Youth Theology in everyday-practice R.E. lessons (church and school)A reconstructive study concerning the relation between norms of Youth Theology and the normativity of R.E. lessons in everyday practice

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Over the last couple of years, the program of youth theology has become established. Its suitability for ecclesiastical (confirmation classes) and school (here: classes 7 and 8 at grammar and comprehensive schools) every-day education still needs to be proven though. The project looks at this aspect by focussing on the question of how the norms of youth theology are related to the norms which can be observed during ecclesiastical and school every-day classes. The project interprets recorded video or audio files of classes from two perspectives: on the one hand from the perspective of youth theology which asks about good religious education by applying the norms of youth theology as a frame; on the other hand from a perspective which analyses acts of addressing. The latter suspends the question of good religious education and tries to reconstruct the rules and norms hidden in every-day teaching practices. Practices are here defined as regulated forms of behaviour. Situations which are often regarded as missed opportunities and are usually explained with a deficiency in the teacher’s professionalism, can, from a perspective focussing on addressing, be described as structural problems. This project achieves three things: Firstly, it evaluates the amount of youth theology in ecclesiastical and school contexts. Secondly, it describes regulated forms of behaviour which are being used to handle religious education in the two contexts and aims at showing some implicit structures of religious education classes. In doing so, it compares teaching styles in ecclesiastical and school teaching. Thirdly, it depicts possible conflicts that may occur between the norms of youth theology and the normativity of school practices, therefore yielding a basis for revising and solving these problems. The project can therefore be considered as an empirical, reconstructive contribution to answering the question of youth theology’s practicability, differentiating between ecclesiastical and school contexts. It can therefore be located within the field of casuistically-oriented research which focuses on norms. This is done by applying didactical norms to lessons (top-down) and by reconstructing the normativity of teaching practices (bottom-up) and finally creating a critical dialogue between the programmatical and reconstructed norms. Youth theology can therefore change educational practices, but a reconstructive view on teaching practices can also critically address the norms of youth theology.