The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how four teachers in Religious Education (RE) in up-per secondary school in Sweden interpret, experience and practice non-confessional teaching in RE. Four teachers were interviewed and the data was categorized through idea analysis. Karin Kittelmann Flensners (2015) thesis about a hegemonic secularistic discourse was used as theory in the analysis of the results. The ontological perspective in this thesis is social constructivist. In the context of this study, this means that RE teaching is formed both by the teachers and their students.The results show that there are signs of a secularistic discourse within the non-confessional RE classrooms. Examples of this is that non-religious students talk about religion and religious peo-ple in condescending ways and there are indications that non-religious world views are perceived as more neutral than religious world views.The concept of non-confessional teaching is primarily being related to the concept of neutrality. Even though the participants are sceptic towards whether it is possible to be neutral, three of them strive for neutrality in their teaching. The fourth participant chooses to teach non-confes-sionally through a variety of biased positions, which need to be explained for the students. The fact that the participants are sceptic towards the possibility of being neutral challenges the hege-monic secularistic discourse.The participants suggest several ways for practicing non-confessional RE teaching. The common denominator for all of them is to give the students different perspectives of religions, world views and ethical methods.

Religious education teachers in modern secular countries like Sweden are faced with many challenges. For example: how do the teachers encourage students to talk about religion when religion is largely understood as a private matter? Kittelmann Flensner found in her 2015 study that Swedish schools operate under what she calls a secularist discourse. This paper aims to examine that claim by analysing interviews with active Swedish religious education teachers. By applying Systematic text condensation to four transcribed interviews and analysing the results, this paper looks at what traces of a secularist discourse that can be found. Furthermore, the paper aims to answer how teachers relate to a secularist discourse and what didactic choices they make to encourage their students to talk about religion.To analyse these questions Kittelmann Flensner’s term secularist discourse is used along with Shiner and Casanova’s views on secularism. In terms of the didactic perspective, Hartman’s presentation of the didactic questions is used to analyse some of the methods teachers describe in the material. In short, my results show that Kittelmann Flensner might have generalized her results when it comes to viewing religion as a private matter in the classroom. Additionally, Casanova’s view on secularisation can explain only a few instances of public religion in the classroom. My conclusion is that the secularist discourse may be present in many classrooms but with exceptions in some multi-religious classes. My conclusion regarding the didactic analysis is that religious education teachers who want their students to talk more about religion need to do mainly three things; get to know their students well, spark interest among the students and bridge the gap between talking about religion in private and in public.

The purpose of this study is to determine to which extent discourses identified within Swedish religious education also exists within the journal Religion & Livsfrågor [eng: Religion & Life Questions]. To what extent does the journal confirm their existence, are they problematized, and is there any way to avoid them? Previous research include mainly doctoral theses about discourses within the religious education in Sweden, as well as some research regarding the formation of the academic discipline didactics of religion. This study also relies on one particular study in didactics when choosing the material. The theoretical approach is based on previous research by Karin Kittelmann Flensner. She finds that there exist three discourses within religious education in contemporary Sweden: one secularist discourse, one spiritual discourse and one Swedishness discourse. A total of 28 numbers of Religion & Livsfrågor has been analyzed by applying the previously mentioned discourses onto the material. Findings indicate that these discourses also exist within the journal. Sometimes the discourses are problematized, but there are seldom any advices on how to avoid them. It also seems that these discourses existed both before and after Kittelmann Flensner’s study, which seem to indicate that the progress made in academic research aren’t always applied in schools. One way to give the teachers the opportunity to avoid these discourses would be to raise awareness regarding them.