University of Graz to get an interreligious dialog center

"If 24 out of 27 pupils in a school class are Muslim, the problem is not the pupils," says Mevlida Mešanović. "Teachers are generally not well prepared for interfaith practice during their training. They then find it difficult to cope with diversity." The Muslim religious educator works at the Institute for Catechetics and Religious Education at the University of Graz. Since 2017, she has been researching questions of interreligious education and the coexistence of different religions as part of her dissertation and the FWF project "Christian-Islamic Religious Education in Team Teaching".

To counteract this kind of excessive demand on teachers, she and her colleague, the Catholic religious education teacher Eva Wenig, have set up interreligious and intercultural workshops. In these workshops, the two teachers show ways of dealing with interreligious diversity in a respectful manner. The focus is on questions relevant to everyday life - such as whether it is possible to hold a hiking day with your own class during Ramadan when some pupils are fasting. The two teachers hold the workshops in Christian-Islamic team teaching.

"So far, we have held over 60 workshops at schools in almost all of Austria," says Mešanović. While the offer was initially aimed primarily at religious educators, it quickly became clear that teachers of all subjects were very interested. "Thanks to the workshops and the accompanying intensive research work, we have built up a lot of knowledge that we would like to pass on in the future."

This motivation gave rise to the idea of developing and establishing an interreligious dialog center for the education sector at the University of Graz. Workshops are to be offered there for school classes in which religious and cultural diversity is a topic. A coaching program will also be developed and offered for teachers of all subjects, both individually and in groups. There are also plans to create teaching materials that deal with this topic.

"We are committed to ensuring that this important topic is transferred from research to practice," emphasizes Wolfgang Weirer, who heads the Institute for Catechetics and Religious Education. Currently, the focus is on raising third-party funds for the center. Applications have already been submitted, but have not yet been approved, and further help with funding is welcome. "There is a great demand for the workshops and coaching sessions, and we want to meet this demand. Fortunately, there are already concrete cooperation commitments from the Directorate of Education, the ComUnitySpirit project and the Rectorate."

The basic idea of the INTER interreligious dialogue center was presented at the Religious Education Symposium on 24 May 2024 and embedded in the institute's overall program.