This editorial was written during the covid-19 pandemic, a time when schools and universities around the world have changed how they work. Many buildings have been shut to staff and/or students, yet most have continued much of their work, using online and other forms of distance learning. (It is worth remembering how the revolutionary technology of printed text has allowed for widespread ‘distance learning’ for many centuries before online learning emerged.) Teaching has continued despite all the restrictions. Lives have been massively disrupted – many lives have been lost – and yet learning continues, itself disrupted, transformed.
What does this mean for research in religious education?
Many people are re-evaluating their priorities, and are thinking again about what is most important. Across societies, the pandemic has sometimes led to a narrowing, perhaps a kind of hibernation, a focus on immediate surroundings and a greater mistrust of others or ‘the other’. At other times, the pandemic has led to a broadening of perspectives, a deepening of understanding, and/or a realisation of how unpredictable the world can be. It is difficult knowing whether the narrowing or the broadening tendencies will prove more dominant, but few have carried on as normal – and new ‘normals’ have been emerging. The need to research has rarely been as urgent: what better time to explore the existential questions raised by religious education in its various forms? Research itself has been restricted for some, as lockdowns restrict access to the full range of people typically encountered in everyday life, and many households are refocused on home-based education – and survival. It also seems to be increasingly difficult distinguishing between sources of knowledge and sources of rumour and misinformation. Although it is possible to maintain dialogue at a distance, there is a tendency of online communication to be less diverse and more of an echo chamber: similar views are echoed, and those who disagree are simply excluded. This is as true of academic researchers as anyone else. For example, when working from home and online, there is less chance to have incidental meetings with researchers from different disciplines and perspectives: each online meeting is tightly managed, and canteens and coffee shops are shut.
How we gain and communicate knowledge has been changing, dialogue with family and friends as well as colleagues has radically changed, participation in religious and other activities has been limited or moved online. Truth or truths may be victims of the pandemic, as well as people and ways of life. Plurality may not be recognised, or may be seen as more threatening – with even viruses themselves being identified with specific nations – and integration may be weakened or made impossible. For most people, not only our learning and work but our family and social lives are suddenly carried out online much more than ‘irl’ (in real life). And as in times of war, an increase in the number of people dying – and the greater difficulty of being with people when they are dying – has challenged people’s sense of the meaning of life. Young people, especially adolescents and emerging adults at school and university, may feel alienated from their own futures. They also find themselves unable to make the ‘mistakes’ from which young people typically learn so much – it is harder to socialise, to leave home, to learn and work outside the home.
It is too early for much substantial pandemic-based research to have been completed. But the current issue of the BJRE provides good examples of why and how religious education, and research on religious education, is so important at this time. The importance of knowledge in the RE curriculum is balanced, by Clare Jarmy, by the importance of the knower to knowledge. RE – like religions themselves – needs to be seen as relational. Jarmy bases her argument on Buber’s distinction between I-Thou and I–It relationships. If knowledge in RE is treated as ‘it’, something will be lost from the subject, and the pandemic lockdowns have made I-Thou relationships that much harder to maintain. Dialogue is central, too, to the article by Antony Luby on a Catholic approach to education that involves dialogue well beyond the church in a ‘post-secular’ society. From church documents through to the philosophy of Taylor, Luby’s account is well-grounded theologically and philosophically, and it also takes us into the details of pedagogy and the views of young people in Catholic schools. The simple (and misleading) binary of confessional/non-confessional RE is challenged by this combination of liberalism and Catholicism. And yet RE in the UK remains a subject that is seen – legally – as sufficiently problematic to retain a ‘right of withdrawal’ (by parents/carers, rather than children and young people themselves, and by teachers), as explored by David Lundie and Cathal O’Siochru. They address the arguments for and against the right of withdrawal, and survey professionals (mostly headteachers and leaders of RE) on their views. The arguments are complex, and withdrawal must be understood in the context of the character of the subject, as taught in particular schools. As RE has become more plural, some arguments for withdrawal are weakened – and some arguments, as Lundie and O’Siochru explain, turn back on the assumptions implicit in multifaith ‘non-confessional’ RE.
Many of us are ‘withdrawn’ from RE, currently, either through the movement to more home-based online learning (with millions of households lacking access to reliable computing) or through schools narrowing the curriculum to ‘priority’ subjects. What makes a priority subject varies between jurisdictions, but in most, RE loses out to science education. Some see this as related to the perceived utility of the subjects, or to national or international measures of school performance. Others see the distinction as epistemological, as in the article by Jo Pearce, Alexis Stones, Michael J Reiss and Tamjid Mujtaba. There is a long history of debates on the epistemological relationship between science and religion, and a shorter – if significant – history of debates between science education and religious education. What Pearce and colleagues do so well is to explore how students in school see the differences – and what the effects on them are, following lessons that tackle some key science-religion crossovers. It is interesting to read how the students understood ‘truth’, with the word sometimes being used to justify a distinction between the subjects (in favour of RE or in favour of science education), notwithstanding the uncertainties common to both – the provisional character of claims in most science and most religions as they are practised.
The first three articles in this issue are researched in England, although all have implications beyond this country. The rest of the issue travels further, starting with Thomas Kawn Choi Tse’s contribution to our regular series of ‘country reports’ that provides overviews of RE in particular jurisdictions. Tse’s article is on Hong Kong, China, and explores its pluralism – its religious and ethnic pluralism and the variety within its schooling system. Most RE is taught as a single-religion subject, in schools affiliated to single religions. There is government-level support, and Hong Kong’s higher education institutions have a significant role in supporting RE, but in recent years the relationship between the Chinese state and religions may have restricted some developments – and seem to have left RE as a subject somewhat divided and hidden. Like Hong Kong, having separate RE for different religious groups has been characteristic of schools in the ‘pillarised’ Netherlands system for many years. The article by Muslih Muslih describes the work of Dutch Islamic schools, and how they are regarded politically. It is possible, Muslih suggests, for such schools to contribute considerably to an integrated plural society. Schools are only part of the picture, of course, as broader political and social movements are hugely influential too.
Najwan Saada and Haneen Magadlah also tackle Islamic RE in their article, and they explore the variety of practice – from ‘devotional’ to ‘critical’ approaches. They illuminate the ways in which RE is not simply ‘of’ or ‘independent of’ a religious tradition. Promoting the value of critical methods, not only for understanding Islam but also for understanding relationships with non-Muslims, Saada and Magadlah complement the work on Catholic RE of Luby, earlier in the issue, with both articles set in contexts (the UK and Israel) where the religion leading the RE is that of a minority in the respective societies. The previous issue of BJRE (volume 43, issue 1) was a special issue on post-colonial and decolonising RE, and it is vital – now more than ever – to try to understand the complexities of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ RE within individual countries, and of RE in more and less powerful or colonising countries. In the third of three articles focused on Islam, Abdulaziz BinTaleb explores how students can use the internet in particular ways to study Islam. The students are based in government schools in the USA, where RE is not taught as a separate subject, and it is fascinating to read research in such a context, and to be in a position – just in this current issue of the BJRE – to compare this work to that in ‘recognised’ RE and in schools with religious foundations. There are many ways to engage with online learning, and there are currently many new ways being developed as a result of lockdowns, and there is a particular value in using online learning that allows students to be researchers, exploring issues for themselves rather than simply being ‘fed’ knowledge.
In the final article, also based in the Americas, Cristobal Madero investigates the educational practices in private Catholic (Jesuit) high schools in the USA, Bolivia, Chile and Peru. Madero says that whether or not the teachers were priests, and which country they worked in, did not seem to be the source of variation in practice. Based on interviews with teachers, there was, however, variation in attitudes to the agency of the students, and to the teachers’ own agency. Finding meaning in their educational function, and/or in their contribution to their church, the ebb and flow of influences and accountabilities is characteristic – in different forms – in all the research in this issue. At the time these articles are published, the world is changing in response to covid-19. The topics addressed in this issue – such as knowledge, dialogue, engagement/withdrawal, epistemology, pluralism, integration, critique, and student and teacher agency – are all the more important. Each theme challenges those involved in religious education, and those involved in research. What continues, notwithstanding the closure of buildings, is teaching and learning – whether in households or online, supported by educational professionals doing all they can to feed the curiosity of young people. In universities, as in schools, we are still teaching and still learning – and researching.