Interreligious Competence (IRC) in Students of Education: An Exploratory Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear author,

I congratulate you on an interesting article. The article presents clear theoretical propositions, topical issues and a large sample. Below I list a few thoughts that could make the article even better.

In the article, the author refers to the Council of Europe and the White Paper. Since the focus of this article is the concept of competence, I recommend that you take into account another document of the Council of Europe, which is more important for this topic: Recommendation CM/Rec(2008)12 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on the dimension of religions and non-religious convictions within intercultural education. This Recommendation was not mentioned in the article at all.

In conclusion, the author points to the role of religious communities as responsible for the development of interreligious competence. This research, however, examines the role of education, not religious communities. After all, the research sample shows that many young people are agnostics and atheists. In that case, who is responsible for developing their competence?

Since this competence is viewed in the context of higher education, it is not logical to place the responsibility on religious communities. It would be more correct to talk about the cooperation of religious communities and educational institutions with the aim of developing this competence.

The White Paper of the Council of Europe, to which this article refers, highlights the importance of developing intercultural competence in the education system, with an emphasis on the role of educators and teachers. I believe that this should be emphasized more clearly in the conclusion.

The article states: „Therefore, teachers must possess and be able to put into practice these competencies in order to facilitate the respectful exchange of perspectives between individuals and groups with different ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds on the basis of mutual understanding and recognition , as well as behaving in a way that is appropriate to the needs and sensitivities of the interlocutors and the context.“ If teachers must have the above-mentioned competencies, how do the study programs train them for this.

The results also show the correlation of interreligious competence with conflict resolution methods. That part in the conclusion is not overly elaborated, nor in the discussion. Perhaps the role of education and more specific guidelines for the responsibility of initial education to adopt appropriate conflict resolution strategies can be highlighted.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer Thank you very munch for you kinds and useffull suggestions and comments.

Thanks to you, our paper has improved very munch

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This study explores a very relevant societal issue, employs the appropriate means to gauge its current bearing, namely the method of empirical research, and, most importantly, it paints a possible future scenario based on the empirical research, whose results are presented in this paper. Thus, its concerns with shaping the societies in which we wish to live both today and in the future, are to be highly appreciated. However, the argument presented therein, as well as the results, is, in my view, neither sufficiently coherent nor plausible.

As far as the theoretical framework is concerned, I identify especially two flaws. First, the concept of religion adopted in the study is quite problematic and not sufficiently substantiated. Equating religion with culture (lines 258-59) or reading religious traditions/developments along these lines (259-60) is undoubtedly a tenable approach, but by no means the only one. That being the case, the adoption of this definition/assumption must be appropriately justified. Accordingly, it does not suffice, in my view, to simply affirm that “models that integrate religion to culture in their competential development are much more numerous [than others that do not do] (267-268)” and, besides that, to mention a few exceptions to this approach (263-266). For, if that is the case, i.e. if religion does not play any role essentially distinct from culture, the questions to be surveyed should be different, as it appears to me. A possible question to be empirically examined might be, for instance, whether the (Catholic) Spanish are more competent with regard to interreligious skills than the (Protestant) German, rather than asking whether atheist behave otherwise than believers. After all, both believers and atheists share the same cultural matrix.

Having said this, it is important to note that such an assumption has major implications for the results of the present survey. For example, couldn’t it be that someone is tolerant towards people belonging to other religions precisely because of one’s religious commitments or out of one’s religious convictions? However, the research is opaque to or not sufficiently sensitive to this question. In my view, this is largely connected to the concept of religion underlying the overall survey. To sum up, if religion is not but the result of cultural developments, and is to be examined with the same tools (259-60), why should religious identity be a meaningful category to be analyzed in a study like this in the first place? For one’s religious identity or affiliation does not provide any relevant information about one’s motivation to act in this fashion, and not otherwise.

Second, can we really assume that the major conflicts and even wars playing out in our contemporary world are religiously motivated. Are we really assuming that in order to bring about a “culture of peace” (153) we need to foster interreligious dialogue? If that is the hypothesis, which is perfectly acceptable, too, at least some evidence to that extent has to be provided. Which empirical evidence do(es) the author(s) base his/her/their assumption on? This is important insofar as the whole research pivots on this central assumption.

As for the empirical study, the survey furnishes very important data, as well as results. However, apart from the issues put forward above concerning the overall design and the central assumptions of the survey, I’d like to point to a few methodological issues, albeit, admittedly, not being an expert in this field. The first question concerns the justification for (a) the population to be surveyed and (b) for the sample size to be collected. If, for example, a correlation between gender and Interreligious Competence was one of the questions to be examined, the warrant for comparing 923 women with 241 men and 11 non-binary – highly disproportional numbers – is certainly wanting. The only justification provided is that the “strong presence of women is a common feature in education studies in Spain” (362-63). If the survey was designed to investigate the correlation between gender and IRC, the proportionality of participants should have been taken into account, too, or at least justified. In addition, this gender issue did not even figure among the research aims (cf. 345-50) and is nevertheless presented as a result, which shows a few inconsistencies between the formulated aims and presented results. The further aspect relative to (a) concerns the milieu of the population of this survey and is even acknowledged by the author(s) him/her/themselves (504-07). Does IRC, in these milieus (university students of education), really correlate to being religious or atheist? Does it not correlate to these students' social and educational background instead? As the author(s) concede him/her/themselves, the same number of participants in another context and with another population would have generated significantly different numbers (505). This raises the question of the representativity and/or purpose of the whole study.

Based on the problematic issues put forward above, I recommend a substantial revision of the text. Collected data may be reutilized, but the analysis/results must be considered and the text reconceived/reworked.

The quality is fine, but could be improved.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer Thank you very munch for you kinds and useffull suggestions and comments.

Thanks to you, our paper has improved very munch

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

First of all, I really appreciate the remarkable effort made by the author(s) (a) to reply to all comments put forward by the reviewers and (b) to extensively rework/revise the text. My sense is that the text gained a lot with this shift of the paper’s focus and its concentration on the core aims of the survey, to the detriment of other aspects such as gender issues, as was the case in the first draft.

Well, the vexed relation between culture and religion – which I raised in my review – remains, in my view, a problematic issue in the paper’s theoretical framework. By making recourse to Morales (2011) this question is still far from being tackled or even properly attended to. However, since this theoretical debate goes far beyond the scope of this paper and considering that this is not the central issue of this paper either, I do not see any point in further questioning the approach, as well as line of argument, chosen by the author(s).

However, since the author(s) quoted Morales (2011) extensively, thereby making him quite prominent in the current version of the text, I cannot refrain from expressing a few concerns in this regard. First, this reference has not been included in the bibliography. On that account, I’m not sure whether I found the correct source to check against the author(s)’s quote and interpretation. What I’ve found was:

Morales, Manuel David. “Religiones, subjetividad y objetividad.” Razón у Pensamiento Cristiano, January 7, 2011, https://www.revista-rypc.org/2011/01/religiones-subjetividad-y-objetividad.html (accessed: Dec 1, 2023).

If that is the case, the quotation marks should be necessarily removed (lines 128-142), given that what the author(s) cite is not a direct quotation, but rather a summary of Morales’ ideas in that text. Otherwise, you need to use markers such as […] to indicate that there is more text between one sentence and the other. Second, the use of this source, not being an academic journal, is certainly questionable. Not because the format (blog, in this case) has implications on the content, but rather because this short text is not concerned with demonstrating the applicability of its assumptions/statements, but because assumptions are just stated, rather than justified, demonstrated, proved true, as one would expect of an academic paper. 

However, it might well be the case that the author(s) has used another source, which I did not have access to.

Bearing this in mind, I have the following recommendations:

a) Kindly include Morales 2011 in the bibliography

b) Please, consider rewriting the citation of Morales if what I have pointed out above applies.

c) The text needs, in my view, a last proofreading before publication.

The text needs a final proofreading.

Author Response

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf