Constructivism in education and religious education

There are many attempts to improve and practice of new educational approaches in religious education recently in parallel of increasing needs in education caused by social changes. In terms of religious education, new approaches of religious teachings in western world, and new theories and methods in attempts to advance religious education programmes in Turkey, have been taken as a key point. In this process, it is one of the main research areas that what are the effects of the assumptions in these religious educational theories, on theoretical and practical aspects of religious education. In recent years, as in other fields in religious education, one of the main theories that affects religious education and have been considered research subject in religious education is constructivism. There are increasing number of research that focused on the possibility of theoretical and practical usage of constructivism as with the topics of truth and knowledge in religious education, and on the possibility of practicing it in terms of its principles and methods. In our study that centred the philosophical and psychological grounds in terms of understanding the truth and knowledge and basic assumptions of constructivism, it is aimed to prove that constructivism in religious education can provide a ground for philosophical, theological and educational aspects of it, and it has been discussed some problems that may arise with this. In our study, radical constructivism comes up with negative results in grounding its philosophical and theological aspects because of its extreme personal and relativist ideas, and additionally it is not suitable for educational aspects because of its extreme personalised teaching methods. On the other hand, moderate constructivism would have been unproblematic in grounding theoretical aspects of religious education and in practicing of educational aspects of it. Additionally, it has been said that constructivism has important contributions on creating an understanding of religious education that provokes educational sides of it, and on practicing a student centred educational process.