Conference Agenda

Research suggests that schools often address diversity in superficial ways (Roegman et al., 2021), such as through world food days, rather than through sustained culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1994; 2014) that develops students’ multicultural competence and critical consciousness of larger social inequities. Jewish culture and antisemitism are often missing entirely from curricula that address diversity (Marcus, 2021). This omission is particularly worrisome as the ACLU (2013) reports that over 79,000,000 harbor antisemitic views in Western Europe. Within the US context, American Jews experience extremely high, and rising, rates of antisemitic hate crimes (ADL, 2021), with many reported antisemitic incidents occurring on school grounds (Adler, 2021). Violent antisemitic hate crimes are also rising in Europe; the UK saw a 34% increase in antisemitic attacks in 2020 (Goodwin & Greene, 2022).

Education, beginning with teachers and educational leader preparation programs must take responsibility for teaching children about antisemitism and also for addressing antisemitism within schools (Marcus, 2021). When schools teach about antisemitism at all, they often focus on the Holocaust, which suggests that antisemitism is no longer a problem. Even when schools do teach the Holocaust, it may only receive very brief coverage, such as reading the Diary of Anne Frank (Himmelstein, 2020), and focusing on Jews who were more culturally similar to their Christian neighbors, suggesting that Jews who spoke Yiddish or dressed differently may have been less deserving of empathy (Horn, 2021). Holocaust education often focuses on individual experiences rather than the social, political, and economic conditions that allow antisemitism to flourish.

This paper uses culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1994; 2014) as a framework for examining the UNESCO (2020) curricula on addressing antisemitism in schools. UNESCO offers four curricula in their Addressing Anti-Semitism in Schools series: for primary teachers, secondary teachers, vocational teachers, and for school directors. These curricula were developed to assist educators globally in training teachers to prevent and respond to antisemitism in schools (UNESCO 2020).

We ask, how do the UNESCO Antisemitism curricula promote academic achievement, cultural competence, and sociopolitical awareness in both Jewish and non-Jewish students?

The UNESCO curricula can help promote academic achievement through clear links with existing international curricula and standards, e.g., clear connections to existing social studies and language arts curricula.

Developing students’ cultural competence requires schools, including institutions of higher education, to teach positive, accurate representation of Jews, Jewish culture, and Judaism, including diversity within the Jewish people. Yet, research suggests that Jews are often omitted from multicultural curricula (Marcus, 2021; Rubin, 2013), or that they may be represented inaccurately, e.g., lumped inappropriately into a “Judeo-Christian” umbrella that is primarily Christian (Joshi, 2006).

Developing students’ sociopolitical awareness requires teachers to explicitly teach students how to recognize and understand antisemitism, including ways in which it looks and sounds different from other forms of discrimination. Antisemitism is, fundamentally, a conspiracy theory that Jews hold too much power over, e.g., the government or media (SPLC, 2023). Antisemitic statements, then, may sound different from deficit-based forms of discrimination and oppression, such as anti-Black racism, that position certain groups as inferior (Author, 2022). A culturally relevant curriculum addressing antisemitism should help students understand how and why Jews were scapegoated for economic and political crises in mid-twentieth century Europe based on age-old stereotypes of Jews controlling the economy in particular, and the government more broadly. As Europe, the U.S., and other countries and regions with long histories of antisemitic ideology face economic and political turmoil related to the COVID-19 pandemic, conditions are ripe for scapegoating Jews again rather than addressing the root causes of existing problems.

In Europe, religious education is recognized as a resource, a tool used for the purpose of promoting democratic values, realizing human rights and active citizenship. More precisely, religious education serves as one of the tools for accomplishing European policies in the matters of coexistence in a pluralistic Europe. The institution that promotes it the most is the Council of Europe, connecting it with the principles of its own organization, namely human rights, democracy and the rule of law. (Council of Europe 2003, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2014; Keast, 2007; Jackson 2014) The need to expand and deepen knowledge about the religious phenomenon within the school education system is becoming increasingly obvious, and education for interreligious learning and dialogue in the context of intercultural education has become particularly important.

International research has shown that two aspects are particularly important for interreligious learning:

1) cognitive aspect: knowledge about other religions can greatly contribute to overcoming prejudices and stereotypes that prevent communication;

2) emotional and interactive aspect: collaborative learning, learning through encounters that promote empathy and mutual respect among members of different religions, is recognized as the most effective method of interreligious learning. (Korkeakoski – Ubani, 2018; Whitworth, 2020; Rothgangel – Jäggle – Aslan, 2020; Sweetman 2021)

Although there seems to be a tendency in Europe to implement interreligious learning through a non-confessional and value-neutral model of religious education, it should be pointed out that certain recommendations and declarations (Council of Europe 2008, 2011, 2015) show that confessional (the term used in the documents is ‘denominational’) religious education can achieve the goals of the religious dimension of intercultural education: ‘learning about religions and non-religious beliefs is not incompatible with denominational learning, as both types of learning help to shape values and attitudes, especially those needed to promote the core values of the Council of Europe’. (Council of Europe 2009) Although there are differences in those two approaches, there is no obstacle to the achievement of intercultural goals, but it is necessary that the approach to learning about religions includes and respects certain principles and values, advocating holistic teaching as parents have the right that their children are religiously educated in accordance with their religious affiliation. An open attitude and critical reflection must be advocated in every model. Religious education must promote intercultural goals, reduce ignorance, remove prejudices and stereotypes.

In this analysis, the main research question revolves around the extent to which confessional religious teaching, in all three versions present in the Croatian national curriculum, is open to intercultural education. It is important, in fact, to answer the question relating to the extent to which religious education takes into account interreligious education and dialogue within the framework of intercultural education.

In the Croatian educational system, the subject primarily responsible for this issue is religious education. There are three confessional religious education curricula in the national curriculum: the Catholic religious education curriculum, the Orthodox religious education curriculum, and the Islamic religious education curriculum. The aim is to investigate the representation of the Council of Europe’s policy guidelines on the religious dimension of intercultural education within the subject curricula of Islamic, Orthodox and Catholic religious education. The theoretical premises of the research were based on the guidelines contained in the fundamental document of the Council of Europe on the religious dimension of intercultural education (Council of Europe, 2008) and intercultural competence (Jackson, 2014). The key concepts of the content categories stemmed from the aforementioned theoretical framework and in the context of the educational policies of the Council of Europe, they are expected to be implemented in the subject curricula at the national level.

Embodied education acknowledges the importance of sensorimotor experiences in developing cognitive processes and the active use of embodied experiences during the learning process (Georgiou & Ioannou, 2019; Gulliksen, 2017). Such approaches have been demonstrated to be effective in promoting students’ understanding of science concepts (Johnson-Glenberg & Megowan-Romanowicz, 2017; Lindgren et al., 2022). Since embodied experiences are developed by the interaction between humans and the environment (Dewey, 1958) the role of the situated sociocultural context for science learning and its relationship with the embodiment needs to be better understood (Danish et al., 2020; Leung et al., 2011). Consequently, this research aimed to investigate the relationship between embodiment, sociocultural context, and their impact on the understanding of scientific concepts.

Metaphors are indicative of the way individuals express their understanding of scientific concepts (Johann et al., 2020). They may also capture differences in participants’ conceptualizations (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The use of a particular metaphor has also been shown to be profoundly related to an individual’s embodiment and their context (Kövecses, 2020). Consequently, metaphor analysis was deemed to be the ideal approach to answer the three main research questions:

RQ 1: How do students’ embodied experiences impact metaphor production for scientific concepts?

RQ 2: How does students’ sociocultural context impact metaphor production for scientific concepts?

RQ 3: How do these two factors impact students’ understanding of scientific concepts?

For the significance of this research, firstly, it can provide a new perspective to embodied science education by extending it to the sociocultural context of science education. Secondly, it may increase our understanding of metaphors, which have grown in importance in science education. Moreover, this research, which focuses on the impact of sociocultural context on science learning in a specific community, should be of interest to audiences with various sociocultural backgrounds. The theories and results involved in this study could be utilised to further conduct relevant research in other communities or promote science learning for culturally diverse students.