Enhancing Religious Education: The Role of Technology in Theology and Community Engagement

1. Thomas Technology facilitating the interaction between theology, church and society in the world of education CICT-COCTI |Brixen

2. About

3. In general • Thomas: Dutch acronym • Founded in 2002 • www.kuleuven.be/thomas: a high quality framework to enable collaboration between all those committed to religious education • Based on the Roman Catholic Religion Curriculum • Hermeneutical-Communicative Model

4. Board of Directors • Chair • episcopal vicar for education • Financial partners • Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies (KU Leuven) • Flemish bishops • VSKO (Flemish Secretary for Catholic Education) • Interdiocesan Office for Catholic Religious Education • Representatives from • academic staff of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies • ‘Pastoral Theology’ research unit • inspectors of primary, secondary, tertiary and special school religious education • high school lecturers • pastoral workers at schools

5. Key aspects • active role in Catholic religious education • powerful instrument of scientific communication • service to the catholic church and society • keep contact with alumni/ae • challenged to follow up on developments in religion, church, and society • learning medium in the academic teachers’ program • new ICT-instruments / databases to generate new research • PR-instrument • Political discussion

6. Interactiveplatform

7. Main categories • General information • Primary education • Secondary education • Special education • Higher education • Pastoral

8. Information exchange, discussion & tools • Provide general information • Official guidelines • Flemish bishops on religious education • Roman Catholic Religion Curriculum • Opinions • Facilitate user interaction and content sharing • Databases (photo, video, prayers, poems, Q&A, …) • User input is reviewed and labelled with keywords from the Roman Catholic Religion Curriculum • Tools to aid teachers and educators • Course action plan • Communities • Assessment tool for Catholic identity within schools or user-generated groups

9. The hermeneuticcommunicative model

10. Objectives • Feeding religious thoughtfulness: broaden the hermeneutical horizon through databases with strong confessional impulses • Examples: • Music database • Movie database • Poem database • Links database • Database of daily updated periodicals and radio and television broadcasts

14. Objectives (2) • Attention to the plurality of religious perspectives • Examples: • assess the capacities of students at the beginning of each school year • Hermeneutical knots (or conflicts of interpretation) for all religious-pedagogical documents • Attention to all ideologies in religious-pedagogical documents

16. Objectives (3) • Introduction to the power of the Christian tradition • Examples: • Strong theological files • Biblical sheets • Post teacher training • Attention tospirituality: prayerbook

19. Objectives (4) • Supporting the development of one’s own ideological identity • Examples • Religiousdiary (MyThomas) • Post-critical belief scale

21. Methodological support • Course action plan • Competency matrices • Methods, examples: • Bibliodrama • Godly Play • PechaKucha • Kamishibai • Meditation • Interreligiouslearning • Support the identity of the religion teacher • As a witness • As a specialist • As a moderator

24. Context of religion courses • Course evaluation instrument between teachers and inspectors • Pastoral at school • Catholic school identity • Mourning at school • Reflectionevens

26. Research based • Hermeneutic-communicativemodel • Interreligiouslearning • Catholicidentity research

28. Technology,site analytics

29. Technology • PHP Programming language • MySQL Database backend • Custom made CMS (content managment system) • Rolebased access model (administrators, moderators, members, visitors) • Hosted at the university data center in Heverlee • One of the largest websites • +50 GB of webspace

30. Visitors • 5,000uniquevisitors / day • 30,000 pages / day • Visitorsby country • 77% Belgium • 21% The Netherlands • > 32,000registered accounts • > 15,000newslettersubscribers

31. Strong theological files • 41 files on current & topical events togiveteachers the necessarytheological background foruse in courses • 116extensivelydocumented files on religious-related subjects for primary and secondary education based on the hermeneutic-communicative model • 8thematic modules forhigher education • 34film sheets • 28biblical sheets

32. Confessionalimpulses • 1,433photos • 450videos • 408prayers • 212poems • 719links • 25,000references to radio and television impulses • 1080announcements • 745Q&A items • 1309liturgical celebrations

33. Interactive instruments • 29,000course action plan documents • 4,130 course projectspublicly shared • 12,000community item posts • 46,155participants to the Post-critical belief scale

34. Future?

35. Content • Continued updates on a monthly basis • Initiativetoprovide new impulsesfor • Primary school education • Tools & instruments • New community system • Updates to course action plan instrument • Research Catholic Identity • From a technologyperspective • Improved search options • Labelling content • Mobile device compatibility

36. English content • English content canbe found here • http://www.kuleuven.be/thomas/page/mary-magdalene/ • http://www.kuleuven.be/thomas/page/for-richer-for-poorer-till-death-do-us-part/

37. Questions? Follow us! • www.godsdienstonderwijs.be • Thomas@kuleuven.be • facebook.com/godsdienstonderwijs • twitter.com/@thomas_1432 Thomas 2013Prof. Dr. D. Pollefeyt | Jan Verkoyen