New Thinking, New Scholarship and New Research in Catholic Education

Responses to the Work of Professor Gerald Grace

Sean Whittle, Sean Whittle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000417593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

New Thinking, New Scholarship and New Research in Catholic Education gives a forum to many established and leading scholars to review and critically appraise the research contribution of Gerald Grace to Catholic education. The book demonstrates the way in which the field of Catholic Education Studies has developed under the influence of Grace, to become internationally recognised.

This book demonstrates the ways in which Gerald Grace has shaped Catholic education since 1997. This begins with the primacy of empirical study and carefully conducted fieldwork when researching Catholic education. Many contributors focus on the way Grace champions the alignment between Catholic education and what we have come to know as the option for the poor. The collection also reflects Grace's intention to ensure the voices of women are properly represented in the field of Catholic education.

The book is based on an inclusive and open principle that seeks to establish dialogue with educators of different faiths and different religious backgrounds, as well as secular and humanist critics. It will be of great interest to academics, scholars and students of religious education, the history of education and all those interested in the developing field of Catholic Education Studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Part I

Gerald Grace's influence in the UK

DOI: 10.4324/9781003171553-2

Chapter 1

The ‘calling’ of Professor Gerald Grace

James Arthur

DOI: 10.4324/9781003171553-3

Introduction

In the UK it is hard to think of a more significant figure in the academic study and research field of Catholic education since Arthur Beales (1905–1974). Gerald Grace has not only contributed noteworthy research in advancing the field of Catholic Education Studies but he has also helped shape its contours both in the UK and internationally. His contribution to Catholic Education Studies in the UK has no equal in modern times. At his professorial inaugural lecture on 7 November 2016 at St. Mary’s University (I have lost count of the actual number he has given at various universities), he celebrated the fact that:

The academic and professional field of Catholic Education Studies has now achieved international recognition. This has been established by the contributions of Theologians, Philosophers, Historians, Social and Economic Scientists, Natural Scientists, Education scholars and researchers, School leaders and teachers and members of Religious Congregations with missions in education who have written about Catholic education, in all its forms, across the world in recent decades.

(Grace 2016b, p. 1)

This statement is no exaggeration and only Gerald Grace had the credibility to have made it because he created the conditions that made it so. With unceasing dedication and without remuneration, Gerald has spent the last 25 years building a field of study that others had simply neglected or ignored. We need to remember that Gerald already had enjoyed a very successful and eminent academic career as historian and sociologist in a number of distinguished education faculties. He has taught Education at King’s College, University of London and the University of Cambridge, together with serving as Head of the Schools of Education at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and Durham University. In September 1996, he retired early from Durham University with a clear purpose and hence began his second academic career, or perhaps more appropriately, mission, that has born much fruit and spanned the last 25 years.

I first met Gerald Grace at an important conference on Catholic education in Cambridge in 1993 and have been a friend ever since. This seminal conference was organised by Terry McLaughlin, a friend of Gerald’s from the days when they were the only two Catholic lecturers in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. Terry brought together academics from the USA, Australia, Ireland and the UK and the conference was entitled ‘The Contemporary Catholic School and the Common Good’. The conference was sponsored by the Von Hügel Institute, Cambridge and Boston College, and was held at St. Edmund’s Hall in Cambridge. While there had been many professional Catholic education conferences, academic conferences focused on Catholic educational research were extremely rare. It is therefore hard to overstate the significance of this conference since there had been no serious contributions to this academic field since the publication of a collection of papers in Catholic Education in a Secular Society edited by Bernard Tucker (1968). Tucker’s contributors included his fellow ex-seminarian Richard Pring and the theme of the book was generally critical, revolving around the statement ‘There is a growing minority in the Church which finds the common Catholic position on education questionable’. McLaughlin’s conference was more positive and in many ways ground-breaking, but critically it influenced Gerald Grace and the purpose for which he was to later give himself. Many of the conference papers were published in The Contemporary Catholic School (McLaughlin, O’Keefe and O’Keeffe 1996). Gerald contributed a chapter.

Gerald expressed his admiration for the research on Catholic education that was being undertaken in the USA, particularly the work of Anthony Byrk (1993) and his colleagues from the University of Chicago. Byrk gave the keynote speech on the theme of his new book, Catholic Schools and the Common Good. It was at this conference that I first met Gerald and we discussed a number of themes around Catholic education. We both noted with some concern that UK Catholic education had attracted relatively little attention from educational researchers and that while there had been Catholic researchers in the field, they had largely ignored the Catholic educational contribution. We found this state of affairs also remarkable considering the size and significance of the Catholic network of schools in the UK. While the USA had major Catholic universities with important Catholic University Schools of Education, the UK had only Catholic Colleges of Education in which there was little, if any, research into Catholic education. We noted the work of Arthur Beales (1963), Anthony Spencer (1971), Michael Hornsby-Smith (1973) and Alan McClelland (1973, 1992) in Catholic education, but also recognised that this research was generally non-empirical and increasingly dated. We also observed that all four of these Catholic professors worked in secular institutions. We agreed that there was an urgent need for research, beginning with an examination of the goals of Catholic educational policy and measuring how effective these goals had been in schools. Gerald returned to Durham at the conclusion of the conference with a renewed mission, something he later termed a ‘calling’ to renew the field of Catholic education. He simply thought that there was no use complaining about the state of Catholic educational research; it was time for action.

The Ebbing Tide

My own research, published as a substantial book in 1995 (Arthur 1995), was the focus of many discussions between Gerald and I, particularly the basic theme and argument of the text: the ebbing of Catholicity from Catholic education. The text posits various models of Catholic schooling, which serve to demonstrate the stages along which Catholic education has been eroded and demonstrates how educational philosophy, psychology, management, curriculum theory and policy studies had all developed in the mainstream of educational research, to the neglect of the Catholic dimension in education (Arthur 1995, p. 247). Gerald professed that the research by Bryk and myself had inspired him and that many of the themes I addressed Gerald was to revisit in his own empirical research in the following years. Later in 1995, and while still serving as Head of the School of Education at Durham University, Gerald published School Leadership: Beyond Education Management, in which he inserted a chapter on ‘The Dilemmas of Catholic Head Teachers’. Gerald had already begun to speak about the obvious gaps in addressing Catholic education in mainstream studies. This chapter identified that there was a real danger of the depletion of the historical deposit of spiritual capital in Catholic schools and of the gradual incorporation of Catholic schools into a secularised and marketised contemporary educational culture. In terms of school leadership, he wrote:

There is evidence that many candidates for the headship of Catholic schools in England can now talk confidently about achievements in test scores and examination results, business planning and budgets, marketing and public relations but are relatively inarticulate about the spiritual purposes of Catholic schooling. This is a major contradiction in a system of schooling which exists to give the nurture of spirituality a top priority.

(Grace 1995, p. 237)

Later, in an endnote (Grace 2010: endnote XVI), he repeated this full quotation and agreed that such an outcome was predicted in my book The Ebbing Tide (1995). While not endorsing all of my suggestions about a weakening culture of Catholicity in schools, Gerald’s own research pointed to problems at the level of school leadership and on this issue he supported my general thesis.¹ This is why it is important to read Gerald’s endnotes for a full understanding of what he is conveying to the reader. However, another interesting observation is that while Gerald’s book received warm reviews described variously as ‘excellent’ and commended for its accessible and elegant style of writing, few, including David Halpin (2007), felt qualified to comment on the Catholic leadership chapter – this particular chapter received no commentary in most reviews.

Mission integrity

It was at this time that Gerald developed some early ideas about ‘mission integrity’ being the greatest single challenge facing Catholic school leaders across the world. Gerald was aware that the Catholic education mission is at the service of nearly 52 million students in more than 200,000 schools and colleges across the world. It is the largest faith-based international educational system, but he believed that perhaps because it has not been researched in detail, it is often misunderstood and misinterpreted. Gerald knew that ignorance was the biggest enemy of understanding what Catholic education sought and he ambitiously wanted to do something about this. This mission ought not to be confused with a ‘retirement project’ because what he did was systematically embark upon a second career and he achieved far more than what some educationalists achieve in one career.

After leaving Durham, Gerald was ideally placed to move to the Institute of Education in the University of London and to persuade Peter Mortimer, the then Director and himself the alumnus of a Catholic teacher education, to provide him with a room and visiting professor status in order for him to establish a new Centre. Gerald offered his services freely and received no salary while endlessly writing letters to various Religious Congregations for much-needed funding. He received many positive responses and some money for which he has always been most thankful, acknowledging the help he received at every opportunity. He consequently founded the Centre for Research and Development in Catholic Education (CRDCE) in September 1997 and became its Director – the first Centre in Europe of its kind. The Centre later moved to St. Mary’s University in 2016 and he currently remains the Director of CRDCE. The Centre was significant because it made a clear statement that Catholic education was a credible area for research, housed in the world’s leading educational research institution, i.e. UCL/IOE. The Centre sought to encourage and support research and scholarly writing in the field of Catholic Education Studies as well as to support the work of Catholic schools and colleges, nationally and internationally, by the publication of staff development texts on various themes. Gerald offered the Centre as a place for consultancy to the bishops in England and Wales and as a place to support the work of graduate students undertaking doctoral research on various aspects of Catholic education.

Gerald wasted no time and began his own research in four areas:

• the challenges of faith and moral leadership
• the challenge of academic success as the dominating goal of the mission
• the struggle between market values and Catholic values in education
• the challenge of maintaining ‘Catholicity’ in changing conditions.

His Centre became the focus for annual conferences, and he began a long series of visiting lecture tours, providing workshops and forming networks around the UK and internationally. Gerald was concerned with researching the ‘successes’, ‘failures’ and ‘uncertainties’ of Catholic schooling and he used his considerable academic standing and influence to carve out a place for Catholic educational research in the heart of the mainstream of the educational establishment. Gerald was increasingly in demand. His after-dinner speech at the BERA Annual Conference dinner on 4 September 1999 was unprecedented by the fact that he was the first professor of education ever to talk openly about his research in Catholic education to such a gathering. He was normalising the study of Catholic education and I have always thought of the famous Heineken advert when thinking of Gerald – ‘Grace reaches the parts others cannot reach’. His growing influence, that he undoubtedly accrued, was illustrated once again by an article in the Guardian newspaper published on 6 April 2002 entitled ‘Holy Spirits in the Classroom’. The Guardian is not a newspaper overly sympathetic to the educational work of the Catholic Church, but Gerald was able and unafraid to write that:

One of the prime purposes of Catholic schooling is to keep alive, and to renew, the culture of the sacred in a profane and increasingly secular world – a daunting challenge since the nature of the sacred is not easily articulated and represents “a struggle to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable an...