Religion in Education

Innovation in International Research

Joyce Miller, Kevin O'Grady, Ursula McKenna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135078553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Education

This volume explores numerous themes (including the influence of ethnography on religious education research and pedagogy, the interpretive approach to religious education, the relationship between research and classroom practice in religious education), providing a critique of contemporary religious education and exploring the implications of this critique for initial and continuing teacher education.

1 Robert Jackson and Warwick Research

An Introduction

Kevin O'Grady, Ursula McKenna and Joyce Miller

This book features the religious education (RE) research developed at the University of Warwick, England, led by Professor Robert Jackson. RE is understood in England as a curriculum subject which is broad and balanced and which, in fully state-funded schools, enables students to ‘learn about’ religions and to reflect on that learning (‘learning from’ religions). This phraseology provides understanding of the English RE tradition. Eight of our twelve authors are English. However, the RE research of Warwick is international in outlook, and we also include chapters from Estonia and Norway. The doctorates of eleven of the contributors were supervised by Robert Jackson—ten at the University of Warwick; one at the University of Tartu, Estonia—and the other (Bill Gent's) was examined by him.

This book is timely. It marks Professor Jackson's fortieth year as a teacher and researcher in academia (1972–2012) and appears when scholars are debating the place of the study of religion in public institutions around the world, including the United States. Thus, before we introduce the chapters, we will describe the evolution of Warwick RE research, including a summary of Jackson's interpretive approach, and make links between the approach and aspects of US and international scholarship.

The story of Warwick RE research began in 1972, when Robert Jackson was appointed to the then Coventry College of Education as a lecturer and began ethnographic research on local Hindu communities. The College merged with the University of Warwick in 1978. Soon he was joined by Eleanor Nesbitt, whose own contribution to Warwick RE work can hardly be overstated and who has provided the lead chapter for this book. Together, they began to form insights into the nature of religious traditions that have continued to underpin what has become known as the interpretive approach. These insights have to do with the internally diverse nature of religious traditions, the need to understand religious traditions at first hand rather than only through textbooks, and the need for sensitive comparison and contrast between the new ways of life studied and one's own background values and assumptions. As Jackson put it himself, in relation to his early studies of Hindu tradition:

for the first time in my life I was immersed in the religious culture of a community very different from that of either my upbringing or my university education in theology and philosophy. It soon became apparent that Hindu tradition, as expressed by my new friends and acquaintances, was both diverse and different in many ways from that portrayed in academic texts used in universities, colleges of education and schools.¹

Following the formation of the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, with Jackson as director, he and his colleagues continued to document religious traditions as dynamic and diverse, giving special attention to children's experience of religious ‘nurture’. He led the first UK Economic and Social Research Council—funded project on religion and education, the Religious Education and Community Project, leading not only to academic publications but also school texts (the Warwick Religious Education series). Early recognition of the unit's excellence came in 1996, in the form of the prestigious Templeton UK Award, for promoting intercultural understanding through the study of religious diversity.

In 1997 Jackson's seminal book, Religious Education. An Interpretive Approach, appeared, synthesizing his and his Warwick colleagues' research into curricular and pedagogical recommendations. The interpretive approach has three key principles: representation, interpretation and reflexivity. On representation, Jackson states that religious traditions should be presented not as homogeneous wholes, but in ways that reflect different groups within the tradition along with the uniqueness of individual devotees, each subject to a variety of influences. Regarding interpretation, pupils should not be expected to set aside their own presuppositions, but compare their own concepts with those of others; students start with their current understanding in trying to grasp the religious language and experience of others. Reflexivity summarizes the processes in which students, through their studies of religious traditions, reflect on their own values; they are asked to be constructively critical of the material they study and to maintain awareness of the development of the interpretive process.

The approach continues to have a strong influence on debates on religion in education. By the time of Jackson's 2004 book, Rethinking Religious Education and Plurality: Issues in Diversity and Pedagogy (selected for panel discussion at the American Academy of Religion), he could include a chapter on interpretive approaches, drawing attention to the application of the initial ideas in different contexts, and a chapter on related dialogical approaches that develop the same insistence on young people's agency in learning. Since then, the approach has inspired work on pupil-to-pupil dialogue, citizenship education, intercultural education, RE and action research, assessment, community cohesion, teacher education and other fields. Our chapters illustrate, but by no means exhaust, this proliferation. R at her t h a n d e scribing the interpretive approach as ‘a pedagogy’, it appears more appropriate to trace the background and emergence of its principles, to identify these principles as a broad and flexible set of pedagogical and other guidelines, and to illustrate the use of these guidelines in a variety of settings and ways; that is the course we have taken in this book. Some recent Warwick RE research, not covered here, has employed mixed methods, including studies of the materials used to teach world religions in Eng-land,² and of young people's attitudes to religious diversity.³

INTERNATIONAL INFLUENCE

Jackson's first participation in the International Seminar on Religious Education and Values was in 1980; wider international cooperation has been increasingly important to Warwick RE research. From 2006–2009, for instance, the interpretive approach was used as the theoretical stimulus for the European Commission—funded REDCo project,⁴ the subject of a previous special edition of Religion and Education.⁵ In 2002, Jackson became a member of the first Council of Europe project to be conducted on the religious dimension of intercultural education. His work has continued to be influential in various Council of Europe projects and publications, and the dissemination of the 2008 Council of Europe ministerial recommendation in the field of education about religion and belief. In 2007, Jackson was a member of the Office for Democratic and Human Rights expert group that produced the Toledo Guiding Principles on Teaching about Religions and Beliefs in Public Schools.⁶ In 2009, he was appointed Professor at the Euro-pean Wergeland Centre, Oslo, as an extension of his ongoing work for the Council of Europe in incorporating the study of religions into education for intercultural understanding, human rights and democratic citizenship.⁷

As was mentioned earlier, this book appears at a time of debate over the place of the study of religion in the United States. We will refer to two of the leading scholars: Diane Moore and Bruce Grelle.⁸ Both are keenly aware of developments in England and Europe, and it is hoped that one consequence of this book will be the strengthening of dialogue between religious educators across the continents.

Diane Moore's aim is to rationalize discourse in the US about religion in public education: for citizens to become aware of their own assumptions concerning the nature of religion and religions and to avoid the uncritical acceptance of these assumptions as ‘facts’. This is a condition for the development of the ‘deliberative democracy’ that Moore sees as congruent with fundamental American ideals. Like Moore, Warwick religious educators have been concerned with the challenging of prejudice and the need for reflexive learning.⁹

Bruce Grelle explicitly identifies commonalities between English and American approaches to the study of religious plurality in schools, although a problem in both settings is the connotations borne by the word ‘religious’.¹⁰ Including the word in the name of a school subject may well give rise to misinterpretation, but the key task is to find a way of handling religious material appropriate to national, cultural and legal circumstances. Current thinking in the US tends to emphasize a sharp distinction between learning about religions and religious indoctrination, which means that the study of religion cannot include attempts to personally edify pupils. This contrasts with English approaches such as the interpretive approach, which see the personal involvement of pupils as essential (not, it must be stressed, by schooling the pupils into a particular religious view of life but by asking them to compare and contrast their own values and ideas with various religious ones). Grelle considers the concepts of the interpretive approach at length and then wonders how the study of religion might be made to come alive for American pupils, while avoiding a form of nurture that would be held to be inappropriate. His answer is that it might do so:

not so much in the context of developing their own spiritual identities but in the context of developing their identities as citizens of a pluralistic democracy. Teaching about diverse religious and secular world-views and ways of life becomes a venue for helping students understand their rights to religious liberty or freedom of conscience as well as their responsibility to protect those same rights for their fellow citizens.¹¹

This is to argue that the study of religions should be conceptualized as a form of citizenship education whose ‘personal’ relevance is in preparing young people for responsible life in a religiously and culturally plural society. At this point, Grelle's analysis joins up with that of Moore and parallels some of the processes reported by participants in the development of links between religious education and citizenship education in the Netherlands.¹² For Ina ter Avest, Cok Bakker, Gerdien Bertram-Troost and Siebren Miedema, for instance, ‘religious citizenship education’ is a ‘daring as well as a complicated endeavour’.¹³ This could be because the combination requires people to operate with two sets of values simultaneously, one societal and the other religious (or agnostic or atheistic). These Dutch colleagues point out that:

It is obvious that teachers need support in exploring their own questions concerning faith and religion in its relatedness to pedagogical themes as a contribution to their normative professionalism of teaching about and from religions.¹⁴

Although all may agree on the necessity for responsible, educated citizenship, it must be borne in mind that nobody embarks on this process from a neutral stance and that all of the participants have different starting points. This affirms Diane Moore's remarks and underlines the need for hermeneutical learning in the study of religion, even when it is considered as a strand of education for democratic citizenship.

We hope that the chapters in this book help to illustrate these and other important aspects of a complex set of debates. In order to structure our material around key themes, we have organized the book in four related parts. This has also helped to signpost the summary critique included as a final editorial chapter. As might be expected, there are overlaps between the parts, which should be considered as formal rather than strictly substantive divisions.

That proviso given, Part I, ‘Ethnography, Religion and Education’, contains four chapters on aspects of contemporary religious traditions, including how they are represented in RE and how they should be represented in RE, their internal processes of religious nurture or education, and young people's experiences of religious belonging and identity. We begin with Eleanor Nesbitt, who writes about how ‘world religions’ are defined and represented in RE. She takes up the issue of caste for pupils of South Asian origin, arguing that the training of teachers needs to be informed by ethnography, historical context and attentiveness to pupils' own experiences and perceptions. Bill Gent follows with an account of fieldwork carried out in a London supplementary mosque-based school, including life story interviews, a general investigation of the school's educational life and work, and an ethnographic study of a hifz class (a class of boys memorizing the Qur'ān). Damian Breen's chapter draws on his ethnographic research to demonstrate the ways in which entering the state education sector results in processes of change for Muslim schoo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Research in Religion and Education
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Robert Jackson and Warwick Research: An Introduction
• PART I Ethnography, Religion and Education
• PART II Student Perspectives
• PART III Pedagogy and Religious Education
• PART IV Theoretical Perspectives
• List of Contributors
• Index