Judging, Deciding and Positioning in Ethics and Religious Education. An Analysis of Learning Tasks

State schools play a crucial role in regulating social issues and problems in civil societies. Consequently, students should learn to position themselves on those issues and problems in all school subjects. Based on a research overview the article provides new insights into textbook research regarding ethics as well as religious education in Germany. Despite its exploratory nature, this study analyses different kinds of learning tasks. The most striking result to emerge from the data is that learning tasks hardly distinguish between 'judging', 'deciding' and 'positioning'. The principal theoretical implication of this study therefore is that 'positioning' should be understood as a learning process including 'judging', 'deciding'.