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, Australia as well as Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School. She trained as a medievalist and her doctorate was published as Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (Cassell, 1998). She now researches primarily in contemporary religious trends and Western esotericism. 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). She edited (with Pavol Kosnáč), Fiction, Invention and Hyper-reality: From Popular Culture to Religion (Routledge, 2017).
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.