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Abstract
Recent studies have increasingly favoured contextualisation of religious education (RE) to pupils’ home faith background in spite of current assessment methods that might hinder this. For a multi-religious, multi-ethnic sample of 369 London school pupils aged from 13 to 15 years, this study found that the participatory, transformative and dialogical activities of church visits, computer use and classroom debate improved attitude to RE. It revealed more readiness in girls to apply RE to their own religiosity and particularly negative attitudes to RE in pupils with no religious background. Besides indicating the validity, reliability and unidimensionality of a new short quantitative measure of pupil attitude to RE which acknowledges pupil experience and home context, the findings suggest ways to move beyond ‘banking’ paradigms to which RE remains prone.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr Mandy Robbins (Glyndŵr University) for supervision, Denise Chaplin (RE advisor to Southwark) and Greenwich SACRE, Revd Canon Prof. Leslie J. Francis and Prof Jack Seymour for critique and encouragement, Phra Veera Virandharo, Kannika Parker, Anuchit Treerattanajutawat, Bhuzaneezah Boonthucksa and Apassara Sangrungreang for administrative assistance and the Teachers Development Agency and Dhammakāya International Society of the United Kingdom which co-sponsored the cost of this research.