Teachers’ professional attitudes toward Muslim religious norms: studying the organizational context of moral position-taking

Abstract

Many studies to date have shown how teachers disadvantage Muslim students due to unconscious bias. Much less is known about how teachers’ attitudes are influenced by the organizational context of their schools. I aim to contribute to filling this research gap by analyzing interviews with teachers at high schools with a large share of Muslim students. I show how my interview partners were forced to position themselves according to the religious norms of their students and the secularized Christian norms that are often taken for granted in the German school system. My interview partners adopted various ethical perspectives. However, their positioning was always ambivalent and linked to both recognizing their students’ backgrounds and distancing themselves from this.
Keywords: Religious diversity; pedagogical attitudes; teacher professionalization; Documentary Method

Leseprobe

Bibliographie: Koch, Annika: Teachers’ professional attitudes toward Muslim religious norms: studying the organizational context of moral position-taking, ZISU – Zeitschrift für interpretative Schul- und Unterrichtsforschung, 14 (2025), S. 58-71.