Views of high school students on the diversities of Islamic thought and their teaching in the context of religions culture and ethics knowledge courses

The issue of teaching the religions and beliefs that have shaped the lifestyles of people in several aspects of life has a great importance today. In a period where people with several different beliefs and opinions live together, it is crucial for individuals to not only learn about their religions and beliefs but also try to understand others by knowing about different religions and beliefs. In this context, as a requirement of the pluralist religious education in Turkey, the implementations and works towards the importance of teaching different interpretations in the dominant religion and the teaching of other religions has become prominent. As a result of the pluralist philosophy, Turkey has included the teaching of faith-related, creation-related and sufistic interpretations of Islam more inclusively especially after the year 2000 in its curricula. In this context, the authorities started to include these topics on some class levels in the curricula of the courses of Religious Culture and Knowledge of Morality and their textbooks. The purpose of this study is to determine the views of high school students on the interpretation differences in the Islamic culture and provide a contribution to curriculum development work. Within this scope of the study questionnaires were applied to 956 students enrolled at different high schools selected from the central districts of the province of Sakarya in Turkey, and the results of the analyses were interpreted by using the SPSS package software