Catholic Youth Associations' Activities in All-Day Schools. Developing a qualitative empirically-based theory of religious education with regard to Catholic youth associations' activities at all-day schools.

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Due to a massive decline of religious traditions accompanied by a weakening of traditional settings of religious education like family and parish, the school seems to substitute for these social institutions developing into the predominant place of religious education and socialization. Because of the expansion of all-day schooling, this development gains in importance even more rapidly. As a side-effect, cases of enhanced cooperation between school administrations and extracurricular partners such as parishes and youth associations are proliferating. The project is designed to test the basic hypothesis that such cases of cooperation with all-day schools cause massive changes in the activities organized by youth associations as well as the structural background of those organizations. Regarding religious matters, these developments call for new and revised concepts within the academic fields of Religious Education and Practical Theology. Furthermore, a study concerning the influence of youth associations as educational actors on informal and non-formal educational processes is urgently required at present, because religious activities are badly neglected in previous studies about all-day schools. Based on this hypothesis mentioned above and taking into account the current state of research including our own investigations, the planned project will contribute to an innovative profile for the educational field of all-day schools focusing on religious aspects within this field. As a result of this project, we shall propose a concept for all-day schools with a special focus on the academic disciplines of Religious Education and Practical Theology. This concept will be structured according to four subgoals. First, we shall analyze the Catholic youth associations' commitment in the system of all-day schools in an investigation of the conceptional designs and their practical implementation within the youth associations' activities. Second, an educational theory of the youth associations' work at schools will be developed on the basis of the results of the first part of the project and all-day school under consideration in the project shall be classified according to their specific educational practice, again focusing on religious aspects. Third, our collection of data will be confronted with results of more general research about all-day schools studying also the relevance of informal education in schools as well as theories about pastoral activities at schools. And fourth, our project will contribute to the development of theories in several other fields (e. g. the development of school profiles) beyond its own specific objectives. The project is designed in terms of a qualitative, empirical analysis. It will cooperate closely with the youth associations BDKJ Osnabrück and Paderborn which connections will enable research in highly different social situations and in the context of multifarious activities of the youth associations in various schools.