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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes how resources on East Asian Religions are utilized by Italian Catholic RE teachers. It aims at highlighting issues such as the concept of religion, oriental representations and the role of contemporary techno-cultural context.

Paper long abstract:

East Asian religions (hereafter: EAR) provides interesting case-studies for examining conceptualizations and representations of religion/s, especially if we consider that they are often positioned in contrastive terms with the euro-centric, Christian-centric ideas about religion.

In the last decades scholars examined EAR in order to criticize the concept of religion. Meanwhile popular representations vary, depicting EAR as the quintessential expression of religion, or as its contrary, classifying them as "philosophies", "way of life", "spiritualities" and the like.

In relation to the Conference theme, the latter popular representations are especially growing in number through the Internet, the entertainment and the advertisement industry. Also, many contemporary holistic 'technologies' aimed at obtaining health, wellbeing and self-improvement are inspired by images and concepts from EAR, which in turn influence their representations.

This paper analyzes how multimedia resources (text, sound, images, videos etc.) concerning EAR are selected and utilized in classroom by Italian teachers of Catholic Religious Education, especially materials not purposively created for teaching and/or available through Web. What are their contents and nature? Why and how they have been adopted? With which educational perspective?

The data for research are obtained through interview from teachers and the examination of resources. The analysis is carried over considering these issues:

- The role of the Eurocentric concept of religion

- The colonial, orientalist and self-orientalist dynamics.

- The contemporary technological-cultural context.

- The teachers' role and identity as Catholic educators.

Reflections from the point of view of the study of religion-didactics are also proposed in order to clarify areas of possibile accordance or of disagreement concerning actual practices of confessional RE.