Dr Geoff Teece University of Exeter

What are the educational reasons for including any subject in the curriculum?

Should religion have a place? If so, what place? If the term ‘religious education’ is used, what exactly is

meant, and what is not meant by it?How far should religion be taught or studied from any one

religious standpoint? Is there a unique contribution made by religious education

that is not made, for example, by social education or moral education?

What is the difference between the task of the school in religious education and that of the church, home, synagogue, or mosque?

Who asked these questions? When?

what its subject matter will be, what pedagogy will be appropriate and the precise

form of its presence in the curriculum. Should RE relate to the humanities, notably history

and geography? To personal and social education? Is citizenship as a subject the natural friend or foe

of RE? Should RE relate more closely to the creative arts,

and subjects that seek to nurture the imagination? Or is RE a loner, offering something unique and distinctive?’

And these? When?

And where will you find these statements? unlike curriculum subjects such as history, geography or maths,

which, ‘are heuristic devices for interpreting and interrogating the world’, religion is, like education, a social practice.

RE carriers an ‘explicit burden’ to address many of the ‘normative concerns, social expectations, economic considerations and cultural anxieties inherent in education ‘as part of its charge to shape young people’s spiritual, moral and social attitudes and behaviours’ (Conroy 2011, 2).

So unlike most other subjects, religion is not so much a subject to be studied as a unique way of understanding the world but as a social practice.

politicians and policy makers have burdened RE with a list of expectations, not all equally shared or understood, the result of which is that the subject has become ‘freighted with too many expectations. RE ‘struggles to enjoy a well-defined academic space in schools’.

And these?Despite the considerable amount written on the nature,

purpose and aims of RE in all kinds of documentation, many people still don’t get it.

(there) is too much diversity, complexity and variation in articulating the aims of RE.

Questions remain about what is and what ought to be taught in the RE curriculum.

Even when the assumption that RE is primarily concerned with the study of ‘religion and belief’ is broadly agreed, both the meaning of the concept of ‘religion’ and the most fruitful way of studying it are hotly contested.

(there) has been too much emphasis on curriculum at the expense of pedagogy.

And so is it any wonder that; There is uncertainty among many teachers of RE about what they are trying to

achieve in the subject. In many of the schools visited, the subject was increasingly losing touch with the

idea that RE should be primarily concerned with helping pupils to make sense of the world of religion and belief.

The confusion about the purpose of RE is exemplified in a number of ways. Many primary teachers, including subject leaders, were finding it difficult to separate RE from the more general, whole-school promotion of spiritual, moral, social and cultural development.

Many schools showed a strong tendency to detach learning in RE from the more in-depth study of religion and belief. Too often teachers thought they could bring depth to the pupils’ learning by inviting them to reflect on or write introspectively about their own experience rather than rigorously investigate and evaluate religion and belief. In the primary schools visited, considerable weaknesses in teaching about Christianity frequently stemmed from a lack of clarity about the purpose of the subject. For example, Christian stories, particularly miracles, were often used to encourage pupils to reflect on their own experience without any opportunity to investigate the stories’ significance within the religion itself.

A longstanding tensionInspectors found that the rationale for RE in

much of the guidance teachers were using lacked coherence and was too complex or blurred. A key factor preventing RE from realising its potential was the tension between, on the one hand, the academic goal of extending and deepening pupils’ ability to make sense of religion and belief and, on the other, the wider goal of contributing towards their overall personal development. Teachers will struggle to plan and teach the subject effectively while this tension remains unresolved (Ofsted 2013, 15).

Primary lesson: The Parable of the lost sheep

This example is taken from OfSTED (2005). We are told that in a lesson on the Parable of the Lost Sheep, the focus of the lesson was on ‘caring for others’.

Year 7 lesson: the story of KisagotamiThe lesson began with the student asking the pupils

what they understood by loss. She then told the story. Then she asked the pupils to construct a ‘memory line’ of the key elements of the story. There were many enthusiastic answers including one girl who said that the key part for her was, ‘that Kisagotami was adamant that her child wasn’t dead’. Another girl answered that she thought the story told us that we all had to die and that the story helped her not to worry too much about dying. The student teacher then went on to develop the learning from element which was ‘who and for what reasons do you go for guidance in your life?’

Visiting places of worship: Suggestions for the way that pupils may

learn from religion included asking them to think about a special place of their own; somewhere they go alone to think; a special building they have visited; a room or area at school that is special. A final offering is that pupils could design a peaceful area at school with questions for the pupils about how, when and why it might be used.

The purpose of RE: According to Ofsted and the ReviewRE should be primarily concerned with helping pupils to make sense of the world of religion and belief.

Religious education contributes dynamically to children and young people’s education in schools by provoking challenging questions about meaning and purpose in life, beliefs about God, ultimate reality, issues of right and wrong and what it means to be human.

In RE they learn about and from religions and worldviews in local, national and global contexts, to discover, explore and consider different answers to these questions. They learn to weigh up the value of wisdom from different sources, to develop and express their insights in response, and to agree or disagree respectfully.

Teaching therefore should equip pupils with systematic knowledge and understanding of a range of religions and worldviews, enabling them to develop their ideas, values and identities

It should develop in pupils an aptitude for dialogue so that they can participate positively in our society with its diverse religions and worldviews.

Pupils should gain and deploy the skills needed to understand, interpret and evaluate texts, sources of wisdom and authority and other evidence.

They learn to articulate clearly and coherently their personal beliefs, ideas, values and experiences while respecting the right of others to differ.

A simple question from the innocent

Why are we teaching a subject about a religion if it does not make students religiously literate?

What is it we are trying to understand?

At best we are….looking at a clumsy process of translation-a translation of other people’s languages and cultures into categories that Westerners can understand and interpret in terms of their own experience (Bowie 2006, 19-20).

Outside of Western cultures the modern term of religion still does not always find a comparable translation, in Buddhism it is often translated as dharma ‘law’ as in Judaism it is often halakha ‘law’…in Christianity Barth famously wrote about the ‘Abolition of Religion’ (Jolly, 2013).

[Hinduism] as a faith, is vague, amorphous, many-sided, all things to all men. It is hardly possible to define it, or indeed to say definitely whether it is a religion or not, in the usual sense of the word’ Nehru (1946, 63-4).

What is it to be religious?‘…it’s not so much about what exactly [people]

believe but how they hold these beliefs’ (Jolly 2013).‘ I interpret the facts of this story in a way that

resonates with the meta-narrative which shapes my life’ (Cooling 2002, 45).

‘Religion is not an object but a human practice: a way of thinking. It functions as a meta-narrative for the individual as it links all the other narratives into a comprehensible whole….it is not a way of understanding the world, but the way that one interprets the world using one’s understanding of the world’ (Jolly 2013).

Religious Education; the study of religions and worldviews

‘Religious Education then is a subject which deals not with religion as such, but with meta-narratives, some of these are Buddhist, some are Christian, some are humanist and some are atheist’ (Jolly, 2013).

Understanding religions and worldviews: the need for depth

The degree to which teaching engaged pupils at more than a superficial level;

in terms of appropriate challenge of the content of teaching and resources

in terms of the representation of religions and worldviews; their higher meaning and significance in the lives of their followers.

(sections from Jackson read).

The context of understandingchildren acquire through an informal process

of enculturation an awareness of the type of understanding expected in particular subjects. They learn by picking up cues from a teacher’s discourse, the kinds of questions asked, the kinds of answers accepted, what is deemed to be an acceptable explanation in each subject discipline (Newton and Newton 1999).

Our projectResearch questions:What does it mean to understand in REWhat might be meant by the term ‘religious

understanding’

Research Method: Focus group interviews6 groups of Secondary PGCE RE trainees2 groups of Secondary RE teachers

Understanding religionAwareness of religious beliefs and practicesUnderstanding that for Buddhists…..More than facts about what Buddhists believeTeaching the concepts in a correct manner

(authentic representation)Giving almost the truths of a religion (without

that confessional approach)Almost bringing in the sacredDistinguishing between the ordinary and the

sacredBeing able to apply it to one’s own life

A personal perspective-meta-narrative

A religious lens through which a person sees the world. The kind of things they watch. The kind of things they listen to. The kind of things they see.

Religious understanding is to develop a depth of a meaning in your life which is not necessarily explicit to religion. You could have a very secular life but still have a lot of meaning in it.

Only from the inside“If I had a religious understanding of Karma wouldn’t I live my life differently? Wouldn’t I make different choices? If I had a religious understanding of Karma I’d believe in right? I’d live my life differently.”

“I’m not sure whether it’s ever going to be possible to get someone who doesn’t belong to a faith, a true understanding of it. I don’t refer to myself as being part of a religion. I refer to myself as being part of a faith.”

Available to the outsiderStep into the shoes of a HinduImagine how a Sikh feels about…..

“I’m Jewish and if somebody talked to me about the significance of the Aron Hakodesh, something very Jewish, very religious…and a Christian, a Sikh, anybody, explained to me the religious significance, I wouldn’t say: ‘no you don’t get it ‘cos you’re not a Jew’. I would be like: ‘yeah, that’s exactly what it is for me and I’m Jewish’.”

an outsider’s perspective may be preferable!

“I remember when we did a Theology degree and when we went into Bible Studies, the lecturer said: ‘if you’re from a religion, when you come into the lecture take off a symbolic hat and look at everything from a neutral perspective so you can really understand what you’re studying and all the different sides to it’. Cos I suppose if you’re from that religion you can tend to be more biased can’t you?”

Neutrality is undesirable and impossible

Understanding is not a neutral task (it can’t be) as everyone is on the ‘religious spectrum’ since we all hold a frame through which we understand the world, for some they are not even aware of their frame and for others they have spent years chiselling out the way they want their frame to be.

Religiously literate or religiate?

RE would distinguish between encouraging children to become religious and enabling them to discover for themselves what it might mean to be a believer or an atheist-enabling them to become religiate to coin a term. Ignorance, like blinkered bigotry, in this respect can be more crippling for a person’s humanity, than if s/he could not read or write (Gates 2007, 18).

Meanings and limitationsThe student’s first responsibility is to recognise

that there is always and in principle more in any man’s faith than any other man can see (Cantwell Smith 1991, 141).

understanding other people’s beliefs depends on ‘the characteristic human capacity for self-transcendence’. ‘A human being can be himself [sic] and at the same time share the life and thought of another person. A person does not react only to another person as an object’ (Schools Council1971, 22).

Cont:Thus religious understanding may be better conceived as

a spectrum of understanding where the observer’s understanding need not be inferior to that of the participant’s as ‘the taste is from the same cooking pot as the full meal’ (Astley 1994, 93).

Conceived of in this way, the development of students’ religious understanding becomes an acceptable aim for the state maintained English school RE classroom which may contain students from a variety of faith backgrounds and none. Both the insider and the outsider perspective are valued and both may be seen as evidence of a student’s religious understanding (Walshe & Teece 2013, 4).

 

Last wordReligion is…. inherently human, and integrally so…if abstracted from…the men and women whose humanity it informs it wilts, even if it is abstracted for the purposes of intellectual scrutiny…It is not a thing but a quality: of personal life (both individual and social) Those of us on the outside who would interpret to ourselves the Muslim must understand not his religion but his religiousness.So for the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Tierra del Fuegin. If we would comprehend these we must look not at their religion but at the universe so far as possible through their eyes. It is what the Hindu is able to see, by being a Hindu that is significant. Until we can see it too, we have not come to grips with the religious quality of his life. And we can be sure that when he looks around him he does not see ‘Hinduism’. Like the rest of us, he sees his wife’s death, his child’s minor and major aspirations, his money lender’s mercilessness, the calm of a starlight evening, his own mortality. He sees things through coloured glasses, if one will, of a ‘Hindu’ brand. Wilfred Cantwell Smith: ‘The Meaning and End of Religion’ page 138