Faith-Based Inquiry as Bounded Openness: Negotiating Revelational Authority and Student Agency in Indonesian Islamic Religious Education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62730/z8ryyz05Keywords:
bounded openness, faith-based inquiry, Islamic religious education, revelational authority, qualitative triangulationAbstract
Confessional religious education faces a precise pedagogical problem: students are invited to question and construct meaning, while revelation retains normative authority. This exploratory qualitative case examined how an Islamic Religious Education teacher and students at an Indonesian junior high school negotiated that tension. The multi-method corpus comprised a teacher interview (11 question-answer units), interviews with 8 students across varying participation levels (S1–S8), 4 classroom observation logs (280 minutes across 4 lesson blocks), and document analysis of lesson plans (Modul Ajar) and student worksheets (LKPD). Analyzed through iterative condensation, comparison, and abductive reflexive thematic analysis, the findings show that inquiry operated as bounded openness. Contextual cases, peer discussion, and multiple viewpoints broadened students' understanding of religious teaching and its application; the teacher then re-entered as the agent of verification, distinguishing defensible interpretations from those inconsistent with recognized sources. Students experienced this not as a contradiction but as a division of epistemic labor, moving between peer exploration and teacher clarification. Inquiry therefore shifted the classroom status of religious knowledge from passively received information to an authoritative source encountered interpretively, without treating the truth-status of revelation as undecided. This arrangement proved fragile: a 70-minute lesson block, uneven readiness, classroom noise, and limited device access compressed verification into declaration, eroding the boundary between inquiry and transmission. The article offers a tri-tiered coding hierarchy and a methodologically triangulated specification of how authority and agency are arranged sequentially in confessional inquiry, establishing Faith-Based Inquiry as a testable proposition.
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