The extreme as the normal; binary teaching and negative identification in religious education lessons about Islam

ABSTRACT

This article examines how representations of Islam in the media influence religious education. Reporting from a case study of religious education in an upper secondary school in Norway, the article analyses the way aspects of Islam are approached and structured by ongoing media debates. Based on research into media coverage of Islam in Norway, the article argues that when teachers adopt the polarized structure of media debates, they also come to privilege the more extreme actors in their teaching. Although the debates commonly present opposing views in order to give a balanced representation of the issue, the observed lessons often revolve around the most controversial side of the debate. This happens through what is called binary teaching and negative identification. In this way, lessons aimed at nuancing what is seen as biased media coverage of Islam, favouring controversial issues and extremism, may come to revolve around these same issues. The article claims that religious education in some instances reinforces the strong focus on controversial issues prominent in media coverage, confirming the ‘normality’ of extremism in Islam.

KEYWORDS:

• Religious education
• media
• Islam
• controversial issues

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As opposed to lower levels in which RE is mandatory for everyone, in upper secondary school, RE is not mandatory for students in vocational training programmes.

2. The exception is private schools based in a specific religion. Such schools are few in number.

3. The English translation of the Norwegian curriculum is sadly not very good, sometimes even misleading. It is, however, the official translation.

4. The study focuses on a single school, and thus I make no claims for generalizability. However, the aim of the case study is to provide findings of relevance to the larger field by analysing a specific setting.

5. This study is part of the project Engaging with Conflicts in Mediatized Religious Environments (CoMRel) (Lundby 2018). A similar case study was conducted in Sweden as part of the same project (Toft and Broberg 2018). The Norwegian study was conducted by Professor Liv Ingeborg Lied and PhD candidate Audun Toft.

6. The names of the teachers are changed to ensure anonymity.

7. Over 60% of the stories about Islam outside Norway were about terrorism (Retriever 2017, 4).

8. This is not to say that these practices are necessarily problematic in themselves, only that the debates are centred on problematic aspects.

9. Stories about Ramadan are exceptions to this rule. A range of stories about positive aspects of fasting and the following celebration of Eid al-Fitr are to be found in the Norwegian news media (Retriever 2017, 17).

10. ‘Sensational’ is one of the most cited news criteria in the Norwegian press, along with relevance, identification, currency (happening now) and conflict (Roksvold 1989; Brurås 2012, 27).

11. Although this might be changing, as participation in Christian practices is declining in Norway.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Norges Forskningsråd [236920].

Notes on contributors

Audun Toft

Audun Toft is associate professor at The University of South-Eastern Norway. His research interests include media, didactics of religion and religious diversity. The research for the current article was conducted as part of his PhD project at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society.