Evolving cultures of religious education: new perspectives on research, policies and practices

Introduction to the theme of the special issue

The theme of this special issue is: “Evolving cultures of religious education: new perspectives on research, policies and practices”. ‘Culture’ is in itself an ambiguous term that includes “all the characteristic activities and interests of a people” (Eliot 1979). The dictionary definitions of culture include: “The set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterises an institution or organisation” and the “set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic” (Merriam-Webster 2017). In simple terms, culture is shared by a certain group or society and is identifiable in the way things are supposed to and are being done in the social interaction of that certain group or its institutions. In the research today, ‘culture’ is less and less seen as a substantial and stagnant phenomenon with exclusive boundaries, but rather as something that is constantly evolving in interaction with other developments and cultures (Grillo 2003; Gropas and Triandafyllidou 2011).

Jerome Bruner’s (1996) central thesis is that culture shapes minds so that it provides us with the toolkit by which we construct not only our worlds but our very conceptions of ourselves and our powers. Taking a cultural view of education requires, according to him, that one considers education and school learning in their situated, cultural context. While adhering to the views of Bruner, we employ his views further as we use ‘cultures’ here as an heuristic interpretative framework for mounting the challenges and changes in the different national and institutional contexts, for instance, that have relevance to religious education. Such current European wide changes include the diversification in religious-demography and secularisation, European policy initiatives to enhance tolerance and human rights in education (Everington 2007; Jackson and Fujiwara 2007; Jackson 2014), and the increased role of social media in the lives of people and the policy initiatives for ICT and digital learning in education (Conrads et al. 2017).

The culture of religious education surrounds the practice of religious education: what goes on in religious education classrooms is a concrete representation of the respective culture of RE in a given country. The culture of religious education becomes manifest as the research, policies and practices of religious education. The practices of religious education can be termed classroom culture of RE (Ubani 2013). Today, ‘classroom’ is understood increasingly so that the learning environment crosses over the traditional physical boundaries of the classroom and blends informal and virtual settings with the formal educational enterprise (Kumpulainen, Mikkola, and Jaatinen 2014). Regardless of this, a classroom culture can be described to include the things that are considered valuable and good, what kind knowledge, language, concepts and practices are characteristic for religious education learning and instruction – what makes RE distinctive from other subjects or educational actions.

The classroom culture in religious education can be viewed to be in interaction with different factors connected to research, policy and practice. Together with the classroom culture of RE, we consider these as integral markers of the culture of religious education. When discussing religious education in schools, such factors include the field tradition – how things have always been done and should be done that is upheld by the teachers and is being reproduced by non-reflective teacher education-, religious demography, the position of religion(s) in the community where the school is located and in society in general and especially in confessional education the religious tradition. In addition, the respective schools’ ethos and ways of handling religion, the effect of educational policy through curricula and the recent research on religion and education through, for instance, pre-service and in-service training or curriculum reforms are examples of factors that play a role in the distinct nature of classroom culture in religious education in a given context. What takes place in a religious education classroom occurs in a web of interaction as these aforementioned aspects are in their right connected with domestic and international politics, media portrayal of religion and conflicts, and the respective socio-cultural situation. The how ‘things are supposed to and are being done’ in religious education is sometimes stagnant enough to be in conflict with other developments in societies and in the lives of the people. It should be added that when ‘the classroom’ is located in a Church setting, we can identify comparable interactions and factors to the ones in public education.

The description of the articles in the special issue

The articles of the special issue are individual case studies that depict through the examination of research, policies and practices how different kinds of tensions, questions and challenges are inherent in the evolving cultures of religious education. The seven articles have been selected from the presentations at the 14^th Nordic Conference of Religious Education (NCRE2017), held at the University of Eastern Finland in 2017. The Nordic Conference on Religious Education has taken place since 1977. The past decades have witnessed a scholarly interest beyond Scandinavia and Baltic countries in the conference. The 120 participants of the NCRE2017 included researchers from the US, Ghana, Israel, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey and Austria. Thus, the selected articles also embody the internationalised nature of the discussion in the Nordic research community concerning religion and education. The articles are also methodologically diverse with contributions that are based on philosophical, qualitative and quantified qualitative analyses. In addition, they touch on issues concerning Lutheran and Greek Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Secular Humanist view of life in religious education. Finally, the articles include viewpoints on research, policy and practice of religious education.

In the first article, Franken relates the Habermas’s normative theory of religion to Islamic religious education in Belgian public education. The article shows how the changes in society challenge the way the state’s educational policy and legislation has been outlined and implemented. The rights of minorities have guided the policy concerning state religious education and Islamic religious education in particular so far. However, now, concerns such as radicalisation have had to be taken into account when examining the nature of Religious Education in Belgium. Franken advocates a kind of cultural change in a stronger state ownership and monitoring in the implementation of religious education in public education: the government should take authority in funding, organising teacher education, reviewing curricula and teaching materials in Islamic religious education. Her article questions the existence of confessional Islamic religious education in a state system if this condition is not met.

The second article focuses on an integral actor in establishing the RE classroom culture: the teacher. In their article, Kimanen and Poulter wish to position themselves in the research of discourses as they analyse the talk of the teachers in segregated and integrated religious education classes in Finland. Their article highlights the role of the teacher in creating and maintaining certain positions for the students and their beliefs. According to the researchers, the discourses in the classroom are empowering certain ways of religiosity and, on the other hand, silencing the other ways. The use of the concept of discourse seems to be a promising tool for evaluating what is considered valuable and how the sense of belonging is being established in the classroom culture of RE.

Similarly to the previous article, Keränen-Pantsu and Rissanen focus on the actions of the teacher in the RE classroom culture. They examine what kind of questions and challenges the use of religious narratives has when they are used as material for Islamic and Lutheran RE in Finland. The article succeeds in portraying what kind of tensions is present in the pedagogical use of the sacred texts of religious traditions in religious education. According to the researchers, the key characteristic of the tension is the conflict between what they call liberal educational values, such as autonomy, and the religious traditions’ self-understanding. The article underlines the important role of the teacher and their pedagogical thinking in the RE classroom culture.

A positive social climate is one aspect of a successful RE classroom culture. In the fourth article, Ubani examines the elements that contribute in the sense of authenticity of the students in integrated Religious Education. In Finland, there is a segregated model of religious education where religious education is given according to one’s own religion. There is a growing questioning of the grounds for having a segregated model in a society that needs, on the one hand, better dialogue skills from its citizens but has also become less religious in terms of Lutheran Christianity. His article describes a teaching experiment where students from different religious affiliations and secular ethics background were taught together. In the analysis of the interviews, Ubani identified aspects in the classroom practice that the students described as contributing in their sense of authenticity in the lessons. These aspects highlight the importance of the atmosphere created during the lessons: the safe classroom culture the teacher and students are creating together is also promoting the sense of authenticity among the students.

The fifth article focuses on religious education in Sweden and India. In the article, Niemi discusses his observations on different interpretations of ‘secular’ in Religious Education in the two cultural contexts. Niemi uses different case examples and data to give understanding on how the conception of secularity differs in Sweden and India. His article shows how public education – and the understanding of religious education – is connected to the cultural, religious and societal characteristics and developments of the respective country in policy and practice: while in Sweden, the secularity in education is outlined in relation to religious beliefs and language, while in India it is delineated in terms of the actions and lived experiences.

The next article concentrates on a topic that has relevance for curriculum development in most Western countries that give public religious education. The starting point for Osbeck, Franck, Lilja and Sporre’s study is that the development of content other than ethics has dominated religious education. In their article, the different aspects of ethical competence are discussed in relation to religious and values education in Swedish public schools, characterised as both a conservative and liberal values education. Their analysis describes how ethical education is represented in research articles between years 2000-2015. They also pinpoint that, in education, there should be more attention paid to the contextual, situational and knowledge-related aspects of ethical competence so that ethical competence is also understood as part of a wider cultural context in life.

The final seventh article illustrates how the educational culture in a Church setting is changing along with the changes in society and the lives of the youth. In their article, Ojala and Innanen are investigating the use of mobile technologies in the context of Christian education, in the Lutheran confirmation training. The confirmation training is popular in Finland as 85.8% of the age group of 14-15 participate in it. The article by Ojala and Innanen shows how social media is becoming part of the educational culture in a customary form of Church youth education and how it challenges the traditional forms of master-student relationship and blurs the boundaries of belonging and community among the young confirmands. It also describes how the use of mobile technology in confirmation training is not unanimously embraced by the students. As the use of new ICT and mobile technology is still in its infancy in the Finnish school education, social media is perhaps seen among the youth primarily as a personal device not to be harnessed in the educational endeavours of the Church.

In addition to the seven articles in the special issue, this edition includes two individual articles. These articles function at the intersection of Christian values, morals and religious education, and they compliment the previous articles rather well. The first of these articles is a study by Leslie Francis, Mark Pike, Thomas Lickona, David Lankshear and Victoria Nesfield. The article describes the outcome of the Narnian Virtues Character Education–pilot among 11-13 year old students in the UK. The neatly executed study shows how the project enhanced the pupils’ knowledge of virtues in general but not their self-perceived behaviours. The other article focuses on gender differences among Italian pre-adolescents on their perceptions of forgiveness. As expected, the study by Barbara Barcaccia, Jessica Pistella, Roberto Baiocco, Susanna Pallini, Angelo Maria Saliani, Fransenco Mancini and Marco Salvati shows that behaviour strategies, such as avoidance and revenge, are connected with non-forgiveness among Catholic pre-adolescents. Their result shows that practising religious girls seem to be more forgiving than other participant groups and it seems to connect the results with the broader literature concerning gender differences on moral orientation.

The articles in the special issue touch on many issues concerning the research, policy and practice that contribute in the cultures of religious education. It can be argued that today there are increasingly shared elements in the cultures of religious education in different countries. There can be identified several reasons for this. In the 21st century, there have been numerous policy initiatives towards standardising religious education in European public education (Everington 2007). In the research, there have also been several activities that have brought together researchers on religion and education in different countries (Jackson et al. 2007; Ziebertz and Riegel 2009; Rothgangel, Skeie, and Jäggle 2015; Kuyk et al. 2007; Schreiner 2011). These arguably affect the practical level of religious education as the outcome of the studies among other textbooks (Jackson 1997) which are studied in academic institutions and teacher education in various countries. This kind of research-based knowledge has been used in its turn in giving guidelines to the policymakers in Europe concerning the handling of religion in public education (Jackson 2014; OSCE/ODIHR 2007).

One aspect that requires more attention in research, however, is the question of identification and memberships in the classroom culture of religious education. This is an aspect that was also inherent in most of the articles. Other research seems to point out that, in terms of learning and social integration, it is important whether a student identifies themselves primarily as a member of the learning community or a member of a given ethnic or religious group during the lessons (Brown 2004). It is, therefore, important to examine what kind of memberships and to what groups the interaction in RE classrooms enhances and how to avoid a situation where the membership in society is in conflict with the sense of belonging to one’s religious or non-religious tradition. As the materials in society may too often depict religion as distant and negative (Freuding 2017), it is increasingly imperative for religious education research, policy and practice to find a means in supporting the students in articulating their relationship to religion in a manner that it is compatible with both their conviction and the good of society. This imperative holds true for religious education in public education, in religious institutions and in homes alike.

Notes on contributors

Martin Ubani is a professor of Religious Education at the School of Theology and the School of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education of the University of Eastern Finland. His research interests include religion and education, spiritual education, RE teacher education and classroom research.

Raili Keränen-Pantsu is a researcher at the University of Eastern Finland, School of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education. She is currently working on her PhD research which focuses on teachers’ pedagogical thinking and narratives used in the context of world- view education.

Martin Ubani
School of theology & School of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland
[email protected]
Raili Keränen-Pantsu
School of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland