James Arthur

Terence Lovat

The academic fields of religion and values have become the focus of renewed interest in contemporary thinking about human activity and its motivations. The Routledge International Handbook of Education, Religion and Values explores and expands upon a range of international research related to this revival. The book provides an authoritative overview of global issues in religion and values, surveying the state of the academic area in contributions covering a wide range of topics. It includes emerging, controversial, and cutting-edge contributions, as well as investigations into more established areas. International authorities Arthur and Lovat have brought together experts from across the world to examine the complexity of the field of study. The handbook is organised around four key topics, which focus on both the importance of religion and values as broad fields of human enquiry, as well as in their application to education, inter-agency work and cross-cultural endeavours: -The Conceptual World of Religion and Values -Religion and Values in Education -Religion and Values in Inter-agency Work -Religion and Values in Cross-cultural Work. This comprehensive reference work combines theoretical and empirical research of international significance, and will be valuable reading for students, researchers and academics in the field of education.

The Routledge International Handbook of Education, Religion and Values

The role of women in Islamic societies, not to mention in the religion itself, is a defining issue. It is also one that remains resistant to universal dogma, with a wide range of responses to women’s social roles across the Islamic world. Reflecting this heterogeneity, the editor of this volume has assembled the latest research on the issue, which combines contemporary with historical data. The material comes from around the world as well as from Muslim and non-Muslim researchers. It takes in work from majority Muslim nations such as Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestine, Tunisia and Turkey, as well as countries with troubled interfaith relations such as India and Israel. Nations with minority Muslim populations such as France, the UK, Canada and Australia, are also represented. The work also features varying Islamic sub-groups such as the two main ones, Sunni and Shi’a, as well as less well known populations such as the Ismaili Muslims. In each case, the work is underpinned by the very latest socio-theological insights and empirical data.

Reflections on Historical and Contemporary Research

Women in Islam

Ron Toomey

Neville Clement

Kerry Dally

Under the weight of a combination of forces, many of the older paradigms of learning are being questioned in our time. Among the updated research that elicits such critique is that which deals directly with effective pedagogy, clearly illustrating the enhanced effects on learning when it is dealt with as a holistic developmental enterprise rather than one concerned solely with content, technique and measurable outcomes. This research includes volumes of empirical evidence and conceptual analysis from across the globe that point to the inextricability of values as lying at the heart of those forms of good practice pedagogy that support and facilitate the species of student achievement that truly does transform the life chances of students. This research indicates that the combination of values rich learning environments and values discourse (that is, the holism of implicit and explicit pedagogy) has potential for positive influence on learning outcomes, most markedly for those deemed likely to fail without such pedagogical intervention. Values Pedagogy and Student Achievement - Contemporary Research Evidence uncovers, explores and appraises those volumes of evidence and analysis, illustrating their pertinence to student achievement, the vexed issue that lies at the heart of all for which education stands.

Contemporary Research Evidence

Values Pedagogy and Student Achievement

Informed by the most up-to-date research from around the world, as well as examples of good practice, this handbook analyzes values education in the context of a range of school-based measures associated with student wellbeing. These include social, emotional, moral and spiritual growth – elements that seem to be present where intellectual advancement and academic achievement are being maximized. This text comes as ‘values education’ widens in scope from being concerned with morality, ethics, civics and citizenship to a broader definition synonymous with a holistic approach to education in general. This expanded purview is frequently described as pedagogy relating to ‘values’ and ‘wellbeing’. This contemporary understanding of values education, or values and wellbeing pedagogy, fits well with recent neuroscience research. This has shown that notions of cognition, or intellect, are far more intertwined with social and emotional growth than earlier educational paradigms have allowed for. In other words, the best laid plans about the technical aspects of pedagogy are bound to fail unless the growth of the whole person – social, emotional, moral, spiritual and intellectual, is the pedagogical target. Teachers and educationalists will find that this handbook provides evidence, culled from both research and practice, of the beneficial effects of such a ‘values and wellbeing’ pedagogy.

International Research Handbook on Values Education and Student Wellbeing

Robert Crotty

At the present time, when so-called Islamic radicalism, terrorism and Jihadism occupy major media space, with Islam often depicted as the main culprit, the book attempts a tour de force. It proposes that Islam is as much victim as culprit in the history that has led to the current hostility. This is because the common claims of both mainstream and radical Islam that Islam represents the high point of the Abrahamic tradition, and therefore a purification of Judaism and Christianity, have been largely ignored, misunderstood or blatantly rejected by these faiths and therefore by ‘the West’ in general. This rejection has effectively rendered Islam as the poor cousin, if not the illegitimate sibling, of the tradition. In turn, this has created long-term resentment and hostility within Islam as well as robbed the ‘Judaeo-Christian West’ of a rich, inter-faith understanding of the wider Abrahamic tradition. The book explores these claims through textual, historical and theological analyses, proposing that many of them stand up better to critical scrutiny than has been commonly acknowledged. It further proposes that seeing Islam in this way has potential to re-awaken its self-understanding as a leader of accord among the Abrahamic faiths, of the kind that characterized the era of Convivencia when, in medieval Spain, Islam constructed and contributed to advanced civilizations characterized by relatively harmonious co-existence between Muslims, Christians and Jews. The book focuses on the role that a more respected and self-confident Islam could play in forging enhanced inter-faith relations in a world that desperately needs them as it struggles to understand and deal with modern and particularly vicious forms of radical Islamism.

Islam’s Special Role in Restoring Convivencia

Reconciling Islam, Christianity and Judaism

Karin Heinrichs

Fritz Oser

The Handbook of Moral Motivation offers a contemporary and comprehensive appraisal of the age-old question about motivation to do the good and to prevent the bad. From a research point of view, this question remains open even though we present here a rich collection of new ideas and data. Two sources helped the editors to frame the chapters: first they looked at an overwhelmingly fruitful research tradition on motivation in general (attribution theory, performance theory, self-determination theory, etc.) in relationship to morality. The second source refers to the tension between moral judgment (feelings, beliefs) and the real moral act in a twofold manner: (a) as a necessary duty, and, (b) as a social but not necessary bond. In addition, the handbook utilizes the latest research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, wishing to suggest by this that the answer to the posed question will likely not come from one discipline alone. Furthermore, our hope is that the implicit criticism that the narrowly constructed research approach of the recent past has contributed to closing off rather than opening up interdisciplinary lines of research becomes in this volume a strong counter discourse. The editors and authors of the handbook commend the research contained within in the hope that it will contribute to better understanding of humanity as an inherently moral species.

Terence Lovat

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