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Research

Why and how media coverage of religion must be part of RE

David G. Horrell, Karen O'Donnell & David Tollerton

Research Summary

Existing GCSE and A-level syllabuses include modules on religion and the media, but these have not been widely or well studied. The modules may be difficult to teach well, and teachers have few good resources to use. The newly launched specifications for RS GCSE and A-level examinations have eliminated, almost entirely, any study of religion and the media. The absence of this theme is troubling. Critical appreciation of the ways media depicts religion is especially important for forming responsible, educated citizens in modern Britain. Key principles and questions that might help equip teachers to tackle critically and intelligently issues about religion in the media are offered. The approach is illustrated by considering media responses to the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.

Researchers

David G. Horrell, Karen O’Donnell & David Tollerton

Research Institution

University of Exeter, University of Durham

What is this about?

  • For RS students to learn about how the media shape views of religion is important, but often not well done.
  • Religion and the media is troublingly absent from the new generation of exam specifications.
  • However, teachers can still do something about this.
  • The researchers offer a framework of principles and questions that will help teachers to tackle the issues critically and intelligently.

What was done?

This research is partly a survey and commentary on GCSE and A level RS specifications and examiner’s reports past and present, focusing on religion and the media; partly a document analysis of different newspapers’ coverage of the Charlie Hebdo attacks; and partly a set of suggestions on how teachers might engage students with issues of media representation of religions in a balanced, critical and intelligent way.

Main findings and outputs

  • Examiner’s reports show how in the former generation of exam specifications, options on religion and the media were neither favoured by teachers nor answered well by students. This may be because the area is difficult, media angles on religion shifting constantly.
  • It is nevertheless found regrettable that coverage of the media and religion is more or less absent from the new specifications.
  • In order to be responsible citizens and often without ‘insider’ knowledge of religion, young people will have to learn to manage the depiction of religion in the media in a critically informed way – sometimes, media portrayals of religion can be simplistic and misleading.
  • Firstly, religions should not be studied in isolation from their wider social contexts.
  • Secondly, wider societies should also be studied from a ‘religious’ perspective, asking about what is held to be sacred, what is worshipped and so on.
  • Thirdly, there are different questions to ask –
    Where does this material come from?
    Who created this material, and why?
    How do different media reports reflect particular interpretations of events with religious significance and what meanings are constructed in these depictions?
    How does media coverage reveal competing value systems and convictions concerning what is sacred?
    For example, in different English newspapers’ coverage of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, there were different outlooks on religious minorities, blasphemy and what the core values of Western civilisation are.

Relevance to RE

The research is directly relevant to RE teaching, demonstrating the necessity of analysing media representations of religion as part of the subject and offering teachers a suggested framework and set of questions to use to do so.

Generalisability and potential limitations

The RE teaching framework and questions have wide generalisability – they could be applied in a very wide range of cases. Some of the language of the questions may need to be adapted to the learning needs of pupils of different ages and abilities, e.g. rather than ‘How do different media reports reflect particular interpretations of events with religious significance and what meanings are constructed in these depictions?’, it might be asked ‘How do different media reports show different attitudes to religions or events involving religions? What messages are passed on?’.

Find out more

The full article is: David G. Horrell, Karen O’Donnell & David Tollerton (2018) Religion and the media in GCSE and A-level syllabuses: a regrettable gap and proposals to fill it, British Journal of Religious Education, 40:2, 114-123.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01416200.2016.1190686?journalCode=cbre20

 

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