Part of the implementation plan for the Alliance of Civilizations (AoC) in 2008-09 is to continue to develop online clearinghouses in its main areas of implementation: youth, education, media and migration.  As a global organization explicitly involved with bridge-building, facilitating, and advocating trust and understanding between cultures, the AoC serves as a prominent platform and resource to enable the widest possible dissemination of information and materials that resonate with its objectives. The AoC does not seek to duplicate or replace existing programs or initiatives that are already being carried out by other IGOs, foundations, or civil society organizations.  Indeed, partnership with existing projects at organizations like UNESCO, OSCE and others would enable effective leveraging with mutual benefits to all concerned.

Participants at the AoC January 2008 Madrid Forum expressed the strong desire that the next AoC clearinghouse should be a clearinghouse on “Education about Religions and Beliefs” (ERB). Education about different religions and beliefs, and critically thinking about the nature of beliefs, enables populations to deal sensitively and tolerantly with the reality of globalization and multiculturalism in modern societies where one will encounter people who believe in many different religions, or people who may not believe in any religion at all. Several key documents and declarations such as the Toledo Guiding Principles on Teaching about Religions and Beliefs in Public Schools (OSCE/ODIHR, 2007), Education about  Learning to Live Together (Arigatou Foundation, UNICEF, UNESCO, 2008), and important declarations such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990) and the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001) all point to the important role of education in this area to promote the pillar of “learning to live together.”  As an organization that focuses on practical steps in the mission of promoting relations between cultures, we hope our clearinghouse will be useful to policy-makers and educators in the ERB field so as to offer examples of different approaches to this subject.
 
The clearinghouse will aim to be:

a)      Dynamic with continuous updates in its various sections, with the aid of partner organizations;
b)      Useful for educators, policy-makers, and religious leaders; and
c)      Accessible widely to different kinds of users.
 
The ERB clearing house will have the following areas:

a)      An overview on Education about Religions and Beliefs.
b)      A search function
c)      A section on education about religions and beliefs in elementary and secondary education.  This section will have links to resources such as consensus guidelines about teaching about religions and belief in elementary and secondary education; collections of curricula about religions and beliefs in elementary and secondary education, and where possible, evaluations of curricular outcomes;  links to relevant associations, institutions and organizations; and events of interest to researchers, policy-makers and educators working in this area. 
d)    A magazine/journal will feature articles written on the issues above in a variety of languages.
e)     A forum will allow advocates for education about religions and beliefs, researchers, and policy makers to meet virtually and exchange ideas.

The ERB clearinghouse will work through a network of partner organizations drawn from different regions so that the materials in the clearing house are available in many languages. Each partner organization will be responsible to maintain and update the site for a limited period of time. 


For further questions, suggestions or comments, please contact Dr. Thomas Uthup, Research Manager, AoC at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it