Understanding ‘religious understanding’ in religious education.

This paper takes as its starting point, one of the explicit aims of religious education in England, namely, the development of students’religious understanding. It shows how curriculum documentation, whilst stating thatreligious understandingis an aim of religious education fails to clearly outline what is meant by it. This paper draws upon long-standing and ongoing debates in the field and suggests thatreligious understandingmay be best conceived as a spectrum of understanding. Approached in this way,religious understandingbecomes not an all or nothing affair, but a lens through which the student of religion may regard the beliefs and practices before them. Finally, the paper proposes an interpretation ofreligious understanding, which focuses on the soteriological dimension of religion, thus providing the student with a particularlyreligiouslens to understand religious traditions in religious education and concludes by outlining what such an approach might look like in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]