Studiebesök i religionskunskapsundervisningen Elevers tal om islam före, under och efter ett moskébesök

Sammanfattning: One aim with the Swedish non-confessional religious education is to increase students’ understanding and respect for different ways of thinking and behaving. One opportunity to reflect upon other people's interpretations of life, are field visits. Many teachers and students want to make field visits but few actually do. This thesis explores educational opportunities and challenges generated by field visits as part of religious education.This is a classroom study in an upper secondary school (the students were 17 years old), during the teaching sequence about Islam where one part was a field visit to a mosque. Data were produced by classroom observations and observations from a mosque visit, students’ journal writing’s before and after the visit and student interviews. The students’ utterances about Islam are analysed using Michael Bachtin’s dialogue theory and Robert Jackson’s interpretive approach.The analysis shows that students apply a speech genre, which in this study is denoted genre of politeness. In some cases the genre of politeness affect the students such that they do not dare to ask all questions, in particular questions about Islam and gender. Another result is that students more widely apply a self-reflexive speech genre during and after the mosque visit as compared to before the visit. By self-reflexive speech is meant that the students mirror what they have met in the mosque with their own interpretations of life. The analysis also shows that the several students express critical opinions about Islam both before and after the mosque visit and the teaching sequence.The study explores educational opportunities and challenges generated by the mosque visit. Some of the themes that are discussed in the thesis are: 1) questions about representations of religion, for instance in what way “lived religion” and religion as a “philosophical ideal” can be combined, 2) the students’ different ways of reflection, 3) how do students relate and rely on the faith representative’s utterances, and 4) how students formulate questions to the faith representative.