Beyond knowledge-centred versus student-centred RE

BJRE volume 45:3

There is a long-standing contrast, sometimes described as a battle, in school-based literature between being ‘student-centred’ (or ‘child-centred’ or ‘personal’) and being ‘knowledge-centred’ or ‘subject-centred’ or ‘academic’. This is played out in debates on specific school subjects, including RE. Is RE primarily ‘about’ knowledge of religious and other traditions, or is it primarily ‘for’ the edification of the students and/or the benefit of society? Current debates in the UK related to the Commission on Religious Education (Commission on Religious Education CoRE 2018) report include this contrast, with religious knowledge or ‘literacy’ having a more significant role than the more edificatory elements of the subject – implied by the recommendation to drop ‘education’ from the title of the subject (Commission on Religious Education CoRE 2018, 31). ‘education’ in a subject title is seen as trying to make students something (e.g. religious), rather than teaching them about something. The contrast can be seen in many approaches to schooling and the curriculum, and can sometimes also be seen in the different approaches to the schooling of children (up to the age of eleven or twelve) and the schooling of young people above that age, with the more ‘personal’ elements more likely to be stressed with younger students, and more ‘academic’ elements more likely to be stressed with older students.

RE as an ‘E’ subject, like PE, PSHE, Citizenship Education, Driver Education, and a number of other subjects, is at the heart of such debates, so dropping the ‘E’ in the subject name (as recommended by CoRE 2018) is itself a significant move. The ‘E’ is given on the grounds that students of the subject are expected to engage personally in the subject: citizenship education (in the UK) is intended to create better and more active citizens, physical education is expected to help students become physically fitter and/or healthier, personal and social education improves personal and social skills. The E in RE suggests a form of ‘learning from religion’, as Grimmitt describes it, the ‘reflective, interpretive, critical, and evaluative interactions’ (Grimmitt, in Grimmitt 2000, 18). Other jurisdictions have sided more with the ‘personal’ or with the ‘academic’, and this is not just related to promoting religiousness (or an individual religious confession), but, as I say, reflects a wider debate on the purpose of schooling – whether it is about ‘making better people’ or about ‘passing on valuable knowledge and skills’.

It is helpful finding out how teachers see this apparent contrast, in their work in RE classrooms. Two recent pieces of research in which I have been involved explored the ways in which teachers of religion saw their role, in schools with Catholic or Jewish foundations (Stern and Buchanan 2021; Stern and Kohn 2022). In both projects, there were indeed some tensions evident: some teachers who found themselves conflicted. However, the majority of respondents found ways to balance the various ‘religious’, the ‘personal’, and the ‘knowledge’ aspects of their roles. What these projects suggested was that teachers are typically placed on a continuum from more ‘personal’ (or ‘religious’) in their intentions and practices, to more ‘knowledge-based’ or ‘academic’ in their practices. This fits with what writers such as Beane says, that all school subjects are personally implicated, and should be seen as distinct from academic disciplines, even though they also make use of similar knowledge: ‘a discipline of knowledge and its representative school subject area are not the same things, even though they may be concerned with similar bodies of knowledge[, as t]hey serve quite different purposes’ (Beane 1995, 617). An even broader claim is that of Polanyi, for whom all academic disciplines, never mind school subjects, are ‘personal’ (Polanyi 1962), related to the position of the scholar and the membership of scholarly and broader social communities. My own research suggested that the existential and communal character of RE meant that it was communally-implicated – with the ‘communities’ being personal (of the students and/or the teachers), academic (of those studying religious and other worldviews) and religious (of the religious or other worldview communities). The communities were seen by the teachers as intermingled. In consequence, although student-centred pedagogies and knowledge-centred pedagogies, or educational and religious contexts, may appear to be in conflict, or at least spread across a spectrum, once a ‘community’ is introduced into the character of subjects and into the character of relationships, student-centredness and knowledge-centredness can both be accounted for within a pedagogy of relationships within communities.

For this issue of the BJRE, I have used this prior research to see whether there are articles that seem to focus more on the ‘knowledge-based’ side of the debate, and others on the more ‘student-centred’ side of the debate. Are they easily categorisable, and if so, are they really so different, or can some kind of resolution be found, through an understanding of the significance – to students and to knowledge alike – of communities? Joseph Chadwin writes of the ‘lived religion’ of English Hindu teachers, in their homes and schools. I would hope that UK RE teachers will be shocked to hear how different ‘Hinduism’ is in students’ homes and their schools, and how school (especially but not only RE) seems to be ‘unteaching’ the Hinduism learned at home. The students express anger, which is not surprising in the circumstances. Learning that yoga, for example, is ‘nothing to do with religion’ is a simple – and, to me, sadly recognisable – example of such unteaching. Replacing the ‘home’ Hinduism with a rather rigid and unequal ‘school’ Hinduism throws the focus on the textbook ‘knowledge’ of Hinduism, and seems to reject the personal experiences of the students. However, the shock of the article also demonstrates, I think, how inappropriate it is to keep the two so far apart. Different tensions are explored by Brendan Hyde in his article on Godly Play – an approach to confessional Christian religious education through biblical storytelling, initiated by Jerome Berryman. The students, Hyde explains, are not simply being told Christian ‘truths’, but are doing their own work on truth, their own constructions, through engaging with the Christian constructions. Of all the articles in this issue, this one most clearly captures the balance between ‘knowledge’ and ‘student’, and the misunderstandings that can come from thinking RE is all about one or the other.

Ebba Henrekson also writes of confessional RE, in this case in Sweden. Such complex relationships between national or ‘public’ values and those of specific religions are demonstrated here, that it is hard – as Henrekson says – to see where the students fit in. The ‘subject matter’ or ‘knowledge’ is here replaced with (public) ‘values’, and the partly or wholly private confessional schools in Sweden seem to be teaching other (if somewhat overlapping) values. It is Henrekson’s attempt to place students and other members of society at the centre of the resolution of such a conflict that makes this article so interesting to me. What are the real social implications of promoting different values, based on different (or different interpretations of) religions or worldviews? The situation is very different, if no less complex, in Zambia, as Brendan Carmody’s article explains. A more knowledge-based ‘learning about religion’ approach is seen – in Carmody’s article – as dominant but also as an imported, neo-colonial (or rather, a left-over from substantive colonialism), approach, to be contrasted with the more personal, confessional, communally-based approach that seems more appropriate to Zambian culture and history. As with Sweden, the political and the religious are intertwined, although in Sweden, religion is seen as the ‘not national’, whilst in Zambia religion is seen as the ‘national’, culture or value-system.

Anuleena Kimanen writes of the teaching of social justice in Finnish RE lessons. As with Zambian RE, the more typical or ‘official’ approach seems to be to focus on knowledge of the topics – in Kimanen’s case, knowledge of social justice issues. But the subject seemed to come alive when opportunities were given for the students themselves to be present in the curriculum, that is, when they were exploring the practice of social justice itself, in their own school. It is, once again, not a simple matter of knowledge versus personal education, but an attempt to address both, together, that can be seen in this article. Likewise, in Poland, where Bogusław Milerski and Tadeusz J Zieliński explore how RE is taught in a legally ‘worldview neutral’ school, in a country with a long-established (post-communist) confessional approach to RE, and a ‘democratic, pluralistic and at the same time hyper-religious society’. Describing some of the religious practices or values imposed on students as forms of ‘symbolic violence’, it is clear that the authors see the ‘knowledge’ of the (current) curriculum as dominant but as needing revision in the light of the rights of the students in schools.

Starting and ending with articles highlighting controversies, and having plenty of controversy in between: this issue of the BJRE once again demonstrates how RE is a politically- and socially-charged subject, in need of exploration and research. One way of understanding these tensions and controversies is to see what the place is of ‘knowledge’, of ‘religion’, and of the ‘personal’. And although that lens will certainly not resolve all the tensions, I think it can help explain how complex the issues are, and how both knowledge and student are in turn implicated in important personal, local, national, and religious/worldview communities. The following articles help illuminate these matters, and I commend them to you.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.