Textbook Gods - Genre, Text and Teaching Religious Studies - Bengt-Ove Andreassen
Representations of Indigenous Australian Religions in New South Wales (NSW) Higher School Certificate Studies of Religion Textbooks
Textbook Gods - Genre, Text and Teaching Religious Studies - Bengt-Ove Andreassen
Carole M. Cusack [+]
University of Sydney
Carole M. Cusack is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney. She researches and teaches on contemporary religious trends (including pilgrimage and tourism, modern Pagan religions, NRMs, and religion and popular culture). Her books include Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith (Ashgate, 2010) and (with Katharine Buljan) Anime, Religion, and Spirituality: Profane and Sacred Worlds in Contemporary Japan (Equinox, 2015). In 2016 she became Editor of Fieldwork in Religion, and she is also Editor of Literature & Aesthetics (journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics).
Description
The author examines the presentation of Indigenous Australian religions in current textbooks used in Australian secondary schools in the New South Wales Higher School Certificate (matriculation) course, Studies of Religion. Cusack argues that the majority of textbooks for this course, and the subject syllabus they reflect, continue to manifest the dominance of the “world religions” paradigm and the normative status of Christianity in defining religion. Aboriginal religion is generally treated cautiously and with respect, reflecting the aura of “political correctness” surrounding discourses about Indigenous Australians in the twenty-first century.