Emerging relationships between religious education and citizenship education: teachers’ perceptions and political dilemmas in Cyprus

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which a group of primary school teachers in Cyprus interprets the relationship between religious and citizenship education. The contextualisation of the meaning of religious education shows the extent to which social, historical and political elements shape teachers’ perceptions about the entanglements between religious and citizenship education. In particular, the present study reveals two important findings – one concerning the conceptualisation of each school subject and their perceived relationship and the other concerning the contextualisation of this relationship in the cultural and political contexts of Cyprus. The findings also reveal important constraints and political dilemmas for the possible trajectories of ‘religious citizenship education’ in Cyprus. The article discusses the implications for curriculum and policy deliberations, as well as further research on ‘religious citizenship education’ in specific cultural and political settings.

Keywords:

• Religious education
• citizenship education
• teachers’ perceptions
• phenomenological study

Notes

1. The term ‘entanglement’ – rather than the notion of ‘relationship’ – is preferred here because I want to emphasise the inescapable and complicated set of connections that exist between religious and citizenship education. As Nuttall (2009) writes, ‘Entanglement is a condition of being twisted together or entwined, involved with … […] It is a term which may gesture towards a relationship or a set of relationships that is complicated, ensnaring, in a tangle’ (1). I find this construct valuable for the arguments I want to make about religious and citizenship education in this paper because I want to call attention to the multiple complexities that need to be explored and exposed in the ways that religious and citizenship education come together, especially in conflict-affected societies such as Cyprus (for a discussion of the variant entanglements between religious and citizenship education, see also Conroy et al. 2013).

2. A recent debate emerging, for instance, is between Gearon’s (2013) critique of what he calls the politicisation and securitisation of religious education on the one hand, and the acknowledgement that although educators should always be wary of being manipulated by politicians and others, there is no escaping of tensions among politics, security and religious education, on the other (Jackson 2015b).