Fit to Religion & Society Programme
This project combines discourse analysis on policy, philosophical reflection on coherence and ethnographic study of experience in the domain of Religious Education in secondary schooling across the United Kingdom. It is led and managed within the largest Religious Education department in the UK and conducted by an interdisciplinary team bringing together Religious Education specialists, social scientists and humanities experts in an unique collaborative effort.
We will be conducting a broad and substantial analysis of the aims, practices and models of effectiveness of Religious Education in some twenty-four secondary schools across the UK. We will initiate our study with the locally determined understandings and policy articulations of Religious Education in each of the political jurisdictions of England/Wales, N Ireland and Scotland. (England and Wales had been aggregated when the project proposal was accepted, prior to the publication in November 2007 of the Welsh Assembly's first independent set of guidance for Religious Education in Wales.) We believe our inquiry will result in more nuanced descriptions of policy in what remains a somewhat fraught area of education.
Our team's international consultancy expertise and national connections across the UK guarantees the necessary access to a range of schools representing different faith traditions and none. We will conduct research in twelve schools in England, five schools in N Ireland and seven schools in Scotland. This is not a study of religious schooling or faith-based education, nor is it our intention to offer normative judgments about the different conceptions of Religious Education. It will however look at coherence, consistency and possible consequences for a variety of social and cultural projects.
Our study goes to the heart of the Religion and Society programme. Much recent social theory is concerned with the relation between religion and scoiety in the aftermath of the decline of theories that predicted the end of the social significance of religion. The widespread acceptance of such a view in the academy has seen religius education theory and practice suffer from being under-researched and under-theorised and lacking the theoretical insignts and resources of the social sciences in particular. Our project offers an important corrective to this absence and will make a major contribution to the establishment of a substantial, multi-faceted evidence base enabling subtle comparisons of aims and practices across the social and schooling spectrum.
Central to the aims here is the charting of religious education from conception to delivery through to social impact. To adequately achieve this we need to secure our geographical and disciplinary spread as well as interdisciplinary and generational cohesion. We have already begun this process by hosting two seminars in Glasgow, and a Delphi Conference bringing together experts in Religious Education policy and practice from a range of sectors across the UK.
Our aim is to map different definitions and means of testing the effectiveness of Religious Education. In any school context ideas about the aims and effectiveness of Religious Education will go hand-in-hand. In faith-based schools these aims are likely to differ in major respects from those of a non-denominational school. It is likely that effective Religious Education in the former will lay claim to certain developmental features of children's spiritual needs. In the latter case, it may be that Religious Education is intended to serve specific civic needs and purposes. This raises questions as to the definition of such needs and the investigation of how Religious Education teachers, as a matter of pedagogical practice, imagine they meet such needs and purposes.
We also intend addressing the challenge of ev aluating effectiveness. We will do so by examining the various accounts of what would count as effectiveness within different politica, religious and educational contexts and plotting experiences, practices and social outcomes against these. A rich seam of inquiry is whther there may be different outcomes regarding 'toleration' and 'otherness' between diverse conceptions of Religious Education, i.e. between those approaches that emphasise personal faith development, and those concerned to promote phenomenological and/or 'ethnographic' practices. In our consideration of such matters we will draw on a range of theoretical perspectives including philosophical analyses of ontological, epistemological and cultural enstrangement (i.e. strange from within) and contact theory.