Pioneering New Paths for Adult Religious Education in the Roman Catholic Community

Abstract

The Roman Catholic Church faces significant challenges in fostering effective adult religious education in contemporary social and cultural contexts. This challenge is particularly acute in western societies and the Church is currently reflecting on how best to respond. Here it is suggested that insights from communities of practice theory and contemporary educational leadership theory have potential to foster effective adult religious education in parishes. Catholic educational institutions, and many other types of Catholic organizations. As an organizational form, communities of practice can exist within different models of faith communities and be established and integrated into existing structures. It is also noted that the Church has multiple historical precursors of communities of practice to develop adult religious educators and leaders. This article presents a preliminary conceptual exploration of how the Church might benefit from current communities of practice theory. It further considers how this might be appropriated and applied to promote the development of promising lay adult religious educators to enhance adult religious education teaching and learning as part of wider institutional renewal.

Formation for Mission in Urban Britain: The Birmingham Mission Apprentice Scheme

“…As such, it has become more of a management tool (Cox, 2005: 1). There is insufficient space here to give this later, more prescriptive understanding of a "community of practice" careful theological scrutiny (here, see: Barker, 2014;Otero and Cottrell, 2013). However, in its more general descriptive sense, the idea of "communities of practice" (henceforth "CoP") offers a useful mirror to evaluate the Mission Apprentice Scheme, as a pathway for lay adult education and formation for mission.…”

From Action Learning to Bonding Social Capital? The Potential of Action Learning Sets Among Isolated Rural Clergy

“…Although this literature search uncovered no evaluations of AL with clergy or Christian laity, various studies do point to the more general merits of small group learning and communities of practice within Christian education (for example, Davidson, 2011;Elias, 2006;Horder, 2010;McCollum, 2005;Otero & Cottrell, 2013) and to the benefits of group facilitation for ministry (Whitehead, 2014). Hull (1985) argued that 'the best learning, especially in the case of adults, is almost always in groups' (p. 17); and for his part Higton (2006) claimed that 'there is no solo route' to learning, because knowledge emerges out of an interactive process (p. 21).…”

Newcomers Learning Religious Ritual

“…7 The concept of community of practice has been highly influential in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century research on informal and workplace learning and adult education (Hughes, Jewson and Unwin 2007, 1-2). It has also been applied to investigating learning in a variety of religious and spiritual contexts: ritual magic users (Cejvan 2023;Merriam, Courteney and Baumgartner 2003), parish organs and small groups (Otero and Cottrell 2013;Anderson 2018;Regan 2016;Robinson, Cranley and O'Connell 2023), medieval monasteries (Long 2017;Long and Vanderputten 2019;Snijders 2019), extremist religious groups (Kenney 2017;Knott and Lee 2022), and faith-based collective housing (Murphy 2018), as well as among Jesus's disciples (Csinos 2010;Courduff 2018), meditation practitioners (Lomas et al 2016), Jain ritualists (Stausberg 2001), and Muslim commu nities (Olson 2017;Shanneik 2018). Only a minority of the studies target newcomers' experiences.…”