Editorial: teacher agency, autonomy and religious education

Perhaps no other school subject provokes such anxieties from teachers as teaching about religion. Understanding the motivations, worldviews, pressures and funds of knowledge of the fantastic professionals who make up the RE teaching world is essential if research-informed resources, pedagogies and interventions are to have a real impact in the lives and learning of students.

In an extensive study of teacher agency in the implementation of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, Priestley, Biesta, and Robinson (2015) theorise a dynamic ecology of agency which takes account of three sets of factors; iterative – teacher histories, projective – future plans, and practical-evaluative – concerning the present in which agency is enacted. Iterative factors, including life histories and professional histories, form the past from which teachers are always moving onward towards the future. For a discipline such as RE, which has gone through so many changes over the years, there can be few teachers who have an uncritical disposition towards reproducing the kind of RE teaching they received at school themselves, yet these histories have a bearing on the kinds of professionals we strive to become. From these iterative factors, teachers move forwards towards their projective futures, the short-term and long-term goals teachers have for themselves, their students, and for the future of the subject. As Janet Orchard and colleagues, and Emma Salter and colleagues, in this issue illustrate, teachers can become producers not only of pedagogy but of the development of the identity of RE into the future. Between past and future, this model posits a range of ‘practical-evaluative’ concerns which bear upon the present – cultural values, beliefs and discourses, social structures and power relations, and material constraints in the classroom. In this issue of the journal, Ruth Flanagan highlights the impact of some of these cultural values on primary teachers’ disposition towards teaching about religions and worldviews, while Rita Phillips shows the impact personal faith can have in challenging some of the material constraints which are leading to ever-increasing stress and burnout for so many teachers. For Biesta and Tedder (2007), agency is not something which teachers possess, but something which is ‘acted out’ in the present, for which they must strive in the constant co-construction of these three factors. In the case of RE, this becomes a doubly complex matter, since the subject itself involves guiding young people towards a sense of their own ultimate values, drawing these out of the iterative pasts of religious traditions and worldviews.

Much has been written about the ‘de-skilling’ of the teacher. For Apple (1993) these are the consequence of a neo-liberal project in education, resulting in an intensification of teacher workload which closes down opportunities to consider the purpose and relevance of study. These are certainly some of the concerns which Rita Phillips raises in her article in relation to teacher stress and resilience. The resources which religions provide, such as a sense of belonging, like-mindedness and vocation may go some way to explaining why RE is often counter-cultural in the neo-liberal school (Conroy, Baumfield, and Lundie 2012), and concepts such as a Christian theology of encounter are drawn upon by some of Janet Orchard’s co-authors in this issue to illustrate the ways that religions’ value resources influence the methodology of our subject area. Similarly, the Islamic concept of ta’lim is drawn upon by religion teachers in the UAE in the article in this issue by Mariam Alhashmi and Jasy Mussa-Inaty, as a motivator towards teacher-driven professional development. Emma Salter and Lyn Tett, in their evaluation of such teacher-led opportunities in England, explore the mutually reinforcing ways that the status of emerging teacher-researchers and the status of RE can positively enrich one another.

Of course, even with committed teacher-researcher partnerships, teachers may not always have perfect autonomy. Teacher professionalism has been in a state of jeopardy within recent decades due to a range of challenges and tensions, including the increasing complexity of multi-agency and multi-professional work, the role and proliferation of new technologies and resources, and changes in community and family life (Forde 2006). Whereas teaching autonomously – acting with little or no relation to externally-imposed guidelines, stakeholder interests and targets – may not be a possibility, Forde nonetheless sees a space for teacher agency, self-efficacy and the capacity to achieve what one thinks of as a desirable end. This can include resilience in the face of stress (Rita Phillips) but also differences of emphasis in pedagogy, such as those found by Jason Metcalfe and Daniel Moulin-Stozek in relation to the moral and character dimensions of learning about religions and worldviews, with some teachers seeing virtue and religion as separate domains in the life of the school, others as permeative of the whole school ethos. The role of other professionals is also taken up by Andrea Belánová in relation to Czech school chaplains, while changes in society, including hostility towards religious institutions, are the focus of Piotr Roszak and colleagues’ survey of RE teachers in Poland. The resources at teachers’ disposal are not always of the teachers’ own choosing, but a measure of critical agency remains in how they can be used, as we see in Ruth Flanagan’s surfacing of subconscious biases to reconfigure orientations towards texts and resources. Espen Schejetne and Ole Hansen’s critical discourse analysis of textbook histories of secular humanism also engages in this critical vein with the histories and biases of the material resources in the classroom.

Drawing together these perspectives on teacher agency, worldview, teacher-researcher identities and partnerships, I am left with an optimism about the health of the RE profession to address many of the material challenges facing the subject, and the teaching profession as a whole.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).