Too many competing imperatives? Does RE need to rediscover its identity?

Abstract

The intention of this paper is to make a contribution to religious education (RE)’s constant search for a rigorous curriculum identity. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)/Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project ‘Does RE work?’ has recently reported its findings, in which it concludes that RE suffers from too many competing expectations. A major reason for this is that, according to the report, policymakers have ‘freighted it with too many competing imperatives’. Such imperatives range from religious literacy, through multicultural awareness, philosophical understanding, moral development and understanding heritage to sex and relationship education. In all, the project lists 13 such imperatives! It is little wonder then that the project echoes OfSTED’s recent finding that teachers were under-confident and unsure as to the aims and purposes of the subject. The AHRC/ESRC project’s findings also reflect a theoretical debate in RE that has been going on for some time. This debate might be termed ‘religious education and disciplinary identity’. So, should RE be regard as a discipline in its own right, rather like history is regarded as a discipline, or is RE better understood as employing a number of disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, psychology in its pursuit? This question of the subject’s identity did not simply arise out a move from a ‘confessional’ Christian identity to a multi-faith identity in the 1970s but was a live issue well before then. This paper takes the view that RE needs to prioritise its aims for the subject and place the aim of pupils’ spiritual and moral development at the forefront of its concerns. In so doing religious educators need to continue the debate about the representation of religion in RE.

Keywords:

• religious education
• aims
• content
• representing religion

Notes

1. I refer here to Philip Taylor’s distinction (Taylor and Richards 1985) between the intended and operational curriculum. The intended curriculum being what RE literature, syllabuses and frameworks conceptualise as the nature and purpose of the subject and the operational curriculum which describes what is actually taught and how.

2. What I am suggesting here is that if academic disciplines called Geography or History, for example, form the basis of the geography and history school curriculum it has always been a contentious and unresolved issue as to what academic discipline (or disciplines) be it theology, religious studies, philosophy, sociology etc., form(s) the basis for the RE curriculum.

3. This is a phrase used by Mark Chater in his address to a symposium on ‘What’s worth fighting for in RE’ held in London in March 2011.

4. Proudfoot (1985) is illuminating here when he distinguishes between ‘descriptive reductionism’ and ‘explanatory reductionism’. According to this distinction, descriptive reductionism is the failure to identify a religious experience by which the subject identifies it. Explanatory reductionism, on the other hand, offers an ‘explanation of an experience that are not those of the subject and that might not meet with his [sic] approval’. Proudfoot claims that this is perfectly justifiable and is normal procedure. The argument is that Hick’s interpretation of religion is a second-order explanatory framework that is not guilty of descriptive reductionism (Teece 2010a).