Teaching Religious Literacy to Combat Religious Bullying

Insights from North American Secondary Schools

W. Y. Alice Chan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000402070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación multicultural

This text explores the phenomenon of religious bullying as it manifests in two North American contexts and theorizes religious literacy as a viable school-based intervention to promote understanding of religious and non-religious difference.

Using substantive, qualitative data from schools and communities in California and Quebec, Teaching Religious Literacy to Combat Religious Bullying examines the impact of mandatory religious literacy courses delivered in secondary schools and identifies curricula, teacher attitudes, training, and administrative support as key determinants of course impact. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner's social-ecological framework, the text then illustrates how the environmental factors both in and outside of the school considerably influence teacher and student attitudes to religious and non-religious traditions. Practical recommendations are made to combat overarching societal trends and religious discrimination within the classroom, and context is cited as key to an effective discussion on religious literacy more broadly.

This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in religious literacy, religious education, the sociology of education, and those looking at the field of bullying and truancy more widely. Those interested in intersectionality, marginalized communities, secularism, and educational policy will also benefit from the volume.

1 How I Came to These Questions

In the mid-2000s, I was a recent university graduate who enjoyed the challenges and innovations in my work environment at a global technology and services corporation. Considering the openness to technological advances from the organization and the pioneering ideas it produced, I was surprised to observe the misrecognitions of diversity that gradually crept into the workspace. Among culturally diverse colleagues in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), confusion arose one December when a tree was erected and decorated with Christian symbols, a menorah to celebrate Hanukkah and a Kwanzaa flag to celebrate Kwanzaa. As a Christian, this mix of religious symbols confused me; none of the symbols were represented in their appropriate context or manner. Why did this assemblage group symbols from differing beliefs? This display placed many symbols out of context. It did not represent my beliefs, and it misrecognized other employees’ beliefs too. That same year, an employee responded to a “happy holidays” corporate wide email via reply-all to voice his anger towards the overgeneralization of all the holidays.¹ With a Diversity Department in place, I was baffled that this situation would arise at all as I had expected them to be informed about such concerns beforehand and would act to prevent them from arising. These incidents proved that even as adults, many individuals working in multi-religious environments and those expected to inform conversation about multi-religious backgrounds were still unaware of how to engage with one another. Instead of recognition, misrecognition and a lack of recognition arose and led to misunderstanding, discomfort, and conflicts. Religion became even more prominent in my life and the public sphere when I began to teach in public middle schools in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.

A few years later, as I came to understand my love for teaching and youth, I embarked on a new journey by completing my master of teaching degree and becoming an Ontario-Certified Teacher. The research component of my MT programme trained me to simultaneously observe and question aspects of my public school² classroom and society. In society, I noted that media sources reported, “Tempers flare over prayer in schools” (CBC News, 2011), “Persichilli: It’s time to talk about religion in our schools” (Persichilli, 2011), and “Part 3: Canada’s changing faith” (Friesen & Martin, 2010). This public conversation arose in the GTA where 82% of individuals under the age of 15 self-identified with a religious affiliation (Statistics Canada, 2001).³ In 2011, while data were not collected for individuals, 78.89% of GTA households self-affiliated with a religion (Statistics Canada, 2013).⁴ My experience among adults in the workspace and these news reports raised several questions in my mind. One being, what is the basis of this tension? If individuals live among multi-religious communities, are they not engaging with one another (as I did in my own schooling and community)? And, why are schools and workplaces not talking about religion already?

In my personal life, my father unexpectedly died in February 2011. As I was struggling with these questions, my Christian faith played a profound role in my life. While I did not relate to societal images and conceptions of heaven or hell and they were beyond my realm of consideration, I was overcome with an intense and immense sense of peace (that I am still unable to clearly interpret to this day) and a confident understanding that my father was in a restful place somehow. With my father’s early passing at the age of 59, many people, including my students and colleagues at school, were incredibly compassionate about my well-being when I returned to teach after a two-week break. In response to their stirring generosity and sincerity, I yearned to be utterly honest with them and explain that I was at tremendous peace despite the sadness that naturally arose. However, while I was able to explain the role of my faith with friends, I was unclear if I should carry such a conversation with my students and colleagues in a public school setting. If so, then how? Should religion be discussed in a secular GTA school environment at all? My concerns about religion in the public sphere reached an apex when I saw and heard of students struggling with the issues pertaining to their religious identities as well.

In one instance, a group of Muslim girls segregated another Muslim girl because they belonged to different Islamic sects; they all wore the hijab but their religious practices differed. This led the segregated student to become even more isolated, shy, and quiet in class than she was before. In another situation, an ethnically South Asian student approached me to explain that a new student who had emigrated from a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) country was bullying him. Although this student did not specify why he felt he was being bullied, at surface level, many teachers attributed the Arab student’s angst to parental behaviour. However, given the cultural and contextual environment of the bully, I suspected that the cultural slurs made towards the non-Arab student might have been also based on the cultural, religious, and perhaps economic differences he saw between them as many South Asians in GCC countries are of a differing culture, religion, and economic status than Arabs in the society.⁵ In this respect, the Arab student may have presumed many aspects of the ethnically South Asian student based on the colour of his skin, despite the student’s familial origin from a Caribbean island. During this time, I was also a youth counsellor for high school students at my church. In this role, I heard other stories of student struggles as Christian youths were teased about their religious identities, with no teacher intervention or response.

Privy to these varying perspectives from my corporate space among adults, my personal experience as a religious affiliated individual, and as a teacher and counsellor among middle- and high school students, I was curious about the limited presence of religious discussion in the public school classroom and the public GTA environment. This propelled me into my master’s research where, among the five teachers I interviewed from various religious and non-religious backgrounds, most of the religiously affiliated public school teachers were uncomfortable and uncertain about how to broach the discussion of religion in their classrooms, despite the current federal, provincial, and local documents that support its inclusion in Ontario.⁶ Rather, the non-religious teacher felt most confident in discussing religion in her classroom. Thus, from these varying perspectives and findings, I began my doctoral research to delve deeper into this discussion as a teacher-researcher with an aim to learn more about religious bullying to help colleagues and myself in order to support our students in the public school environment.

This book documents my doctoral research titled “Exploring a potential connection between religious bullying and religious literacy in Modesto and Montreal public schools,” where I asked, “Religious bullying: Can religious literacy courses address this phenomenon?” As such, I examined the phenomenon of religious bullying and if religious literacy in the public school environment is a potential means to address it. In doing so, I sought to find a solution for the public school teacher that did not require additional workload or time in their school day.

In the following sections, I elaborate on the purpose of my study in this respect. Then, I explain my ontological and epistemological approaches to this study overall and suggest the contributions and implications that this study can offer to the current studies on bullying and the larger society. To conclude, this chapter presents a roadmap of the overall book.

The Purpose of My Study and the Research Question

While bullying is a common concern in schools and various forms of bullying exist, teachers often overlook and misunderstand religious bullying (Craig & Edge, 2012; Chan, 2012). In my own classroom experience, I may have misunderstood or been irresponsive to the religious bullying incident between my Arab student and the one he perceived to be South Asian, and my colleagues may have done likewise. Upon this reflection, my study had four objectives.

Firstly, to understand religious bullying. What is it? Why is it not well-known? Chapter 2 of this book explores this objective. To clarify this focus on “religious bullying” opposed to “faith-based” bullying, I recognize that some reports refer to religious bullying as faith-based bullying. However, I refrain from using the word faith as it is largely a Christian or Western approach to belief that may not be conceptually appropriate to describe different traditions, such as Buddhism, which are currently referred to as religions by many. Instead, I use the term “religious” in my study in relation to “religion.”

As this study is contextualized in the United States and Canada, and neither constitution nor Supreme Court offers a clear definition of religion,⁷ this dissertation uses the understanding of religion by Coward, Slater, and Chagnon (2009):

Religion (from the Latin, religio, “respect for what is sacred”) may be defined as the relationship between human beings and their transcendent source of value. In practice it may involve various forms of communication with a higher power, such as prayers, rituals at critical stages in life, meditation or “possession” by spiritual agencies. Religions, though differing greatly, usually share most of the following characteristics: a sense of the holy or the sacred (often manifested in the form of gods, or a personal god); a system of beliefs; a community of believers or participants; ritual (which may include standard forms of invocation, sacraments or rites of initiation); and a moral code.

Despite this encompassing definition of religion, I recognize that the terminology of “religion” is problematic as some traditions do not consist of a set system of beliefs such as Hinduism and other eastern traditions do not fall into the westernized notion of “religion” (Smith, 1962). The eastern traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Shintoism are arguably more philosophies of life than a religion, as described by Coward, Slater, and Chagnon. However, despite recognizing the ongoing conversation about the definition of religion, I did not want to let it distract from the purpose of my study and wanted to seek a means to incorporate the multi-belief perspectives that I encountered. Thus, my study used the terminology of “religious bullying” based on my findings regarding this form of bullying overall, as it includes bullying across and within religious groups, and between those that are religiously affiliated and religiously unaffiliated. In using the word “religion,” various traditions still fit into these parameters, such as the non-religious. These findings are elaborated upon in Chapter 3.

Secondly, another objective was to raise awareness of religious bullying. Through discussion about religious bullying with participants and their communities, it was hoped that individuals who have experienced it could perhaps share their narratives with others, thereby increasing the familiarity and comfort to respond to such incidents, as well as understanding the implications of such incidents.

Thirdly, to find solutions that may prevent or respond to religious bullying. As a public school teacher with limited free time to offer extracurricular activities and to engage students within school hours, I wanted to explore how and what existing school curriculum could support us in addressing religious bullying. As knowledge about individuals of differing sexual orientations is used to address bullying based on sexual orientation,⁸ I wondered if an educational programme related to religious understanding could inform teachers about religious and non-religious identities, equip, and enable us to address religious bullying as well. This led me to learn about the oldest two mandatory religious literacy courses in North American public secondary schools—the Ethics and Religious Culture (ERC) K-11 courses in Quebec, Canada, and the Grade 9 World Geography & World Religions course (WGWR) in Modesto City Schools (MCS) District, Modesto, California—and consider if these courses could offer a preventive or responsive solution. In finding solutions to prevent or respond to religious bullying, this study does not provide a history of religious bullying or history of religious individuals in each context. Rather, Chapter 5 discusses the history of each context and the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Table of Acronyms
• Glossary of Terms
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 How I Came to These Questions
• 2 Grounding the Discussion: A Space for Religious Identities and Religious Understanding
• 3 Religious Bullying: Why Should We Care?
• 4 Religious Literacy: Why Does It Matter?
• 5 Context Matters: Past and Present Influences in Quebec and California
• 6 Methodology and Timing Matter: North American Politics From 2016 to 2017
• 7 Findings: Modesto, California
• 8 Findings: Montreal, Quebec
• 9 Yes, Religious Literacy Can Inform Religious Bullying, Positively and Negatively
• 10 What This Means for You: Recommendations
• Index