What religious students have to tell us about RE

I became interested in the perspectives and experiences of religious students in RE as a teacher working in a comprehensive school. I use the term ‘religious’ here as this was the label used by students. Aware of the strangeness of being ‘religious’ to most of the students, I began to notice how the minority of religious students were treated. Perhaps the most obvious cases were bullying or abusive slurs concerned with racial and ethnic identities. For example, I encountered anti-Semitic and Islamophobic sentiments. These were based on recognized stereotypes, such as connecting the actions of the state of Israel with Judaism and the Nazis, and Islam with terrorism (See Runnymede Trust 1994, 1997; Iganski & Sweiry, 2009). Sometimes these were directed at individuals (Jewish and Muslim students were extreme minorities in the schools in which I taught), at other times these were just general comments I overheard.

As I became more and more interested in these issues I began to take an interest in research about RE and religion in English society. At this time I read Terence Copley’s Indoctrination, Education and God (2005). In it Terence suggests that secular indoctrination could be taking place in RE. He based this argument on the findings of research about the use of the Bible in schools (Copley et al., 2004). One question arising from my reading of Copley’s book was that if RE were biased towards secular interpretations of religion, how then is it perceived by religious students, and what impact may it have on them?

I was extremely lucky to be able to research these issues as part of a Farmington Fellowship, then for an ESRC funded MSc and doctorate at Oxford University. I conducted group and individual interviews in places of worship with Christians, Jews and Muslims. I chose to interview in Churches, Mosques and Synagogues so I could recruit participants who practiced a religion, and also so participants could be interviewed outside of school.

My first study (Moulin 2011) explored reported experiences of RE specifically. The perspectives of Christians and Jews resonated with observations and criticism of RE professionals and academics about the varying quality of RE, and the potential of lessons to exacerbate some of the problems of prejudice that they were intended to solve.

While conducting interviews, I found that the participants also wanted to talk about more general issues of schooling, including bullying. I became interested in the participants’ explanations of the strategies they employed to cope with the challenges schools presented to them. For example, some participants said they wanted no one to know their religious affiliations, while other participants wanted to be more open about their religion in order to educate their peers.

I undertook a larger study that explored the reported schooling experiences of adolescent Christians, Jews and Muslims in more general terms. From hours of interviews with 99 participants who attended places of worship affiliated to the Catholic, Baptist and Anglican Churches; Orthodox, Reform and Liberal Synagogues; Mosques and Islamic community centres; and Mormon and Quaker meetings, I explored what it was like to attend a secondary school and also participate in religious activities outside of school.

By this stage, I realised that the concept of identity was essential to understand my original questions and the issues presented in the data we generated. I came to see the notion of ‘religious student’ as a completely naïve one. Instead, religious identities are actually performed and represented in all kinds of ways by individuals who have complex and dynamic relationships with religious traditions. The work of Stuart Hall, a Jamaican born cultural theorist influenced me a lot in the theoretical interpretation of how adolescents sought to negotiate their religious affiliations and identifications in schools.

The participants’ perspectives and narratives were complex and nuanced, but they constituted a rich body of data highly relevant to RE teachers. Christians, Jews and Muslims’ reported experiences of RE and schooling in general could also be often quite negative. For example, Jewish participants reported anti-Semitism and misrepresentation of Judaism in RE lessons (Moulin, 2015). I became more and more interested in the impact these challenges may have on the construction of students’ religious identities.

Analysing and re-analysing the data, I was able to construct a theory of religious identity construction in secondary schools. This is fully explained in my paper Religious identity choices in English secondary schools (Moulin 2014). The theory goes like this. In schools, students are ascribed identities by peers and teachers. These identities consist in all kinds of attributes, but include affiliations to religions and the associated attitudes and beliefs about those religions. For example, a student may be ascribed the identity of ‘Catholic’ by teachers and peers. Along with this ascription may come other connotations such as ‘believes in the virgin Mary’, or negative attitudes, such as ‘has an irrational belief system’ (put politely here – some examples given by participants were more colourful).

Identity ascriptions reported in my interviews included anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and anti-clerical slurs, and inaccurate representations of religions in RE. Ascriptions in RE consisted of negative or out-of- date resources, comments made by teachers, or assumptions in the curriculum that were at odds with students’ beliefs, such as the focus on philosophy of religion and its challenges to Christian faith.

In response to ascriptions, participants reported to seek and act to define and represent themselves, sometimes in order to change other people’s perceptions of them. I put these strategies in three groups, drawing on concepts used in other studies (these are cited in the paper): identity seeking, identity masking, and identity declaration.

Identity seeking takes place when a student looks for answers to the challenges presented by schools from within a religious tradition, usually by asking community leaders or parents outside of school. Identity masking is the strategy of not telling, or not being seen to be affiliated to a religion. This was a typical response among some participants, particularly those fearful of bullying or criticism about their religion. Identity declaration, on the other hand, is the opposite strategy to masking. It is aimed at tackling criticism and negative comments or actions, by attempting to educate peers and teachers about a religion.

Over time, the process of understanding oneself to be, or seeking to be recognised, or representing oneself in a particular way, according to these strategies, contributes to religious identity construction – the identification with, rejection of, or partial or full integration, or presentation of elements of a religious tradition (or ties with members of that religious tradition) with an individual’s worldview, lifestyle, beliefs, practices, actions.

According to this theory, what happens in RE lessons can affect the attitudes and beliefs students have about religion(s). While professionals talk about being non-confessional, the theory of identity construction supported by the interview data show that RE impacts on students in complex and nuanced ways. I think therefore, the findings of the study can help us think about RE and improve it. I give a summary of these suggestions below.

1) RE teachers need to be aware that their lessons and actions act as a system of representation and ascription of the religious identities of some of their students.

Religious adolescents could be critical of how their own religious traditions were represented in Religious Education lessons. This resounds with the findings of a number of other studies. At worse, Religious Education was considered to reinforce stereotypes and inaccuracies rather than promote understanding. Acute examples of inaccurate and inauthentic representations of traditions were given by Christians, Jews and Muslims – who could see little resemblance between their own understanding of their tradition and that of its presentation at school.

2) RE teachers need to be aware of how religious identities are formed and their own potential impact on students’ identity construction.

RE teachers should be aware that adolescents’ religious identities are rarely formed as the result of philosophical or rational enquiry, but through processes of cultural identification, identity ascription, and socialization according to the values and practices of students’ homes and communities. RE teachers need to understand the importance of role models and affinity with adults to the identity construction process, and that therefore their own actions can have an impact on the beliefs of students, as they cannot avoid being a potential role model that holds a particular view.

3) RE teachers should be aware of a potential problem with ‘difference blind liberalism.’

RE can sometimes constitute a form of ‘difference blind liberalism.’ That is, it actually reflects particular cultural views and assumptions, rather than allowing for equality of representation and the accommodation of plural views. There would seem to be a prevalent assertion about the political value of ‘learning about others’ in literature about pedagogy – an aim accepted by the participants of the study – but that stated aim does not necessarily result in classrooms that actually account for, and engage with, or even tolerate the authentic beliefs and traditions of those ‘others.’

4) RE teachers need to be aware of the problems of using the philosophy of religion when teaching about Christianity.

Related to point 3 above, adolescent Christians could perceive a secular bias in Religious Education that undermined the legitimacy and possibility of the existence of God. Young Christians felt they did not have the knowledge to rebut the challenges to their faith presented in RE, such as the problem of evil. This meant that some believed they were under ‘attack’ and their non-philosophical reasons for identifying with a religious tradition unacknowledged. Furthermore, this kind of pedagogical approach failed to communicate the nature of their religious identity to their peers.

5) RE teachers need to be aware of peers’ negative attitudes towards religions and religious prejudices and the implications of these for pedagogy.

The existence of prejudice show that a genuine, high quality Religious Education may be needed to combat religious stereotypes and misunderstanding – not between adolescents of different religions perhaps inasmuch as between religious adolescents and their secular peers. However, the ascription of religious identities, religious prejudice among peers and the phenomenon of religious identity masking – as found in this study – raise problems for the vision of the classroom as a place where adolescents can always share their own experiences and perspectives as part of the representation of religious traditions in RE. Because of the hostility of their peers, and ignorance or bias of their teachers, the classroom was not always a safe place to be open about their religious identity. Moreover, pedagogical approaches that favour the exploration of religious identity by examining the perspectives of students, may fail to equip religious adolescents and their peers with suitable knowledge and understanding to undertake such a venture.

6) Good teachers with excellent subject knowledge are extremely important.

Related to point 5 above, the perspectives of participants suggest that the most important aspect of the provision of quality RE are knowledgeable teachers who understand the complexities of religious traditions, their adolescent members, and have a greater subject knowledge than their students. They also suggest that religious adolescents may benefit from being provided with resources and arguments in classrooms that help them defend or support their religious beliefs and traditions. This is, of course, a great challenge to educators in the context of a radically plural society where there may be students from communities representing traditional, new and historical religious minorities – thus multiplying the number of traditions that teachers need to competently represent and understand.

References

Copley, T., Freathy, R. and Walshe, K. (2004) Teaching Biblical Narrative: a summary of the main findings of the Biblos project 1996-2004 Exeter: University of Exeter http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/uploads/content/news/files/Phase-3-Summary-Report.pdf

Copley, T. (2005) Indoctrination, Education and God. London: SPCK.

Iganski, P. and Sweiry, A. (2009) Understanding and addressing the Nazi card. London: European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism http://www.brandeiscenter.com/images/uploads/articleuploads/nazicard.pdf

Moulin D (2011) Giving voice to silent minority: the experiences of religious students in secondary school religious education lessons. British Journal of Religious Education 33: 313-326. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01416200.2011.595916#.VS9kRPmsW0I

Moulin D (2014) Religious identity choices in English secondary schools. British Educational Research Journal. (Early view) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/berj.3151/abstract

Moulin D (2015) Reported schooling experiences of adolescent Jews attending non-Jewish secondary schools in England. Race, Ethnicity and Education. (Early view) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13613324.2015.1013459?journalCode=cree20#.VS9j-PmsW0I

Runnymede Trust (1994) A Very Light Sleeper: the Persistence and Dangers of Anti-Semitism. London: Runnymede Trust http://www.runnymedetrust.org/index.php?mact=CompanyDirectory,cntnt01,details,0&cntnt01companyid=33&cntnt01returnid=74

Runnymede Trust (1997) Islamophobia – a Challenge for Us All. London: Runnymede Trust

http://www.runnymedetrust.org/publications/17/32.html