This book presents a broad and in-depth, research-based source for exploring how teaching controversial issues on ethics, values, and beliefs can be conducted in Religious Education. How may teachers conduct an objective and comprehensive education that respects children's and young people's divergent views, based on traditions and beliefs that characterize their background and family discourse and/or in personal standpoints? The chapters explore the development of pedagogical and didactical approaches, with special regard to the implementation of teaching on issues that may be experienced as sensitive and contentious. The chapters represent a variety of disciplinary fields, including philosophy, science of religion, ethics, intercultural education, values education, worldview education, and social sustainability. The book may serve as course literature in Teacher education, and in in-service training for teachers.

In this chapter, ongoing discussions on powerful knowledge and democratic and inclusive practices are related to teaching existential questions and core values in religious education. In classrooms where both multi-religiousness and secularity characterize the students’ everyday life, it is urgent to offer the students possibilities to discuss norms and values, since they constantly move between various multicultural contexts. The students should be given the opportunity to reflect on questions of core values, ethics, and morality as well as to discuss what democracy, solidarity, equality, and inclusion can mean. One way for teachers to work with these questions is to focus partly on subject literacy and on powerful knowledge in relation to inclusive teaching, partly on a subject content where existential questions and a plurality of norms and core values are expressed together with controversial issues.

This chapter strive to contribute to ongoing epistemological and didactical discussions in religious education and by working with democratic practices such as deliberative conversations in relation to controversial issues, the content of conflicts is made visible, and the possibility for students to develop and assess their own opinions, as well as to recognize and respect each other’s diverse identities increase. Thereby, they may also gain an increased knowledge and understanding and consider new perspectives on various sensitive or complex questions. It is the aim of this chapter to explore and illuminate these issues and thus to contribute to the development of epistemological contexts of the subject religious education.

This contribution has two purposes. It aims at grasping Indigenous religions with an emphasis on Maya religious discourse seen in long term perspective and aims to give examples of how teaching about ecology, sustainability and global ethics and values can benefit from connecting to Indigenous religious traditions rituals within Religious Education. Questions of powerful knowledge and religious literacy are also discussed in this context.

Central themes in Maya cosmology, mythology and rituals will be highlighted together with the viability of Maya view on nature, agriculture, ecology and thus sustainability. Local knowledge of agriculture and ethnobotany, as well as ritual healing ceremonies are handed down from ancient traditions and still visible in present everyday life. These ritual practices today still communicate meaning and spirituality in the Maya area.

Knowledge of Indigenous religions and spirituality, exemplified by the case of Maya cosmology and ritual practices, will deepen understanding of processes of change and permanence and thus of sustainability. The objective is to emphasise the importance of integrating questions of sustainability and ecology in RE classrooms and to encourage future teachers in RE to develop their knowledge on the relations between religion(s) and sustainability.

In the context of humanistic Bildung-centred Didaktik, the educational potential of different school subjects is emphasized. But how can different school subjects collectively contribute to the ‘cultivation-of-human-powers’ and Bildung with a focus on sustainability? In this article, seven different school subjects are compared. Eleven teacher educators from Malmö University, Sweden, have written scholarly about the roles of their respective school subjects for Bildung and sustainability. Drawing from the texts related to the seven school subjects – geography, mathematics, physical education and health, religious education, science for citizenship, Swedish as a second language, and visual arts – a comparative analysis was conducted. The primary focus was to understand the unique characteristics of each school subject, explore their epistemic differences, and discern their potential roles in fostering cross-curricular didactics for Bildung and sustainability. It is shown that the different school subjects collectively provide complementary contributions to contemporary Bildung and climate change literacy.