LAUSR

This paper offers the first insights into a research project in progress: “Blind Spot Credition: Bridging the gap between basic research and application” at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz. The intended project is part of the Credition Research Project (Angel, 2022) and has a special focus on religious education, but we understand our research as paradigmatic and applicable for any kind of education dealing with the topic of belief and believing in public schools. The project has in mind the situation of teachers in public schools and has the intention to deal with learning barriers in the first approach to credition. An important aim of the project is to detect, define and analyze barriers that prevent “newcomers” (in this case teachers or school children, who haven’t heard or learned about creditions so far) when encountering creditions for the first time—be it as an idea, as a concept, as a model or in theoretical debates. We argue that addressing this issue helps to bridge the gap between basic and applied research of the credition research project. For the empirical part, we have chosen teachers of religious education in public schools as our target group. We intend to start a survey that is international (schools from Croatia, Germany, and Austria are involved in the cooperation network) and will nevertheless provide comparable results. A broader empirical database is not yet available, but we have data from pre-test studies that have not yet been published. In this paper, I will present the theoretical background and first results which have been influencing the actual research perspectives.