Icke-konfessionalitet i religionskunskaps-undervisningen : En fallstudie om gymnasielärares hantering av en svår balansgång

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how four teachers in Religious Education (RE) in up-per secondary school in Sweden interpret, experience and practice non-confessional teaching in RE. Four teachers were interviewed and the data was categorized through idea analysis. Karin Kittelmann Flensners (2015) thesis about a hegemonic secularistic discourse was used as theory in the analysis of the results. The ontological perspective in this thesis is social constructivist. In the context of this study, this means that RE teaching is formed both by the teachers and their students.The results show that there are signs of a secularistic discourse within the non-confessional RE classrooms. Examples of this is that non-religious students talk about religion and religious peo-ple in condescending ways and there are indications that non-religious world views are perceived as more neutral than religious world views.The concept of non-confessional teaching is primarily being related to the concept of neutrality. Even though the participants are sceptic towards whether it is possible to be neutral, three of them strive for neutrality in their teaching. The fourth participant chooses to teach non-confes-sionally through a variety of biased positions, which need to be explained for the students. The fact that the participants are sceptic towards the possibility of being neutral challenges the hege-monic secularistic discourse.The participants suggest several ways for practicing non-confessional RE teaching. The common denominator for all of them is to give the students different perspectives of religions, world views and ethical methods