The Place of Religious Education Between Other Sciences

The Place of Religious Education Between Other

Sciences

Key Questions:

• Why is it important to determine the place of pedagogy between other sciences?

• How many ideas are there about this topic?

• What are the methods of Religious Pedagogy?

Every scientific brunch;

• Has to have own scientific research field.

• Has to have own scientific methodology

• Has to have own epistemology to produce theories, methods, approaches, and concepts.

• It is also important to produce and develop curriculum, determine goals, content, educational environment ,

educational methods, and evaluation structure.

There are three opinions about field of Religious Pedagogy (Tosun, 2001):

• Religious Pedagogy is one of the religious (Islamic) science

• Religious Pedagogy is one of the educational science

• Religious Pedagogy is an interdisciplinary science

• According to the first opinion, it is one of the religious

science because, every social science which deal with the human being, should depend on the religious resources.

Because God is the first educator (Rab), so he knows

educational methods better and the best educational

methods are the God’s methods (Tosun, 2001).

• For the second opinion, even religious pedagogy has some resources from the religious science, it should focus on

the educational science. Religious sciences are just the

other disciplines that help religious Pedagogy (Tosun,

2001).

• The strongest opinion is the last one. According to this idea, the interdisciplinary approach is the scientific

approach. So being interdisciplinary does not show that

religious pedagogy is not scientific (Tosun, 2001).

According to this opinion,

• Education is a whole process and religion is the one part of it. So it is not true to deal with just with religious

sciences. On the other hand, it is not the true way to look

and analyze Religious pedagogy just from the educational

science side (Tosun, 2001).

Methods of Religious Pedagogy (Tosun, 2001)

• Normative-deductive

• Spiritual-hermeneutics

Spiritual scientific

methods

• Statistical methods

• Interview

• Survey/inquiry

Empiric

methods

Normative-deductive method :

• Religious norms are accepted the main norms and every educational theory and approach get produced from those norms.

• The main way to produce principles from this norms is the

deduction.

Spiritual-hermeneutics

• The center word is «understanding».

• It depends on the scripture like the normative method but

it defers from it by interpretation of the text according to

conditions of the time.

Empirical methods

• It should be used carefully.

• It is not enough to use these methods without other

methods.

The language of Religious Pedagogy

• It should be clear

• It should be objective and informative (descriptive) not

judgmental

Every religious educator should know that

Religious

education Religious instruction

Religious

pedagogy Train

Concepts

Languag e of Religiou

science s

Languag e of educatio

science nal

Langua ge of Religio pedago us

gy

Cited Resources

• Tosun, C. (2001), Din Egitimi Bilimine Giris, Pegem A

Yayincilik, Ankara.