New Directions in Religious Education

John Hull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367145934
• eBook ISBN: 9780429628092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1982. This book brings together some of the most influential articles which had moulded British religious education. The articles are divided into specialised sections dealing with various aspects of the subject so that the main developments are clearly indicated.

The first section of the book deals with research into the religious psychology of childhood. This is followed by two collections of articles dealing with the search for a philosophy of religious education and with the problems created for the teaching of religion in Britain by our pluralist society. The fourth section deals with the problems of designing a curriculum in religious education, while the final part gives some examples of methods in the teaching of religion. The book thus provides, both the general reader, the student teacher and the specialist religious education teacher, an easily accessible collection of many of the materials which had created British religious education.

1
Religion in Childhood and Youth:
Empirical Foundations
for Religious Education

Introduction

Studies of the religious psychology of children for the guidance of clergy and classroom teachers have been appearing for over a century. Amongst earlier works, one thinks of Thomas Stephens’ The Child and Religion, published in 1905,¹ Edith E. Read Mumford’s The Religious Difficulties of Children, also published at the turn of the century,² Basil A. Yeaxlee’s Religion and the Growing Mind,³ and J. W.D. Smith’s Psychology and Religion in Early Childhood,⁴ both published in the 1930s.

From the early years of the century, syllabus makers were advising teachers to consider carefully whether various passages from the Bible were suitable for the age and development of the child. But it was not until the 1960s, with the increased emphasis upon experiential religious education, that the psychology of religion in childhood and youth, as it is affected by religious education in county schools, was placed on a secure research basis. The work of Ronald Goldman in developing a stage theory of religious development has been influential on both sides of the Atlantic, and has received its most probing criticism and confirmation in the work of Dr John Peatling. While Goldman and Peatling have concentrated mainly on the development of religious thinking, the work of Kenneth Hyde on the formation of religious attitudes is continued today in the work of Dr Leslie Francis and others. Peatling, Francis and E.B. Turner have developed a range of test instruments which enable the religious education teacher to diagnose the intellectual and attitudinal situation of the pupil vis-à-vis his education in religion, leaving it open for the teacher in a church context to develop this for the formation of religious faith, or for the religious education teacher in the county school to develop an increased insight into religion appropriate to a secular educational context. With the formation in 1978 of the International Seminar for Religious Education and Values (ISREV) many British researchers are in regular contact with colleagues in several countries, and although the difficulties in this area of investigation must never be under-estimated, it does seem possible, as John Peatling remarks, that ‘the future may hold a “science” of religious education’.

References

1 Stephens, T., The Child and Religion, London, Wm. Norgate, 1905.

2 Read Mumford, E.R., The Religious Difficulties of Children, London, The Sunday School Union, undated.

3 Yeaxlee, B.A., Religion and the Growing Mind, London, Nisbet & Co., 1939.

4 Smith, J.W.D., Psychology and Religion in Early Childhood, London, Student Christian Movement, 1936.

On Beyond Goldman: Religious Thinking and the 1970s*

John H. Peatling

Parents (and other alert adults) in the United States are familiar with the work of a delightful spinner of tales who writes under the pseudonym of Dr Seuss. One of his numerous works bore the title, On Beyond Zebra.¹ The hero of that tale was a precocious boy whose reaction to the claim of a classmate that Z is ‘all there is; there is no more!’ was to announce (and demonstrate!) that ‘where his alphabet left off, mine began!’ With broad humour the author and his hero demonstrate that an ending can be a beginning, that only a kind of intellectual arthritis assumes finality, or (inferently) that it requires an SQ in excess of 145 to presume that the creative burst of the 1960s provided religious education with all there was, let alone all there is to know.² Seuss provided a delightful ‘alphabet’ on beyond Z. The author and his colleagues have provided a series of focused studies on beyond the seminal work of Ronald J. Goldman in the early 1960s.

The beginning of the author’s work on the construct Religious Thinking, like many a good thing, goes back to a post-meeting supper. Over good food and wine, good conversation sometimes flourishes. The place was New York City. The year was 1965. The question was whether or not Goldman’s findings could be ‘replicated’ with a large sample of children and adolescents in the United States via a paper-and-pencil instrument. Goldman, the author and several educational researchers were involved. Goldman fielded the question by suggesting that the attempt be made: both a psychologically safe and (given the time) a scientifically correct response. That meeting has, with appropriate scholarly care, been recognized as a beginning and referenced in the author’s 1973 dissertation.³ But it was only a start. There was an ‘on beyond’ initial encouragement that involved years of work, a goodly sum of money, and the co-operation of many schools and their pupils. To the question of how one does that sort of thing there is really only one answer: Very Carefully!

*This article first appeared in Learning for Living, Vol. 16, No. 3, Spring, 1977.

The author and his colleagues in the then Department of Christian Education of The Episcopal Church spent the remainder of 1965, all of 1966, 1967, 1968 and most of 1969 preparing for the study envisioned and encouraged over a supper in mid-town Manhattan. In addition, The Episcopal Church itself supported that work with a series of generous grants, plus the administrative decisions that enabled the author to devote an increasing proportion of his time to the preparation for and conduct of the final study. It was not ‘cheap’ research by any measure one would care to use.

The instruments: ‘Thinking about the Bible’

The research very early focused upon the development of Religious Thinking itself: the projective pictures Goldman used were bypassed in favour of three biblical miracle stories, plus criterion-referenced responses.⁴ In view of Goldman’s pre-dissertation study of story stimuli,⁵ and because of a desire to create a body of ‘comparable’ data from North America, the three stories of (a) Moses and the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:1–6), (b) the Crossing of the Red Sea (selections from Exodus 14), and (c) the Temptations of Jesus (Luke 4:1–13 and Matthew 4:1–9) were used. Initially these three stories were taken to a sample of 330 subjects, each of whom supplied a response to a set of questions based upon Goldman’s interview schedule.⁶ Then these responses were subjected to a lengthy content analysis, which judged them against a combination of Goldman’s stated criteria and Piaget’s criteria for the several stages of cognitive development. As one might guess, this process created reams of paper, took an almost inordinate amount of time, and occasionally left the author feeling that the major difference between middle Elementary school children and Secondary school students had something to do with spelling and sentence construction. But the process did not stop.

As a result of the content analysis of student-supplied responses to a set of standard questions, a series of ‘typical’ responses for the Stages of Concrete and Abstract Religious Thinking were identified. These responses were put into a multiple-choice format and tested with another, second sample of403 students. The results were submitted to a careful and thorough item analysis; a normal psychometric procedure that helps one discover which items ‘work’ and which simply have no discriminating ‘power’. As a result, the multiple-choice format was revised and taken to a third sample of 401 students, and the item analyses repeated. By this time the instrument was performing as one would wish: it was discriminating between the youngest Elementary school students and the oldest Secondary school students, two criterion groups whose average response one could presume should be both noticeably different and, as well, different in a theoretically expected direction. Finally, a core of highly discriminating item responses was identified and, from the open-ended responses of the first sample, parallel sets of ‘extreme’ responses at the Concrete and the Abstract ends of the cognitive development continuum were added. This revision was, during mid-1969, carefully programmed, formatted, and printed: the resulting instrument was entitled Thinking about the Bible.

The initial study: On beyond Z

During 1969 the author had the co-operation of the National Association of Episcopal Schools and, as a result, was able to conduct a random sample of classes (within each grade-level from 4 through 12) that was a genuinely nation-wide, representative sample of schools in the NAES.⁷ During late 1969 and early 1970 some 91 schools co-operated in this sample, and 1994 students across the nine grade-levels completed and returned usable instruments. Although the instrument was an untimed test, actual experience indicated that the average administration took 49 minutes (a confidence band of two standard errors ran from 46 to 52 minutes). Thus, in actual practice in North American private schools it was possible to use Thinking about the Bible in its long, research edition well within the limits of a ‘normal’ one-hour class period. In terms of the sheer pragmatics of many school settings this was an excellent and an important result: assessment of levels of Religious Thinking was possible within the constraints imposed by normal school scheduling.

In addition to completing the research instrument, most of the cooperating schools provided information on the measured intelligence of each student in the sample. Thus it was possible to calculate a mental age for something more than 80 per cent of the students.⁸ In addition, each student identified his or her chronological age. As a result, in addition to a school grade-level and a calculated mental age, each student respondent could be identified by age-level. In the resulting analyses three basic metrics were used: Grade, Age, and Mental Age. Developmental curves for each of these metrics were drawn, and adjacent-group means were tested for statistically significant differences. As a result, over all ‘growth’ in Religious Thinking could be (and was) described in terms of periods of slower and more rapid ‘growth’, or change.

For example, periods of noticeably ‘slower’ growth in Religious Thinking appeared to approximate plateaus, as specified in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, where periods of relative equilibrium are posited as a part of the sequence of developmental advance. Periods of noticeably ‘rapid’ growth in Religious Thinking, then, appeared to indicate times of transition from one such plateau to a next higher one. This pattern of plateaus was markedly evident under the metric of school grade-level, evident under the metric of chronological age, and still statistically significant under the metric of mental age-level. For this sample of North American students, then, Religious Thinking grew or progressed in a step-wise manner toward increasingly ‘higher’ levels of Abstract Stage Religious Thinking across the nine school grades 4–12.

Goldman was right, but …

Basically, Goldman was right: children and adolescents do become increasingly abstract i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: New Directions in Religious Education
• 1 Religion in Childhood And Youth: Empirical Foundations For Religious Education
• 2 The Nature of Religious Education: The Search for a Rationale
• 3 The Social Context: Religious Pluralism in School and Society
• 4 Designing The Curriculum in Religious Education
• 5 Methods in Teaching Religion Today
• Author Index
• Subject Index