Religious Education

A Conceptual and Interdisciplinary Approach for Secondary Level

Clive Erricker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136998300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

The role of Religious Education in secondary schools is the subject of national and international debate. This book examines the current debates surrounding RE and puts forward a new approach to teaching the subject that is non-faith based and focused on conceptual enquiry and the development of a clear pedagogy. The book is based on the Living Difference learning model developed in Hampshire and adopted in other parts of the UK, which is sparking international discussion and provides an effective approach to implementing the new secondary curriculum.

The chapters include examinations of:

• religious education and the curriculum
• an interdisciplinary approach to religious education
• the significance of pedagogy and learners' development
• planning, progression, assessment and delivery
• specific case studies and examples of good practice in schools
• theoretical grounding and the future of RE
• the effects of globalisation, post-modernity and multiculturalism.

Providing a basis for developing thinking about Religious Education, its place in the curriculum and how it can be delivered effectively in schools, this book is essential reading for tutors, students and teachers.

PART 1
Contextualising religious education

CHAPTER 1
Religion and education in the modern world

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a summary of some of the major contextualising features that surround and impose themselves on the teaching of religious education today. In the sections that follow I have tried to provide a progressive ‘map’ of those features giving some historical information, some contemporary commentary and some informed opinions and judgements to help us make sense of the situation we are in if we concern ourselves with teaching RE. The aim, by the end of this chapter, is to reflect on what the present purpose of the subject should be, before embarking, in Chapter 2, on a more focused study of religious education and then, in Chapter 3, on some of the influential approaches that have been and are being undertaken. In brief we need to find our own starting point.

The historical context and the present situation

Since the European Enlightenment there has always been the ‘religious question’ in that, as the Western nations developed and secularised, at the same time, religion persisted despite the sometimes secular constitutions put in place. By this I mean that the course of history, unlike before that time, was not dominated either by religious questions or religious groups. Consider the demise of metaphysics in philosophy, the rise of scientific method as the means to knowledge, the disappearance of any form of religious cosmology and the significant impact of the theory of evolution (and the recent controversies over creationism and intelligent design). To be sure, however, religion has persisted. It has a significant influence within the democracy of the United States and is still institutionally influential in Europe; for example through the Church of England and the Lutheran and Calvinist legacies in the north and the Roman Catholic persistence in the south. The latter also still has an international appeal. But, in particular, the ‘religious question’ has been more one of its accommodation than its previous dominance: a shift from power to varying degrees of influence. Blasphemy, whilst still on the statute books in the UK, was not taken so seriously. When Monty Python’s Life of Brian was accused of just this offence it was, for the majority of the population, a source of amusement.

All that has changed. With the end of the Cold War, the demise of the Soviet structure, the bringing down of both the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, the deposition of the Shah with the Iranian Revolution and subsequent events in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan, globalisation has brought religion firmly back on the agenda. This is not just due to the rise of militant, fundamentalist Islam. As the Communist threat disappeared, so free-market economics boomed. The bringing down of barriers to freedom and democracy also resulted in the erasure of barriers to capitalism and the possibility of economic exploitation, of wealth and markets in new countries. As a result politics in the West has moved to the right, and this has had a concomitant effect on religion; its influential movements are now right wing. One example is the rise of the evangelical Christian influence in the United States. Their pro-life and anti-abortion stance has had a significant influence on the debate in this area, as has the influence of the Catholic Church. Similarly homosexual issues have come to the fore in the Episcopalian world, with the election of a homosexual bishop in New Hampshire and the subsequent protests by the African wing of that fraternity and the ceding of diocesan groups in the US to take up African pastoral leadership as a result – a phenomenon beyond conception only ten years ago. The gender issue, the right of women to be leaders in the church, has been attacked with renewed vigour.

Further afield, blasphemy as a serious indictment returned to our shores with the fatwah on Salman Rushdie. This was not condemned by other religious groups; nor indeed was the extraordinarily fierce Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons or the violence of Sikhs at the showing of a Birmingham play, involving rape in a Gurdwara, by a female Sikh playwright, which caused the play to be closed. Honour killings regularly appear in our newspapers – the latest, at the time of writing, being the case of 17-year-old Basra student Rand Abdel-Qader in Iraq, who spoke with and came to know an English soldier, became infatuated with him and, as a result, was killed by her father, Abder-Qader Ali, with the help of her brothers. In an article in the Observer newspaper her father was interviewed and said,‘Death was the least she deserved … I don’t regret it … and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion’ (Sarhan and Davies 2008: 8). On the same page the paper carries a rider, in an accompanying article, that says honour killings are not sanctioned by Islam and they were born out of tribal culture. We shall come back to this tricky religious-cultural conundrum later. Suffice it to say, at this point, that the father cited Islam as an authoritative reason for his action, that he received support from police and friends and that the accompanying article is not polemically opposed in its approach, consistent with responses to the former events cited.What exactly is going on that we wish to refrain at all costs from criticising religion per se, except when we can siphon off ‘extremists’ or ‘tribal groups’ who can be said not to represent the true face of their religion but the face of ‘terrorism’ or ‘tribal culture’ instead? Contrastingly, back in 1996, the religious studies scholar John Bowker had stated, somewhat prophetically at the time, that:

For years I have been pointing out that religions are likely to destroy human life as we know it now on this planet. Religions contribute to virtually all the intransigent and seemingly insoluble conflicts in the world.

(Bowker 1996: 3)

It was on this basis that Bowker thought religions should be taught in religious education. He received little or no support from the RE community although his views were in some respects to be echoed by the scientist Richard Dawkins later.

This is introducing us to the dilemmas of postmodernity: a time in which modernity (the idea of progress) wrestles with the continued presence of the pre-modern (for example tribal cultures and fundamentalisms) and postmodernist criticisms (critics of the project of modernity itself with its over-arching grand narrative).

There is an historical dimension to all this and we need to recall it in order to understand the place of religion, and, often, the protection of it in the way it is represented in society (through the media and religious bodies) and in education, in the recent past and the present. In the period from the Second World War until the 1990s the United Kingdom went through a period of change that was significantly influenced by three factors: immigration from former colonies for those with UK passports; a substantial increase in the number of students who went on to higher education; and a progressive liberalism, most prevalent in the middle decades of that age and declining toward the end. During this period the policy of multiculturalism became a defining factor.

Migration and multiculturalism

Migration to the United Kingdom is nothing new. In particular the area around what was the London docks, Whitechapel and Brick Lane has seen several waves of immigrants, Jews, Huguenots and Bangladeshis prominent among them, and areas like Southall have experienced a demographic change that totally altered it from white working class, in the main, to becoming a veritable ‘little India’. To experience this to the full, go there at the time of the Sikh celebration of Baisakhi, when rented BMWs are driven up and down the main streets and the noise of the horns fills the night air as young men seek recognition from Indian girls walking the pavements (accompanied by older female members of the families in many cases, it must be said). Other urban manufacturing areas similarly acquired new ethnic populations in the Midlands and North West especially. Typically migrant communities initially seek to preserve what they have brought with them: from cultural habits and states of mind, to language and the recreation of a tribal geography that reflects the past situation. The multiculturalist policy of this period sought to embrace a sense of diversity in society and in schools as a new form of cultural wealth. The anti-racist policy of the time set out to highlight discrimination, oppose the ‘racist’ discourse and champion the cause of minorities. These policies were very different in type. Religious education tended to house itself within the former. This was partly because ‘anti-racist’ educators were concerned about ‘racism’ not religion. It was also because religious education needed to project a message that made it more prominent, useful and yet less controversial in the curriculum. For ‘anti-racist’ educators there was a progressive political battle to be fought and religion was not a progressive force.

RE had already embarked upon its most notable curriculum change. In 1944 (the Butler Act) religious education was still avowedly confessional. It was presumed that it was the vehicle for teaching Christianity to the progeny of a Christian population. This was also reflected in higher education in which religion was taught on theological degrees centred on Christianity. It was not until 1964 that the first Religious Studies degree, in its own right, was started at Lancaster University, the initiator being Ninian Smart, the first professor in the subject heading the first department of that name. The liberal tendency of that time brought about an interest in other worldviews and travel to other cultures, the hippy trail of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The mirage that we were shaking off the past and creating a new and quite different ‘brotherly’ or ‘sisterly’ future was beguiling and abounded in a new burgeoning student generation, partly precipitated by the reforms of the Wilson government and the initiation of the Open University. Religious studies found its niche within this. This mood was not about discovering new doctrines but one of replacing old doctrines with a doctrineless future. Of itself this had nothing to do with the parallel phenomenon of post-colonial immigration. It had, perhaps, more to do with the évènements of Paris in 1968. But the two events served each other well as far as the study of world religions in schools, as it came to be known, was concerned and, like all ill-fitting conflations of purpose, it resulted in confused policy and practice. (Were we teaching the religious views of an increasingly multicultural society or were we introducing children to a new, and potentially limitless, world of ideas? As we shall see later, these are not the same thing.) For example, the emerging teacher graduates did not reflect the new ethnic and religious population of England and Wales in their number, but often sought to represent them in the curriculum. But it did put world religions on the map. With graduates emerging from increasing numbers of Religious Studies degrees and with pupils in urban schools from immigrant families whose religion was other than Christian (Muslim, Hindu or Sikh most typically), the curriculum swung toward the teaching of religions rather than just Christianity. This was not uniform of course; the shire counties moved more slowly on the whole than urban populations and church schools more slowly still. Jack Priestley (2006: 1001–1017) points to the first break in the mould being the Birmingham Agreed Syllabus in 1975, which included five religions and created controversy. It followed on from the criticisms in the Ramsey Report, The Fourth R (Ramsey 1970). Priestley quotes Adrian Bell as saying that the latter ‘constituted a “minor revolution” for RE within the curriculum, one that was based upon what the report called “educational criteria” rather than on any position of unique privilege’ (Priestley 2006: 1012; Bell 1985: 190). Priestley adds that it was another decade or two before the more rural areas ‘started to feel that multiculturalism was their problem too’ (Priestley 2006: 1015). The significant thing about this progressively sweeping change was that it took no notice of the law in place at that time. It wasn’t until the Education Reform Act of 1988 that the law acknowledged the need to teach the principal faiths in Great Britain, but with Christianity restored to a place of most significance.

That RE had turned into a different animal, in terms of the revision of syllabuses and the representation of religions, there was no doubt. Its connection to immigration is also clear from the case of the Birmingham syllabus, as is its connection to multiculturalism: the ideas of tolerance, acceptance and even respect for the beliefs and cultures of others (we shall return to the idea of ‘others’ ag...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1 Contextualising religious education
• PART 2 Living Difference: an approach through conceptual enquiry
• PART 3 The future for education and religious education
• Bibliography
• Index