Sustainable Development. Empirical research into its effect on the planned environmentally conscious behaviour of secondary school students

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Claudia Gärtner
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 538650788

Religious Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is being conceptually and didactically developed in Religious Education (RE). So far neither the developed concepts nor the corresponding learning settings have been empirically tested. The project responds to this problem by empirically investigating the underlying thesis that a politically oriented religious ESD contributes to environmentally conscious planned behavior. Therefore, the project uses learning settings that were designed on the basis of didactic principles of a politically oriented religious ESD. They are heterogeneity-sensitive and address secondary school pupils who are statistically more likely to have negative, sceptical or undecided environmental attitudes and who are rarely studied in RE. The project aims to investigate the extent to which these pupils are enabled to adopt more environmentally conscious planned behaviour on the basis of the learning settings. The project chooses a contrastive sample to compare extracurricular, non-formal with school-based, formal religious learning. Accordingly, the project is structured into two sub-projects: Sub-project 1 investigates extracurricular religious learning in social seminaries for educationally disadvantaged students. Sub-project 2 investigates religious learning in school-based religious education in 9-10th lower secondary and secondary school classes (Haupt-/Sekundarschulen). The project addresses the following research questions: 1. What effects do heterogeneity-sensitive learning settings of a politically oriented religious ESD have on the planned environmental behavior of secondary school students in the 9th-10th grade in the classroom or in extracurricular learning settings? 2. To what extent can differences between heterogeneous students be identified with regard to 1.? 3. To what extent can the data show how and through which principles the learning setting contributed to the reconstructed learning success? 4. To what extent can differences between classroom and extracurricular learning settings be identified with regard to the results of 1.-3 ? 5. To what extent do the results of 1-4 lead to an empirical foundation of a politically oriented religious ESD or to ist differentiation and further development? The project does not claim to survey the effectiveness of learning settings in an evidence-based way. Rather, it is about the empirical reconstruction of process-related effects of religious ESD based on learning settings. The study is designed as a mixed-method design. The initial learning situation and results are collected quantitatively through questionnaires; the learning status, results and processes are collected in more detail through qualitative semi-standardized interviews, ethnographically influenced observation studies and the evaluation of learning products. The quantitative data assessment is based on SPSS, the qualitative study on MAXQDA based on U. Kuckartz' qualitative content analysis.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants