Religious Literacy in Policy and Practice

Adam Dinham, Matthew Francis, Dinham, Adam, Francis, Matthew

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781447316657
  9781447316657
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447316688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration

This valuable book is the first to bring together theory and policy with analysis and expertise on practices in key areas of the public realm to explore what religious literacy is, why it is needed and what might be done about it. It makes the case for a public realm which is well equipped to engage with the plurality and pervasiveness of religion and belief, whatever the individual's own stance. It is aimed at academics, policy-makers and practitioners interested in the policy and practice implications of the continuing presence of religion and belief in the public sphere.

Section Three
Practice

NINE

Religious illiteracy in school Religious Education1

James C. Conroy

Introduction

This chapter attempts to explore two central concerns in and for Religious Education (RE) in a liberal democratic society. The first is a marked decline in functional religious literacy, and the second, that such functional illiteracy both feeds off and nurtures a kind of pathology in the practices of RE that militate against the seriousness of claims to the theological. The discussion here is informed by, but not confined to, the findings of a major three-year ethnographic study of RE practices in 24 schools across the UK (Conroy et al, 2013). The study comprised a series of interlocking steps, beginning with a two-day expert Delphi seminar (Baumfield et al, 2012), out of which emerged a professional focus on the particular shape and challenges of RE. The next step in this multidimensional exploration was to send five ethnographers into the schools over a two-year period for a minimum of 10 days in each location. The observation schedule included the description and analysis of the geographical location, physical and pedagogical/material resources, curriculum documents, informal settings and class lessons (largely focused on Key Stage 4/Year 11 – the final year of compulsory RE). Additionally we conducted interviews, focus groups and coffee conversations, and a student attitude survey. In a preliminary analysis of the data, we deployed a heuristic based on Kerry’s (1982) work on a tripartite hierarchical structure of teacher–student linguistic interactions: data, concept, abstract. In a penultimate iteration, a number of drama specialist teacher education students were invited to analyse the data for four emerging themes and to create five-minute dramatic vignettes (adapting insights from Boal’s Forum Theatre workshops; see Boal, 1979; Lundie and Conroy, 2012). During a launch of findings conference in 2011, the students performed the vignettes in front of high school students who, in turn, acted as a further focus group. Finally, we conducted a series of workshop conversations with an audience of teachers, advisers and academics. This extensive and complex data set has enabled us to burrow into the nested (Conroy and Lundie, 2015: forthcoming) interior of RE practices. In doing so we are acutely aware that the ensuing descriptions of RE and its impact on religious literacy and illiteracy are not, in any straightforward sense, representative. Like many social practices, RE embodies significant and substantial variation and, of course, 24 schools are, in absolute terms, a small number. Nevertheless, we are confident that our study is robustly indicative of major themes and trends in practice and, allied to our choice of schools that were identified (both by self-nomination and by Ofsted reports) as sites of good practice, it exposes some of the structural, epistemological and theological deficiencies of contemporary practice.

In our deliberations, and as far as possible, we allowed the analysis to follow the shape of the material, and this led us into some unexpected spaces, most notably into the use of textual and related resources, and the relationship between text and examination. As we shall see, the relationship between examinations and religious literacy is as significant as it is complex. Other emerging themes included the confusion between epistemic claims and personal value attachments as well as the absence of any historic-theological understanding. In all of this I would wish to distinguish religious literacy from religious practice, which can too often (especially by religious communities themselves) be construed as a proxy for literacy. There is, arguably, no reason why religious literacy should collapse in the way in which religious practice in Europe has (for a full discussion, see Herbert, 2003). Importantly, this is not a chapter primarily concerned with secularisation, but with the capacity to cultivate a discourse in the civil polity about religion, most especially in and through education.

Sum and the parts

The notion of religious literacy has received significant and substantial treatment in RE in recent years, significantly in the work of Andrew Wright (1993, 2001; see also Conroy and Davis, 2007), and, of course, denotes not an attachment to any particular religious formulary or doctrine per se, but an acquaintance with, an understanding of, the nature of religious language, religious concepts and practices, and some grasp of the complexities, contradictions and challenges of at least one religious tradition. Perhaps more than any of these, religious literacy is an engagement with religious language and its import (which again, is not, of course, to imply offering some kind of assent or credence to any particular religious or theological claims). It also embodies the capacity to locate particular ideas within their historical, ethical, epistemological and social context. Given that in the UK there is compulsory schooling it would not be unreasonable to consider such capacities as the mark of a religiously educated person. Religious illiteracy, on the other hand, is founded, not only on the absence of these elements that comprise religious literacy; in addition, it is grounded on the confusion of parts and wholes, where partial understanding or explanation inclines to mis-representation and mis-understanding. Let me explore this a little further. In his discussion of the relationship between the whole and its parts in Cratylus, Plato indicates that the two require some kind of congruity with respect to their claims to verisimilitude:

Socrates: But is a proposition true as a whole only, and are the parts untrue?

Hermogenes: No; the parts are true as well as the whole.

Socrates: Would you say the large parts and not the smaller ones, or every part?

Hermogenes: I should say that every part is true. (Plato, The Cratylus: A dialogue, 2008)

A similar concern is to be found in the Buddhist text, The questions of King Milinda:

Nagsena: Then is it the combination of poke, axle, wheels, framework, flag-staff, yoke, reins, and goad which is the “chariot”?

Milinda: No, Reverend Sir!

Nagsena: Then, is this “chariot” outside the combination of poke, axle, wheels, framework, flag-staff, yoke, reins and goad?

Milinda: No, Reverend Sir!... It is in dependence on the pole, the axle, the wheels, the framework, the flag-staff, etc, there takes place this denomination “chariot”, this designation, this conceptual term, a current appellation and a mere name.

The consequence of singling out only the parts is that they can be made to look partial, ridiculous or inflated. It is, after all, not difficult to extrapolate a social or liturgical practice from its historical or theological context and point to its apparent absurdity. So it was that advice to teachers from one South East England Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education (subsequently removed after succumbing to substantial criticism) included the suggestion that they should avoid using such terms as ‘the Wailing Wall’ when referring to the Western Wall of the temple in Jerusalem on the grounds that this might suggest to students that Jews ‘moaned’ a lot. Nor, in speaking about Christian Eucharistic celebration, should they refer to ‘the body and blood’ of Christ on the grounds that this carried the connotation that Christians were cannibals. The fallacy of inappropriate extrapolation is not reserved solely for those wishing to avoid given offence, opponents of religion such as Richard Dawkins (2007) have almost turned it into an art form.

In our own study examples included, in church schools, an invitation to ‘feel’ the suffering of Jesus without any discussion of the theology of sacrifice, or where religious propositions serve as forms of proof texting intended to secure particular behavioural outcomes in the classroom. On other occasions it was clear that the shape of the curriculum and examinations were intended to elicit very specific answers (but I shall return to this). Such questions and answers refer to part of a thing rather than to the thing. For example, in the 2012 Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) Religion and Morality examination,2 students were asked (for three marks) to distinguish between a hospice and a hospital! While it is no doubt a good thing to know some vocabulary, it hardly amounts to a theological or religious insight unless it is located in a historical theology of hospitality.

What these examples, and the very many similarly perfunctory questions that are increasingly common in public examinations, evidence is a penchant for disaggregating synoptic questions that appear to have grown as the performative impulses of education have grown. These impulses often takes the shape of examination questions that invite students to, for example, offer two reasons why a Jew might believe X, as if believing X was somehow merely propositional. Moreover, this practice has tended to ignore, or at best significantly downplay, the complex and integrative relationship between religious propositions and moral and emotional attachments, between narrative and event, and between what is and what might be. Yet, as I shall illustrate later, personal preference plays a substantial role in the RE classroom. It is, of course, the case that education has always embodied degrees of performativity – after all, medieval schools were instituted to prepare clerks and clergymen for their professional calling. Yet the shape of performativity has changed markedly in the wake of the public examination. More specifically, in the course of our ethnography, the growing dominance of the examination has arguably had a corrosive effect on the claim that a particular set of religious beliefs might offer an integrated account of being, and, in its turn, be offered to students as a synoptic account of a belief system. Of course, all education involves some disaggregation. Analysis is predicated on an exploration of parts, but not only the parts per se. Rather, it is concerned to reassemble the disaggregated or constituent parts into something like a coherent whole that carries not only descriptive, but explanatory, force.

These, and other related examples point to the failure to understand the nature of religious language and its commitments. The educational response to the conundrum of how to treat religion in a culture that feels some discomfort with the religious has often been to naturalise it, that is, to ensure that it referred to something that could, in Voegelin’s (1952 and 1965) sense, be made or construed as immanent. Sometimes this emerges in oblique ways wherein what appears to be an invitation to enter into a dialogue with religious stories and religious meaning tends to occlude the particularity of theological language in favour of personal interpretation. Hence in one (fairly typical) example from Dundon School, the teacher engages a class of 12- to 13-year-olds as follows:

“... I want you to go out of this class knowing how to read stories, how to read myths, how to read religious stories, and decide what they mean for yourselves.” Mr Dylan says that, when they listen to the stories he’s going to give them, he wants them to be asking “Why would anybody tell a story like that, what would they be trying to get across?” (Dundon Grammar School, emphasis added)

Of course this apparent strategy of engagement precisely reflects the ways in which religious language is to be embodied in mythic stories, which students are invited to interpret for themselves (‘decide what they mean for yourselves’), as if engagement and interpretation were simply to be thought of as preferences. It is seductive to imagine that the central purpose of RE is such personal appropriation of the meaning of religious myth. Indeed, the Scottish 5–14 Curriculum Guidelines (1992) explicitly foreground such appropriation of ‘personal’ value as central to the task of RE. Significantly, in our study, the impulse to see the content of RE in such personalised terms appeared to lie in anxiety about making substantive claims. Arguably the gradual privatisation of religion in late industrial societies has resulted in confusion between what might be considered epistemic claims and value attachments. In other words, religious propositions lay claim to certain transcendent truths. As theological constructs, sin and salvation, redemption and kenosis, sacrifice and anamnesis are intended to lay claim to a particular feature or features of the world, and the relationship between being in the world and being beyond the world. The verisimilitude of such claims is a second order question, which depends on the more pressing concern of actually understanding the nature of the proposition(s) under scrutiny. However, more often than not, especially in the non-religious school setting, teachers prescind from engaging in such seemingly abstruse discursive practices in favour of descriptions of the social practice. Questions about truth claiming are reduced to interpretation. So it is that teachers feel unable to address the connective tissue of theological description as truth claiming, preferring instead an approach that considers RE to be primarily concerned with meaning making and its concomitant affections. Of course this move has a substantial pedigree going back to the work of R.B. Braithwaite (1968) and beyond, work that considered religion to be centrally concerned with ethics. But Braithwaite’s rather subtle analysis of the distinctive ways in which believer and unbeliever approach religious propositions is largely lost in the transactions of the classrooms with which our project engaged. His belief that one has to consider the ways in which religious assertions coalesce into a certain coherent account that joins belief and practice is precisely what is ignored in many classroom transactions. The emergence in the classroom of a perceived interchangeability between religious and ethical propositions allied to the rise of ‘postmodern’ (Lyotard, 1984) epistemic insecurity has seen teachers resile from a comprehensive engagement with the claims of religion, preferring instead the less contentious route of opinion and voice. Hence, at the more obvious end of the continuum, the following record was not at all atypical of the conversational spaces in the classroom:

Ms Raphael: “You can be as controversial as you like.”

Audrey: “What does that mean?”

Ms Raphael: “It means you can say anything you want.”

...

Jack: “What about the father of Jesus?”

Ms Raphael: “I’m just gonna put ‘Father’ [on the board].”

There are a lot of group discussions arising out of students’ ideas; this is generating background noise in what is intended as a whole-class discussion. Ms Raphael sits at the front desk, with her arms folded; she looks fed up. “Is it possible to have a discussion with you lot?” (Brockton Community School)

The invitation to ‘say anything you want’, to be as ‘controversial as you like’, appears to have little enough foundation in coming to terms with the claims of religion. Indeed, it was precisely this discursive pattern that was made present by the drama students in one of their vignettes. Interestingly, the school students (in our Boal Forum Theatre event) responded by suggesting that they found this form of ‘loose’ person-centred talk unhelpful. It is certainly the case that students considered that they talked more in RE than in other classes but, in something of a blow to the liberal instincts underpinning suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Grace Davie
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Section One: Theory
• Section Two: Policy
• Section Three: Practice