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AHRC/ESRC Warwick Religions & Education Research Unit
RELIGION & SOCIETY
PROGRAMME
Religion in Education:
Findings from the Religion and Society Programme
Mon 25 July–Tues 26 July 2011
ABSTRACTS
University of Glasgow
Presentation 1 (Jim Conroy, Vivienne Baumfield & David Lundie):
“Religious Education: Public and Private”
Myriad public claims are made about RE’s contribution to young people’s social and moral development, in particular with regard to life in a multicultural society. Drawing on our ethnographic studies, including those focused in areas of cultural diversity and community conflict, this paper elucidates a range of classroom practices which proved efficacious in mediating successful encounters with the beliefs and practices of others, drawing attention to the distinction between committed pluralistic practices in classroom discourse and a thoroughgoing relativism which seeks surface consensus by eliding students’ deeply held commitments.
Further, conflicts of intention emerge in balancing the demands of Religious Education as an academic subject leading to assessment and recognized qualifications, pupils’ personal spiritual and moral development, ability to engage with truth claims, and the social aims of religious education in multicultural Britain. Recent reports by Ofsted and HMIE suggest that the personal dimension of pupils’ spiritual development is the least well developed aspect of religious education, suffering from a lack of understanding of how to measure and communicate progress. This difficulty is compounded by anxieties, noted in the literature and in teacher practice, about the appropriate treatment of personal religious faith (pupils’ and teachers’) in the classroom. Again drawing upon our findings, we discuss certain approaches to religious education that have emerged, and which appear to offer more success in balancing the demands of academic success while dealing robustly but respectfully with the deeper personal dimensions of the subject.
Presentation 2 (Jim Conroy & David Lundie):
“Forum Theatre and Meaning-Making in the Classroom”
This paper represents a methodological innovation in taking a forum theatre enactment of research findings and subjecting that interpretation, alongside the original interpretation of findings, to a further analysis. The focus of this iterative process will be the way in which ‘deep’ meaning may be seen to be absent even in those contexts and circumstances where meaning appears to be the central purpose of the activity. While much political and policy discourse advocates the centrality of meaning-making to the very nature of religious education, the nature and process of such activity are, we wish to demonstrate, more complex than is frequently admitted and the very instruments used in the service of meaning-making in the class can and do on occasion create the antithesis of their purported purpose. Absence of meaning emerges pluriform not only in the absence of teaching but in the constitutive.
Tomlinson and Engelke argue that such failures of meaning-making allow approaches to meaning as a contested and uncertain process, rather than an entity waiting to be uncovered. This contested conception of meaning allows for the consideration of cultural artefacts, images and events that follow, not as the bars of a rigid cultural cage within which students and teachers are caught, but as the strands from which students and teachers weave a tapestry or tapestries of meaning. An aspect of the meaningfulness of such a tapestry is that it can have holes, areas in which the negotiation of meaning falls flat; it can unravel, when core values and beliefs fail to withstand the testing of life in the world; the possibility of the failure to make meaning in itself renders meaning possible on a normative level beyond the purely descriptive. Meaning allows for the imagined and the normative to have a place within culture, for the intersubjective paradigm to retain its ethnographic closeness to the language and identity of the subjects. As Bornstein illustrates, these moments of meaninglessness for participants may themselves be both pedagogically and ethnographically meaningful. On occasion, as in the cases of two particular schools in the study, operating in areas of overwhelming secularism, indifference and hostility to religion, the tapestry can be almost blank, offering no points of reference from which to begin an exploration of processes of meaning-making within a given religious culture. Such cases stand in contrast to those that illustrate the creation and negotiation of meaning that arises from the subversion, by teacher and student, of those constraints by pedagogic and system failures imposed on the opportunities for creating meaning.
As a methodology, forum theatre enhances our attentiveness to these questions of meaning and its absence by bringing to bear a different eye from those who have conducted the research and interrogated the emergent data.
WRERU, University of Warwick
Presentation 1 (Julia Ipgrave & Elisabeth Arweck):
“Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity: A Qualitative Perspective”
A current study in the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit (WRERU) at the University of Warwick is investigating the attitudes of 13-17 year old pupils from a variety of geographic, demographic and cultural contexts across the United Kingdom. It is a three-year study (2009-2012) funded by the ESRC/AHRC Religion and Society Programme. The project combines qualitative and quantitative research methods to explore pupils’ attitudes to religious diversity and the factors that shape those attitudes—an area about which little research has been conducted to date. The paper will discuss the way theory and method have been approached in this project so that one can inform the other. It will then focus on the first qualitative stage and use material from focus group discussions with young people to demonstrate how data gathered at the local level poses challenges to some common understandings of the role of religious education in promoting religious tolerance.
Presentation 2 (Leslie J. Francis, Jennifer Croft, Alice Pyke & Mandy Robbins):
“Researching Attitudes towards Religious Diversity: Quantitative Approaches from Social Psychology and Empirical Theology”
This paper discusses the design of the quantitative component of the WRERU project and anticipates preliminary findings from the data. The questionnaire draws on three bodies of knowledge. The overall coverage of the questionnaire was shaped by a distillation of the themes generated by the qualitative component of the WRERU project. From the field of social psychology in general (and the social psychology of religion in particular) theories were incorporated concerning the function of factors like personality, self-concept and empathy. From the field of empirical theology in general (and the quantitative approach to empirical theology in particular) theories were incorporated concerning the function of factors like images of God and theologies of religions. In order to provide a comparative study, the sample embraced the five ‘nations’ of the UK, attempting to capture 2,000 cases each from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and London. The questionnaires were printed during February 2011: 10,000 questionnaires take time to code, so some preliminary findings will be presented at this conference from those data ready for analysis by that stage of the process.
Judith Everington, WRERU, University of Warwick
“‘We’re all in this together, the kids and me’: Beginning Teachers’ Use of their Personal Life Knowledge in the RE Classroom”
The focus of this paper is on trainee RE teachers and the role that their personal ‘life knowledge’ plays in their planning, teaching and understanding of the role of the RE teacher. Drawing on a two-year qualitative study of English trainee teachers, I will explore the kinds of ‘life knowledge’ that trainees use in the classroom (from insider knowledge of a particular religious tradition to personal knowledge of bereavement and political struggle), the differing ways in which they use this knowledge and why they do so—reflecting different views of the role of the RE teacher and the nature of RE. In the light of concerns about the ‘tyranny of intimacy’, I recognize the dangers of this practice and also trainees’ need to ‘share’, their view that this is crucial to effective RE teaching and their own views on how to avoid the dangers. I argue that in the selection of trainee teachers it is important to consider ‘life knowledge’ as well as academic subject knowledge, but that it is also important to consider that teacher trainers should develop and provide opportunities for beginning teachers to explore the personal and professional issues raised by the use of their ‘life knowledge’ and collaborate in the development of guidelines for doing so.
Jenny Berglund, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden
“Young Muslims’ Confidence in Teachers Suggests the Importance of Relational Skill”
In the course of reviewing a recent quantitative survey of approximately 1,300 Swedish youths on the subject of religion, leisure activities and other issues, I came across what, from my perspective, was an intriguing finding: some 50% of those that identified themselves as Muslims reported that they confided in their teachers (compared to only 5% of the non-Muslims) for help with personal problems. Supplementing this finding with several studies as well as my own interviews, this paper explores its possible meanings and examines its implications relative to such matters as the value of relational skills in teaching, the content and direction of teacher training, the importance of the teacher-student relationship and the potential of teachers to facilitate integration.
Mathew Guest, Durham University
“The University Campus as a Site of Religious Expression: Allegiance, Controversy and Community among Campus-based Christians in England”
Christians constitute one of the largest campus-based religious populations in the UK, yet little is known of their size and constituency or of associated patterns of religious expression and social engagement. This paper reports on a three-year project involving a nation-wide survey of undergraduate students, supplemented with qualitative case studies, examining how the experience of university—social networks, exposure to religious and cultural difference, and the academic learning process—shape on-campus expressions of moral and religious values. Reflecting the conference theme, we will also examine how Christian constituencies approach university life as a means of broader social engagement.
Nicola Madge, Anthony Goodman & Colin Webster, Centre for Child and Youth Research, Brunel University
“Together and Alongside in Multi-faith Communities: The ‘Youth On Religion’ Project”
The ‘Youth On Religion’ (YOR) project is looking at the place of religion in young people’s lives and the ways in which faith and non-faith identities are developed and negotiated. Research data have been collected from an online survey, focus groups, paired interviews and e-Journals involving some 10,500 13–18-year-old pupils in secondary schools and colleges in three locations in England. This presentation will examine young people’s knowledge of different religions and how those from different faith and non-faith backgrounds seem to interact and get on at school and in the community. It will also explore the factors that seem important in promoting interfaith contact and understanding.
Sarah Jane Page, Durham University [Nottingham]
“Recounting the Past: Sexual Knowledge among Religious Young Adults”
This presentation will outline the narratives of 18–25-year-olds from various faith backgrounds who recall their experiences of how they learnt about sex and sexuality in the context of faith. Based on questionnaire, interview and video diary data from religious young adults living in the UK, the presentation will outline the inadequacies felt by the young adults in the sample regarding sexual knowledge and the strategies employed in overcoming knowledge gaps. Fields of exploration will include the role of religious organisations and religious leaders, family and friends as well as school in knowledge transmission. It will highlight that, although young adults frequently cited their religious faith as the means through which their sexual ethics were lived, working out these values and codes of conduct was very much an individualised process, with few clear paths of support.
Mark Pike, University of Leeds
“Religious Education in Two Contrasting Christian-Ethos Schools”
This paper draws upon the case studies of two schools. The first is an academy with a Christian-ethos, which has no ‘faith test’ for admission and serves a largely secular social area. Here the sophisticated relation between the school’s Christian ethos, the importance it attaches to Religious Education (to which two hours a week are devoted, even though the school specialises in business and enterprise) and its ‘secular’ core values are of most interest and will be discussed. This school’s approach will be contrasted with the confessional religious education, across the curriculum, of a parent-funded, would-be free school which was established as a faith-based alternative to secular schooling. Interviews with 14-year-old students inform the analysis.
Jasjit Singh, University of Leeds
“Keepers of the Faith: Formative Influences in the Lives of British Sikh Religious Transmitters”
Using data gathered as part of a research project which is studying the transmission of Sikhism among young British Sikhs, this paper will examine how those involved in the transmission of Sikhism have been influenced to do so. Examining the influences of the family and the school environment and the various methods being used in Gurdwaras, including Punjabi supplementary schools, this paper will offer a retrospective look at the ways in which young Sikhs are nurtured and socialised into Sikhism, providing an understanding of which methods appear to work and why.
Naomi Stanton, Open University
“Christian Youth Work as Religious Education?”
This presentation will examine the notion of Christian youth work as religious education based on research with Christian youth workers and young people engaging in their youth work programmes. Collins-Mayo et al (2010) have argued that Christian youth workers are ineffective in transmitting the Christian narrative and foster only a ‘passing interest’ in Christianity among young people. A three-phase model of Christian youth work will be presented, ranging from youth work as a social club, small group teaching to engagement with church services. The model which emerges from my research allows young people to choose how far to engage with the explicit Christian teaching, without catering exclusively for those who do. Notions of choice, voice, relationship and community will be explored in young people’s engagement with Christianity. The discussion will also challenge the dominant assumption of recent literature that young people engage with religion as consumers in an individualistic society, by exploring the significance of social action and volunteering to young people involved in the research. The argument will be framed within the concept of ‘social currencies’ (a term suggested by Griffiths 2009) as a two-way, transactional alternative to building social capital.