Religious Education and religious literacy – a professional aspiration?

Abstract

This paper draws on an AHRC/ESRC funded, three-year multi-dimensional study of the political, cultural and pedagogical practices of religious education (Project AH/F009135/1). More specifically, it draws on that material to help understand the challenges to a sense of professional identity amongst UK religious education teachers. The empirical findings are here located in and shed light on prior discussions of the extent to which teachers in general are to be considered professional. These prior discussions have seen the idea of teacher professionalism come under sustained attack with the conflation of the conceits of professional, vocation and occupation, and the opening section of the paper tries to understand how this has come to pass. This concern with professional identity is subsequently pursued into the domain of religious education and the ways in which, amongst other concerns, the rise of a deracinated examination process and the neglect of religious literacy have contributed significantly to the diminution of the religious education teacher as a professional.

Keywords:

• vocation
• government
• religious literacy
• liminality
• professional-personal conflict
• performative cultures
• deprofessionalisation

Notes

1. The one obvious exception, at least in advanced democracies, has been medicine, largely as a function of the late modern obsession with defeating (or at least radically delaying) mortality.

2. There is much of note in the concerns of such as O’Hear, Woodward and others concerning the failure to address adequately the substance of the curriculum, but that failure is not as easily laid at the door of ideologically driven professional ‘establishment’ as they imagine – the epistemic failure of UK education has been driven by ministerial interference in the control of teachers, management, curriculum and, above all else, examinations.

3. The study was funded by the AHRC (AH/F009135/1) and schools that comprise the study used here were drawn from across the UK. These examples may be considered indicative rather than representative. However, such indications were widespread in our study.