Background and experience
Background and Experience
I have worked as a university lecturer in Religious Education at the University of Agder (UiA) since 2020. I teach ethics, philosophy, and religious education didactics at all levels of teacher education programmes.
In the autumn of 2025, I began a 50% doctoral fellowship at the Department of Religion, Philosophy and History. In my PhD project, I explore how the co-creation of religious education learning resources using cinematic 360-degree videos can contribute to the development of empathy, perspective-taking, and resonance in Religious Education (RE). The overarching research question of the project is:
How may integrative use of cinematic 360-videos foster perspective-taking and empathic abilities and create resonance in religious education (RE)?
Teaching and learning resources based on virtual reality (VR) have the potential to open up cognitive and emotional first-person perspectives, which may enhance ethical reflection and perspective-taking (Smith-Gahrsen et al., 2024; Smith-Gahrsen, 2024). However, this is still a conceptually and empirically underdeveloped field within research on religious education didactics.
My project consists of a literature review and two empirical case studies in which we have developed VR resources for RE in collaboration with primary school pupils and student teachers. I employ reflexive thematic analysis of pupil interviews and reflection notes, which I interpret through M. H. Davis’s multidimensional theory of empathy (1980; 1983) and the concepts of the visitor, the cognitive tourist, and the assimilated as developed by H. Arendt (1978) and J. Disch (1994). These religious education perspectives both align with and challenge two of the core elements in the Norwegian curriculum for RE (LK20), which states that pupils should develop the ability to take others’ perspectives and engage in ethical reflection.
Areas of responsibility
I am course coordinator for the advanced courses in Religious Education (REL131 and REL132) in the Primary Teacher Education programme (GLU), and course coordinator for the RE component within the subject Pedagogy and Pupil Knowledge (PEL) in the fifth year of GLU (PED427/429).
Teaching
In addition to teaching REL131/132 and PED427/429, I also teach RE courses at other levels of teacher and upper secondary teacher education programmes (REL120/122, REL125/129, REL126/130, REL410/419).
Research
My research interests span the use of VR and AR in educational contexts and methodological and epistemological questions in religious education.