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Encounters With The ‘Other’ – Teaching Controversial Topics In A Surveillance Age

Dr David Lundie, senior lecturer in education studies at Liverpool Hope University, explores the likely impact of the government's Prevent strategy on the teaching of RE

Dr David Lundie
by Dr David Lundie
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The discussion and debate that has surrounded the changes in schools’ and teachers’ duties around the Preventing Violent Extremism programme [latterly known as the Prevent duty] gives us pause to rethink, and to seriously question the object of our study in Religious Education.

Religions are profoundly disturbing to the ‘civic’ morality of a liberal age. This is no mere accident of their misinterpretation, but foundational to the notion of religions as grounded in a transcendent Other.

The importance of meaning In my work with James Conroy, I have written about the need for carefully managed ‘unsafe spaces’ – areas of encounter in the classroom, in which contrasting and controversial world views can meet without needing to reduce their own or one another’s views to the quotidian, and encounter without expectation of final resolution.

For perhaps 30 years or more, there has been a debate between advocates of a doctrinal approach to RE based on texts and teachings, and a phenomenological approach based on ritual and practice. Jim Conroy and I have argued that both of these fail to give sufficient attention to a third characteristic of religion – meaning.

Meaning in this sense concerns the comparative descriptions of social phenomena and practices, with religion as a way of not only construing, but of being in the world. This concern resonates with many of the concerns raised by pupils in the focus groups and interviews of our Does Religious Education Work? project. It also speaks to subsequent debates in the anthropology of religion, namely the so-called ontological turn.

Advocates of the ontological turn highlight the need for anthropology to not only address what it would be like for a concept to have meaning, but also for anthropologists to highlight the fact that some beliefs patently don’t ‘work’ – that they don’t cohere with reality.

According to advocates of this ontological turn, the anthropologist must also account for the question of how societies can be so structured that nobody ever points out how said beliefs don’t work – an approach that accords with that of the New Atheists, who would have our students be attentive to the fundamental question, ‘Is the emperor wearing any clothes?

Many of us – researchers, teacher educators, teachers – want to bring something else to the curriculum. Something excluded, while the somewhat idiosyncratic study of religions remains. Few of us are as blatant as the Head of RE in one Scottish school who admitted to me on my first day, “I basically get through all the RE with them in the first term, so we can do psychology in the second.” But since psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, theology are often near to our own hearts, I too must take care to not present a polemic for a particular school of anthropological thought.

My intention is to bring us back to an experience of the religious as the only ground on which RE can justify itself as academically sustainable.

A troubling space Experience of the religious is often profoundly unsettling. It is always, to some extent, an experience of a space which belongs to the ‘Ultimate’. It is not a space where ‘It’s your own opinion so you can’t be wrong’, nor is it a space closed inwards by the confessional boundaries of the community as an essentialised and static phenomenon. It is often a space of finality, and as such, a necessarily troubling space.

Ironically, the meaning of religion is apt to be lost in the perceived purpose of RE as the site for personal positioning and meaning-making. To understand the concepts at play requires that we freight the exercise with an expectation that it will change us ethically. To do otherwise is to engage in the endless piling up of information, an anti-humanist doctrinism, where the weight of sources, however obscure, is given prominence over the value of the one who receives, and even the One who gives, loving religion more than God.

It is this argument by decontextualised quantity which sadly contributes to much of the bad religion online, not least to the spectre of radicalisation. Is the violence of the sacred simply too terrifying a concept for the school and the exam room? Are we justified in taking Gradgrindian comfort in the cozy insulation of facts?

Steps in the right direction The 2013 Ofsted report Religious Education: Realising the Potential [PDF], called on the DfE to ensure that KS4 examinations focus more strongly on deepening, as well as extending pupils’ knowledge and understanding of religion and belief.

Likewise, the RE Council’s October 2013 curriculum guidelines [PDF] called on the KS4 and 16-19 curricula to enable young people to use concepts confidently, and to flexibly interpret, contextualise and analyse the expressions of religions and world views they encounter.

More recently, we have seen the Donaldson review of the school curriculum in Wales [PDF] earlier this year, and Linda Woodhead and Charles Clarke’s call for ‘A New Settlement’ [PDF] in which RE is clearly articulated as distinct from spiritual, moral, social and cultural development and as an academically rigorous subject in the humanities – something on which I could not agree more strongly, though there are other aspects of the report with which I take issue.

Relating to the ‘Ultimate Other’ While the Cantle Report of 2001 [PDF] framed community fragmentation in largely racial terms, from the moment the community cohesion agenda arrived in schools, RE had specific duties, framing both race and community through the lens of religion – and that is equally true now of the Prevent agenda.

Perversely, RE may actually find a distinctiveness in response to Prevent, what with whole school values and SMSC now being too big a priority for inspection to be farmed out for RE to deal with. Yet it does not absolve RE teachers of the need to create ‘unsafe spaces’, to step out beyond ‘facts’ and the naming of parts, to questions of ultimate meaning.

If needs must that our young people learn about religion as a relation with the Other, then they must understand the ways and styles of relating to the Ultimate Other as they have meaning to the religious believer.

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