Page - 24 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/02

24 | Mirko Roth www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/2, 17–35 religious studies methodologies critically. therefore, the high aim of teaching religious studies should be to design learning situations and teaching scenarios in such a way that they enable students to acquire those competencies that identify a scholar of religious studies. in my mind, these include, in addition to more general skills of critical learning competence with regard to religious studies, three other fields of competence that make possible the critical recon- struction of religions as mediatised phenomena with their various “spaces of perception”: (1) religious studies competence, (2) intercultural/interreligious competence and (3) media competence. since critical learning competence can be assumed to be a standard skill of a university graduate,11 i will not address it in the following; instead i emphasise the latter three skill sets, thus focusing on the issue of media competence. resoLUtioN: aCQUisitioN of NeCessary CoMPeteNCies in order to test my hypothesis of a critical perception of second-order mediatisa- tion in the successful teaching of religious studies, individual teaching scenarios must be designed that will meet the above-mentioned learning objectives and ensure the concomitant acquisition of the associated competencies. i consider religious studies competence (1) as described above to be the internalisation of the research style inherent to the discipline, the ability to apply religious stud- ies methods and the possession of historical knowledge and religious studies theories that are used to classify and reconstruct religious facts. such compe- tence can be achieved in the course of a study programme through learning and understanding, practice and application, critical accompaniment and reflection. the sphere of intercultural competence (2) is, for me, a core religious studies competence, but within the framework of teaching religious studies i see it as a separate focus. i understand intercultural competence to be the understand- ing that socio-historical developments are contingent, cannot be interpreted by applying teleological, universalist or evolutionary models and are dependent on many contextual factors. As a result – as described above – highly specific infra- structures, societies, cultures and religions (which are also constantly changing) emerge over generations; their complex symbolic systems have unique dimen- sions of meaning in specific “spaces of perception”. These in turn influence distinctive patterns of perception and perceptual habitus and suggest cultural and religion-specific options for interpretation and action. Students of religious studies must therefore learn to understand that their own patterns of inter- pretation cannot remain unquestioned and can at best serve as a conditional foil for any such interpretation, because these complex symbolic systems with 11 Cf. Laack 2014, 392–395.