Post: Tim Hall, Ph.D., Executive Director, Religion Matters
When I talk with teachers about global competence, the conversation often turns to what we want our students to take with them when they leave our classrooms. We hope they can navigate an increasingly complex world. A world filled with difference, ambiguity, and interconnection. Yet we seldom talk about how to help them understand those differences rather than tolerate them.
This is where religious literacy and global competence interconnect. Both ask us to see human diversity not as a problem to be solved, but as a story to be understood.
The Moral Work of Understanding
As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006) reminds us in Cosmopolitanism, cross-cultural understanding begins with a simple recognition of our shared humanity. Genuine conversation across differences grows from seeing others as people with stories, experiences, and perspectives worth engaging. That idea that we share a moral world even when we don’t share beliefs sits at the core of global education.
Appiah’s notion of “shared stories” helps students move beyond seeing religion as difference or danger. Every culture tells stories to explain meaning, identity, and belonging. When we teach students to listen for those stories in history, art, literature, or civic life, we help them see that understanding difference isn’t just empathy; it’s a form of civic responsibility.
Religious Literacy as Global Competence
Religious literacy gives students the tools to interpret how beliefs shape people’s lives and choices. It helps them ask informed questions about culture and conflict, and to distinguish between individual experience and group stereotype.
When we teach about religion academically, not devotionally, we are building the same cognitive and civic skills global competence requires: perspective-taking, evidence-based reasoning, and respect for diverse ways of knowing.
In short, religious literacy is global competence in practice.
Teaching the Human Story
Across my work with teachers, I’ve seen how inquiry-based approaches allow students to encounter religion through primary sources, art, and lived experience. A question like “How do belief systems shape how people understand justice?” can lead to rich, interdisciplinary exploration that bridges world history and current events.
Appiah reminds us that we cannot expect consensus, and we shouldn’t. The goal of global learning is not to erase differences but to sustain dialogue across them. For Appiah (2006), the strength of dialogue isn’t measured by whether we agree, but by our willingness to remain in conversation across differences.
In that sense, global competence begins not with travel or technology, but with conversation. This is the very kind of moral and intellectual exchange that inquiry makes possible.
Moving the Conversation Forward
My recent National Council for the Social Studies House of Delegates resolution on religious literacy education sponsored by the North Carolina Council for the Social Studies invites our professional community to think about how we model these values ourselves. Just as students learn to ask better questions, we too must keep asking: How can our teaching help students see difference as dialogue, and dialogue as the foundation of democracy?
Understanding difference is not just a classroom goal. It’s the civic work of our time.
📄 Promoting Religious Literacy Education as an Essential Component of Social Studies Education
👉 Read the Full Resolution
Reference
Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. W. W. Norton & Company.
AI Disclosure
Portions of this post were supported by generative tools such as ChatGPT (GPT-4) and Grammarly for organization and language refinement. All ideas, interpretations, and final edits reflect my own professional judgment, classroom experience, and commitment to thoughtful, inclusive, and inquiry-based social studies education.
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