Charting the hermeneutical turn, its impact on religious education curricula and developing principles for pedagogy

Abstract This article develops a Catholic tradition educational understanding to religious education (RE) classrooms through the application of hermeneutical approaches to sacred texts. This is part of a historic intellectual clarification in how the Church expresses the relationship between reason and faith, identifying disciplinary methods of meaning that contribute to faith and understanding. These methods constitute an integration of disciplinary knowledge practices and personal-spiritual dimensions from the field of Biblical hermeneutics, into RE pedagogy and didactics. A hermeneutical turn in education is responding to critiques that traditional RE approaches to text engagement were detached from the natal (inherent and disciplinary) ways of knowing embedded in the subject and tradition. Sacred text traditions have long emphasized personal engagement, and 20th-century developments in Catholic Biblical interpretation, for example, reshaped academic methods of scripture study. This article originally argues that such shifts have now influenced early 21st-century school curriculum developments, particularly in Catholic education in England and Wales. The turn now incudes changes in the guidance on handling Biblical texts in RE. Reporting this trajectory of change, the article next sets out principles from scholarly and personal hermeneutics to inform a more authentic, natal and subject-aligned approach to sacred text education in schools to further a spiritual understanding in education.