Worldview Diversity Education Practices: Findings from a Comparative Higher Education Study

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Formal and Informal Religious Study in Homogenous as well as Pluralistic Contexts

Proposal

Introduction
Across contexts, there is interest in educating students to be able to understand and engage with religious difference. In pluralistic settings, this can take the shape of multifaith or interreligious education, referred to as worldview education or a worldviews approach to religious education (Cooling, 2023; Lipiäinen et al., 2020; Valk et al., 2020). This transnational comparative case study (CCS; Barlett & Vavrus, 2019) utilized a broad survey with follow-up elite interviews to gather baseline data on the worldview diversity education (WVDE; Author, 2023a) practices global campuses are engaging in.

Relevance
In a rapidly changing global education landscape inhabited by diasporic and locally contextualized religious cultures (Edwards, 2018), the CIES 2025 conference invites scholars to ask, “what are we doing and why we do things the way we do?” This research examined practices and leaders’ underlying beliefs about WVDE to better understand both the “what” and the “why.” Both are important to the design of student learning in pluralistic environments. Specifically, this study sought to answer: (1) to what extent are global liberal arts colleges and universities engaging in worldview diversity education and (2) how do select campus leaders express their approaches to and rationales for worldview diversity education? This paper prioritizes the findings from the first question.

Theory/Context
Global liberal arts colleges and universities (Author, 2023b) provided the institutional context for the study, selected for their international student bodies and their shared ethos of intercultural learning, missions to develop global citizens, and commitments to interdisciplinary undergraduate teaching.

Placing worldview education in conversation with both diversity and intercultural education, as suggested by Edwards & Kitamura (2019), the study’s interdisciplinary conceptual framework combined contextual aspects of the interfaith learning and development framework (Mayhew & Rockenbach, 2021) from student affairs with conceptualizations of religious literacy (Moore, 2015; Francis & Dinham, 2022) and worldview education (Edwards & Kitamura, 2019; Shaw, 2023; Iliško et al., 2020) from religious studies. A critical internationalization studies lens (Stein & McCartney, 2021) drove examination of leaders’ underlying rationales. Comparative international education scholarship informed the framing of educational practices in multiple layers of context and connected to global education policyscapes (Ball et al., 2017; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Global (Mendenhall et al., 2018), diversity (Williams, 2013; Adserias et al., 2017), and change leadership (Kezar, 2018) scholarship shaped the study’s focus on senior leaders as key actors poised to lead, support, and provide institutional narrative for WVDE.

Mode of Inquiry
The CCS-led design was sequential exploratory. First, I recruited participants who met campus and leader selection criteria from across 50 higher education networks. The survey engaged 22% of the estimated existing global liberal arts campuses (Godwin, 2013) and was representative of their known geographical spread, with most located in the Global South.

The Qualtrics survey took 15-20 minutes to complete and included write-in, multiple-choice, and slider questions about campus and regional demographics and WVDE practices. I analyzed the survey descriptive statistics to identify trends then combined these with campuses’ relevant web content and Pew Religious Diversity Index (RDI; 2014) ratings to prepare interview briefs.

Using Zoom, I conducted and transcribed 45-90 minute semi-structured interviews with nine senior leaders including presidents, chief academic and student affairs officers. The interviews followed a protocol focused on leaders’ rationales for WVDE and included elaboration on their campuses’ associated practices, serving as a source of triangulation for the survey data. Guided by the 3 CCS axes of comparison, I inductively and deductively coded then thematically analyzed the transcripts, adopting a reflexive codebook approach (Braun & Clarke, 2021).

Findings
The analysis found strong reported engagement in multiple worldview diversity education practices by nearly all global liberal arts campuses (94%), averaging 5-6 practices per campus. Following is a snapshot of the findings organized by the categories of people, programs, and spaces.

People
One-third of all campuses house a religious or spiritual life office, often staffed by chaplain employees, but sometimes by unpaid or third-party religious workers. Religiously affiliated campuses were twice as likely as their non-religious counterparts to have a spiritual life office and staff, including interfaith staff.

Programs
Nearly all campuses (92%) provided religious academic and/or co-curricular programming. They offered interreligious or world religions academic electives (52%), conducted multifaith or religious co-curricular programming (45%), and/or organized visits to local religious sites (36%). Additionally, most campuses (64%) held observations of religious holidays or festivals. One in four provided spiritual formation in a particular tradition. Of these, the majority were private campuses, but 40% were hybrid or government sponsored institutions in contexts where religious instruction was a societal expectation or legal requirement.

Spaces
Campuses varied in offering interreligious (59%) or dedicated spaces for specific worldview communities (44%), occasionally offering both: one campus was noteworthy for featuring both a mosque and a chapel. Many of the campuses were in medium to very high RDI contexts in proximity to multiple communities’ sites of worship, but others were more isolated, making access to religious spaces more challenging. Just under half of the campuses reported flexibility around housing accommodations and catering for diverse worldviews, an area of practice that has been raised as an equity and well-being concern by previous scholars (Maples et al., 2021).

Interviews with leaders confirmed the survey findings, providing rich illustrations of all three categories of practice. Additionally, leaders elaborated on their conceptualizations of WVDE and their philosophical and pedagogical approaches, discussed in a separate manuscript under review. Those findings speak to the “why” for worldview diversity education and were made possible by the study’s sequential design that first identified “what” is happening in this area of practice.

Significance of the Contribution
As the first globally comparative study of worldview-oriented religious education beyond dyadic national comparisons, this research extends knowledge and establishes important benchmarks for WVDE practices. Global liberal arts campuses’ strength of engagement and intentionality confirms these campuses as innovative and world-leading in addressing this form of student and societal diversity, offering insights for other campuses and national contexts.

Author

• Renee L Bowling, The Ohio State University