Praxeological research on teaching. The example of dialogical confessional religious instruction in Vienna

In this paper, we present and discuss selective results of our accompanying study on the dialogical confessional religious instruction project in Vienna. This specific mode of religious instruction in schools is characterised by an inter-con-fessional focus that aims at enabling students to both deepen their appreciation of their own religious denomination as well as learn to enter into a dialogue about different confessions with others. This form of instruction is therefore implemented in learner groups consisting of members of various Christian denominations. The study presented here addresses the so-called delegation model, in which a confessionally diverse group of students is taught by a single teacher. Our results show that instruction in this specific setting does predomi-nantly fail to follow the form outlined in the program. Rather, we could observe multiple reductions of complexity that are in some cases contrary to the pro-gram's intended goals.