Visiting Fellows
Dr Marian de Souza
Marian de Souza is a Senior Lecturer in the National School of Religious Education, Australian Catholic University, Ballarat Campus whose research has focused on contemporary understandings of spirituality and how young people’s spirituality may be addressed in education. Other research interests are how ethnic communities hand on their spiritual and cultural heritage to their young in a contemporary pluralist society; and the implication of non-conscious learning for the perceptions, experiences and expressions of tolerance of a new generation in a divisive, pluralist world.
Marian is a team member in the Australian Federal Government funded project into Values in Education. She has been published nationally and internationally on her research and was the Coordinating Editor of a 2-volume International Handbook on the Religious, Moral and Spiritual Dimensions in Education (2006) published by Springer. Marian is currently Coordinating Editor of the International Handbook on Education for Spirituality, Care and Wellbeing and a Section Editor for the International Handbook on Interreligious Education,both to be published by Springer. She is the Editor of the Journal of Religious Education and is a member of the international editorial committees for several national and international journals. Marian was the convenor of the 8th International Conference for Children’s Spirituality at ACU, Ballarat in Jan 2008.
Olga Schihalejev
Olga Schihalejev is a researcher on the EC Framework 6 project REDCo. She is based in the Faculty of Theology Tartu University, Estonia, and is a Lecturer in the Institute of Theology of the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church (EELC). She has worked as a teacher of religious education and has written teaching-learning resources for students in Estonia. She is a board member of the Estonian RE Teachers Association, actively involved in improving the national syllabus for RE, and she is a member of a team which organizes annual conferences for RE teachers in Estonia.
Within the REDCo Project her research has been on how religion is perceived by young people in a secular context. Additionally she has been interested in perception of religion and tolerance by different ethnic groups in Estonia.
Olga's doctoral research is on 'Meeting Religious Diversity: the Role of Schools'. The aim of her research is to examine the potentials and limitations of RE in coping with religious diversity in Estonia, especially identifying approaches that can contribute to promoting dialogue and mutual understanding among representatives of different worldviews and examining how openness towards others and mutual respect across religious differences might be strengthened. During her visiting fellowship at WRERU Olga will be writing a chapter about different pedagogical approaches to religious education and examining the limitations and possibilities of these approaches in the Estonian context.
Professor Arto Kallioniemi
Dr Marion de Souza
Dr Olga Schihalejev
