The Empirical Science of Religious Education

Mandy Robbins, Leslie Francis, Mandy Robbins, Leslie Francis, Leslie J. Francis, Mandy Robbins, Leslie J. Francis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138929852
• eBook ISBN: 9781317398523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Education General

The Empirical Science of Religious Education draws together a collection of innovative articles in the field of religious education which passed the editorial scrutiny of Professor Robert Jackson over the course of his impactful fourteen year career as editor of the British Journal of Religious Education. These articles have made an enormous contribution to the international literature establishing of the empirical science of religious education as a research field.

The volume draws together, organises and illustrates the contours of this emerging field and is an essential compendium which covers work in:

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• teacher education and teacher experience;

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• student understanding, attitudes and values;

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• varieties of religious schooling, and;

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• worldview and life interpretation

Organised into ten thematic sections the contributors cover the field comprehensively and bring with them an international and reflexive approach to their research.

It is an essential resource for those practitioners and researchers who wish to access original and innovative research undertaken by way of ethnographic fieldwork, practitioner research, life-history approaches to research, psychological scales and measures, and large surveys. Particularly interested readers will be studying PGCE and masters level programmes in religious education, as well as qualified religious educators undertaking continuing professional development.

Part I

Ethnographic fieldwork

One of Robert Jackson’s major contributions to the science of religious education was his establishment of the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit as a centre of excellence for promoting, refining and developing ethnographic fieldwork as a secure and reliable research method capable of delivering data and generating theory relevant to the field of religious education. It is appropriate, therefore, both that ethnographic fieldwork has been selected to occupy the opening section of this collection of papers, and that the two papers selected to illustrate this approach have been written by close colleagues of Robert Jackson within the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit.

In the first of these papers, Eleanor Nesbitt is concerned with employing ethnographic research to explore the experiences of young Hindus and young Sikhs of their own faith tradition outside school and within school. Such research is motivated by the desire to identify the gap between these two sets of experiences and to propose ways in which harmonisation between the two sets of experiences can be achieved. It is ethnographic studies of this nature that provided the basis for the series of curriculum books inspired by the Warwick RE Project.

In the second of these papers, Julia Ipgrave is concerned with employing ethnographic research among Muslim children in Leicester. Such research is motivated by the desire to explore the tensions between the educational and religious interests and values of the teachers and the students, and on the basis of this knowledge to propose ways in which challenges posed by the multi-faith context of the religious education classroom can be addressed by developing the curriculum to match the students’ religious understanding. It is ethnographic research of this nature that leads to criteria for testing the extent to which teachers’ delivery of RE matches the religious understanding of their students.

1 Bridging the gap between young people’s experience of their religious traditions at home and school

The contribution of ethnographic research

Eleanor Nesbitt

Abstract

On the basis of ethnographic research and curriculum development conducted in the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit (WRERU) this chapter suggests ways in which ethnographic research can harmonise young Hindus’ and Sikhs’ experience of their faith tradition outside school with its presentation in school. Fieldwork-based evidence of interaction between religious nurture and the encounter with their tradition in school is followed by an examination of dissonances and of the contribution of ethnographic research to understanding the issues that these raise. Finally, the contribution of the ethnographic process itself to the integration of young people’s experience of their faith is examined.

Introduction

Uniquely among qualitative studies of the lives of young people in Britain, a longitudinal study of young British Hindus’ perceptions of their religious tradition has provided the opportunity to observe the development of the young people’s relationship with their tradition over a nine-year period and to hear their perceptions of the factors involved. On the basis of this study, and of a study of religion in the lives of Sikh children, this chapter examines the relationship between young people’s experience of their religious tradition at home and in school. Reference is also made to the Warwick RE Project, a curriculum development project which is grounded in ethnographic theory and fieldwork (Jackson, 1997, chapter 5) and it is argued that, in a number of ways, ethnographic research can help to integrate young people’s experience of their religious tradition at home and in school.

First, it is contended that fieldwork provides valuable evidence of an interaction between not only formal and informal nurture, but also between this religious nurturing and young Hindus’ and Sikhs’ encounter with their faith tradition in school. This school-based encounter may occur through religious education (including work for public examinations) via collective worship and through social interaction. It is suggested that the absence, paucity or inadequacy of such encounters must be considered, alongside higher profile encounters, as formative in young people’s perception of their tradition.

Second, it is argued that there are dissonances, inconsistencies, and contradictions between the Hinduism or Sikhism of these two domains of home/community and school, and that these can be highlighted by examining the content of curriculum books in the context of ethnographic data. The issues raised by these discrepancies are identified and it is proposed that, third, fieldwork enables the contextualisation that is vital if educators are to reflect and implement change in an informed way.

Fourth, our ethnographic research suggests that research may impact upon young people’s understanding of their faith and help to bridge the gap between encounters with their tradition at home and in school in the following ways:

The young people who are involved in the research process experience finding that their religious tradition is being taken seriously by outsiders who are religious educators.

Teachers’ practice can be affected by the enhanced understanding which results from engaging in fieldwork.

For pupils and teachers using curriculum books, in which both the information content and pedagogic approach are grounded in ethnographic research, the gap between religious education and nurture is likely to narrow.

What these examples illustrate, I suggest, is the potential contribution which ethnography can make both by providing a source of data, and by its very nature as an interactive process.

Before turning to data which indicates that an interaction is taking place between young people’s religious nurture and their encounter with their tradition (or with perceptions of it) in school, it may be useful to situate this data in relation to the ongoing interaction observable between different aspects of religious nurture. Fieldwork shows both the reinforcement of parental practice and the challenge to it, in terms of dietary discipline, for example. This may result from the influence of teachers in supplementary classes or from the exhortations of visiting spiritual teachers (Nesbitt, 1996, 1999a). Young people’s experience of their faith outside school differs in its degree of homogeneity and for some consists of contradictory messages. The level of consistency discernible within an individual’s nurture and between this and the school experience differs markedly between individuals of a single religio-ethnic community as well as between communities. In the case of Christian groupings this is demonstrated in an earlier study.

Young Hindus’ and Sikhs’ school encounter with their religious tradition

New locally agreed syllabuses for religious education in county schools are required to take account of the teaching and practices of the other principal religions represented in Great Britain (UK Government, 1988). Since the Hindu and Sikh communities in Britain each probably number between 400,000 and 500,000, this means that account must be taken of both these traditions. Thus some of young Hindus’ and Sikhs’ school-based encounters with their faith are likely to occur during designated religious education lessons. That this was indeed the case emerged from the ethnographic data. Although the fieldwork did not include observation of religious education classes, or of other areas of the curriculum in which religious or cultural topics might arise, young Hindus and Sikhs recalled relevant instances during semi-structured interviews. For example, a twenty-one-year-old Gujarati Hindu woman reported that her younger sister was asked to write about all the stages of a Hindu marriage: ‘ . . . she had to give an example of an invitation and all the songs they sang’ as an assignment. Several of the young people had studied religious education for public examinations (GCSE and A level) and the curriculum had included their own tradition. Thus, when she was asked during an interview, ‘Have you heard the word karma?’ a sixteen-year-old Gujarati responded, ‘Yes . . . I did it in my exam.’

Like religious education, collective worship, referred to as ‘assembly’ by interviewees, is statutory. The requirement that it be ‘wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character’ allows for the inclusion of other faiths (Hull, 1989). Young people’s reports of encountering their own faith tradition in an act of collective worship arose in most cases from their experience in primary school, and in particular in primary schools with significant numbers of pupils of South Asian background. Most frequent mention was made of their school marking the annual late-autumn festival of Divali and of its doing so with an enactment of the story of Rama and Sita. This recurred as the young people’s first (and in some cases only) experience of the Hindu tradition in school. Similarly, some young Sikhs had seen or taken part in ‘assemblies’ or other functions featuring the April festival of Vaisakhi (Nesbitt, 1998).

The extent to which interaction with peers contributed to young people’s awareness of themselves as members of their faith tradition varied considerably. A twenty-year-old Hindu man (of Gujarati background) contrasted his more multi-cultural county primary school with his independent secondary school:

It was like no holds barred: they would ask whatever was on their minds, whereas at senior school . . . people were far more reserved in asking questions.

It needs to be stressed that some of the young people recalled little or no acknowledgement of their faith in religious education lessons, collective worship or in peer group conversational exchanges. In the next section, in which ethnographic data is used to support the view that school-based encounters with religious tradition interact with young people’s out-of-school experience of their faith, it will also be suggested that the absence of Hindu or Sikh tradition from school is itself a powerful factor in their perception of their tradition.

Evidence of interaction

The ethnographic data maps a complex interactive relationship between, on the one hand, school encounters with one’s faith and, on the other, religious nurture. In some of the young people’s accounts, school clearly enjoys a privileged status and what a teacher says is accepted as authoritative. A young Punjabi Hindu woman (a Ravidasi) recalled learning about the caste system and reincarnation in religious education. She said:

When I heard it at school I believed it. It had a great effect on me because it was my own religion and I thought it was true.

Her receptiveness to the teacher’s presentation of the content of her tradition set up an interaction with prior, less articulated awareness of what it meant to be Hindu.

Young people’s respect for teachers as authority figures meant, moreover, that teachers’ endorsement of their tradition by talking about it gave them a positive feeling about themselves and their tradition. Thus, in recalling the occasion when her religious education teacher quoted from the Bhagavad Gita in assembly, a Punjabi Hindu sixth former in an independent school commented: ‘You obviously feel proud when someone talks about your religion.’

Ethnographic data indicated that, in addition to responding positively to hearing the content of the tradition - whether a belief or a passage of scripture - mediated by a teacher, a young person might even have accepted the label for his or her religious identity on a teacher’s authority. Thus it was the teacher who, while almost certainly unaware of the interweaving of sampradayas (guru-led devotional groupings) and zat-baradari (caste) in the fabric of Punjabi religion, precipitated a Ravidasi girl’s identification of herself with a major tradition. She recalled:

First I used to say [my religion was] Indian, but then my teacher told me that it’s not really Indian: it’s Sikh. So I start sort of saying, ‘It’s Sikh’. (Nesbitt, 1991, p. 31)

The stages by which such an identification might be reached illustrate further the interaction of home and school. In the words of a younger Hindu girl:

I just found out that I’m Hindu. Well, my mum told me because this teacher said, ‘Are you a Hindu?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know,’ so she said, ‘Go and ask your mum and tell me.’ And when I told her the other day, she said, ‘OK’ and she wanted to know about Divali, [saying] that you celebrate Divali if you’re a Hindu. (Jackson & Nesbitt, 1993, pp. 162–163)

Unmistakably, our ethnographic research suggests that, when elements of Hindu or Sikh culture feature in school, children from the relevant community become resources and conduits of information from the community to the teacher and, in some instances, directly to fellow pupils in their religious education lessons. Whereas, while they were pupils at schools with a white majority, two young Gujarati men had been unready to speak about their tradition in front of their peers, a Punjabi man and two Punjabi women had welcomed the opportunity to speak to other pupils about their religion and culture. For one it had been an opportunity to speak about ‘arranged marriage’, and for another to explain the dietary restrictions that she observed and also to tell the story of Ganesh’s elephant head.

Parents (children’s nurturers in their tradition) emerge from the data as, in some cases at least, doubling up as resources for the school’s religious education or collective worship.

One example (the wedding assignment) has been mentioned above. My Gujarati informant went on to say that her sister had ‘felt so good, because she knew she could go home and spend loads of time and say, “Mum, what’s this?”’ In this case the mother’s experience of Hindu weddings (together with ‘a whole Asian film of an Indian wedding’) provided material for her daughter’s homework. How significant a parent’s input might be for pupils and teachers more generally is evident from a young Punjabi Hindu man’s recollection that when his father, who was one of the governors of his primary school, heard that the school would be acting a play based on the Ramayana for Divali, he wrote down ‘a quite detailed description’ of the Ramayana for the teachers who, the young man commented, ‘learned a lot’.

The recurrence of Divali, the late autumn festival of lights, in these examples of the interface of nurture and school-based encounter, is true to the data more generally. The festivals of Divali, and occasionally Vaisakhi, parallel Christmas and Easter as pegs for teachers to present particular religious traditions, and as opportunities for religious nurturers and religious educators to interact. The prominence of festivals in the transmission and adaptation of South Asian religious culture takes on a new form in the context of diaspora children’s education.

Peer group interaction was another aspect of school life which, the data suggests, can affect young people’s engagement with their tradition outside school. Thus a nineteen-year-old Punjabi Hindu woman related that as a child she had been accustomed to ‘do the jot more’ (worship with a simple burning wick in front of the domestic shrine). This she attributed to the influence not of her relatively few Hindu ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Empirical Science of Religious Education
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introducing the Empirical Science of Religious Education
• PART I Ethnographic Fieldwork
• PART II Practitioner Research and Community of Practice
• PART III Educating Religious Educators
• PART IV Students Imaging Beginnings and Endings
• PART V In Search of Meaning and Purpose
• PART VI Lifeworld and Life Interpretation
• PART VII Religious Schooling
• PART VIII Developing Scales and Measures
• PART IX Shaping and Testing Theories
• PART X Large Scale Surveys
• Original Publications
• Name index
• Subject index