Seeking educators and parents for a survey

The Religion and Diversity Project is a government-funded research initiative studying religious diversity in Canada. They’re putting out a request for Canadian public school educators and parents of children in public elementary or secondary school to fill out a research survey about what they think students should learn about religion, beliefs and world views in Canadian public schools.

Religion and Diversity Project

The Religion and Diversity Project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and headquartered at the University of Ottawa. It’s a $2.5 million, 7-year project, now in its final year. The kinds of questions it asks include:

• How are religious identities socially constructed?
• How is religious expression defined and delimited in law and public policy?
• How and why do gender and sexuality act as flashpoints in debates on religious freedom?
• What are alternative strategies for managing religious diversity?

This is a huge project, broken up into multiple strands and sub-projects, with researcher names that Canadian Atheist readers might recognize, like Dr. Lori Beaman and Prof. Solange Lefebvre (Lefebvre was expert witness for the city in Mouvement laïque québécois v Saguenay (City).

One of the sub-projects is Religion and Education, that looks into how religions should be taught. They are seeking:

• Canadian public school educators, including current or retired teachers, principals, and counsellors; or
• parents of public elementary or secondary school students in Canada

to fill out a survey on what they think students should learn about religion, beliefs and world views in Canadian public schools.

I don’t fit the requirements, so I couldn’t take the survey. But I did take their cultural and religious identity survey to get a feel for what they were looking for. I found it to be a very interesting, well-designed, and well-intentioned survey, so I assume the education survey would be the same.

So if you meet the requirements above, please take 20–30 minutes and fill out the “Learning about Religion, Beliefs & World views in Public Education” survey.

If you don’t meet the requirements, or even if you do but feel up to filling out a second survey, consider filling out the “Cultural and Religious Identity Survey”.