An Understanding Focused Method in Communication with Religious Texts: Asking Question and Reaching “Right” Questions

One of the primary goals of Religious Education is to make students come together with Qur’an text and religious content seamlessly. In order to reach this goal, religious educators usually support students to have the knowledge of the text and sometimes students only memorize the content. But although “knowing” and “memorizing” stages are important for educational processes, they are not functional enough in the long term. For providing a permanent learning, students should also “understand” the text. Besides, students cannot create their own ideas and interpretations by the ways of knowing and memorizing. Because they can achieve to make their “own” senses only by their understanding. For these reasons, setting “understanding” as a goal for RE and defining the bases of an “understanding focused religious education” are an important responsibility of all. There are lots of bases for understanding focused religious education. One of them is “asking question”. Asking question to the religious texts and questioning the content have crucial effects for understanding processes due to their role of being a chance for having a dialogue with the text and its author. Therefore, it is necessary to determine which types of questions are useful for permanent learning and which types of contributions to understanding are limited. In Religious Education which is a social discipline, in order to reveal the meaning, the questions that are convenient to open a field for individual interpretations of the students can be functional. These questions are mostly open-ended questions and high level cognitive questions offering students an opportunity for their ownevaluations. However, students can establish the healthiest communication with Qur’an text and religious content through contextual and existential questions that they will pose to them