The Language of Interfaith Encounter Among Inner City Primary School Children

Abstract

This article reports on a study of the influence of encounter with religious difference on the religious understanding of primary age children in an inner city district of an East Midlands city. It offers an analysis of the children's use of language in small discussion groups where they were free to explore their own and respond to each other's religious ideas. It applies Mikhail Bakhtin's theories to the interanimation of language and meaning that characterizes the children's religious discourse and considers the implications for religious education of a greater understanding of the processes of meaning-making in the children's religious dialogue.

KEYWORDS:

• children
• dialogue
• inter faith encounter
• religious language

Notes

Julia Ipgrave, “Inter Faith Encounter and Religious Understanding in an Inner City Primary School” (Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Warwick, 2002). The research was extended in various publications, including Ursula McKenna, Julia Ipgrave, and Robert Jackson, Interfaith Dialogue by Email in Primary Schools: An Evaluation of the Building E-Bridges Project (Münster, Germany: Waxmann, 2008).

Robert Jackson and Eleanor Nesbitt, Hindu Children in Britain (Stoke on Trent, UK: Trentham, 1993).

Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 428.

Derek Layder, Modern Social Theory: Key debates and New Directions (London: UCL Press, 1997).

Ibid., 23.

Junior schools serve pupils aged 7 to 11.

Bakhtin's use of the word discourse (slovo) contains an understanding somewhere between a word and a method of using words. In keeping with this, discourse in this article is used as shorthand for ideas, speech, and meaning, as they engage people in particular themes or areas of interest. It thus differs from sociopsychological or power-relations analyses of classroom conversation that have been inspired by discourse analysis and the work of Norman Fairclough.

Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 345.

The terminology of assimilation, acknowledgement, and authoritative word comes from the translation of Bakhtin's work in Holquist's 1981 edition.

Ibid., 348.

Ibid., 280.

Ibid., 272.

Ibid., 276.

Ibid., 345.

TR's reference here was to Sai Baba.

Ibid., 282.

James V. Wertsch, Vygotsky and the Social Formation of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 137.

Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 280.

Ibid., 282.

Ibid., 272.

Interest in combining dialogical and interpretive approaches is evident in WRERU's involvement in a programme facilitating inter faith dialogue by email that followed this research as reported in McKenna, Ipgrave, and Jackson, Interfaith Dialogue by Email in Primary Schools, 136.

Bakhtin described an utterance as “a link in the chain of speech communication” as it does not belong to the speaker alone but reflects other utterances about the same object. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 94.

Including in WRERU's research project, Young People's Attitudes towards Religious Diversity, funded by the research councils (ESRC and AHRC) and in the WRERU's research project funded by the Department for Schools, Children and Families: Robert Jackson, Julia Ipgrave, Mary Hayward, Paul Hopkins, Nigel Fancourt, Mandy Robbins, Leslie Francis, and Ursula McKenna, Materials Used to Teach about World Religions in English Schools (London: Department for Schools, Children, and Families, 2010).

In a 1998 article Linda Rudge drew attention to the position in RE conversation of students who have no religious background: Linda Rudge, “‘I am Nothing: Does it Matter?’ A Critique of Current Religious Education Policy and Practice in England on Behalf of the Silent Majority,” British Journal of Religious Education 20, no. 3 (1998): 155–165.

Jackson et al., Materials used to Teach about World Religions in English Schools, 166.

Clive Erricker and Jane Erricker, “The Children and Worldviews Project: A Narrative Pedagogy of Religious Education,” in Pedagogies of Religious Education: Case Studies in the Research and Development of Good Pedagogic Practice in RE, ed. Michael Grimmitt (Essex, UK: McCrimmons, 2000), 194, 195.

There are similarities between this process and Jackson's interpretive approach.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julia Ipgrave

Julia Ipgrave is Senior Research Fellow at Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, University of Warwick. She has degrees from University of Oxford and University of Warwick. She is currently researching religion in schools, teenagers’ attitudes to religious plurality, and school-based interfaith dialogue, and the significance of Adam to 17th-century political thought. She has published and presented conference papers in her areas of research. Previously Julia worked as teacher and manager in Leicester schools for 15 years, and taught in teacher education at Oxford Brookes University from 2004 to 2008. Her work on young people's dialogue has been influential in Council of Europe projects. Julia is currently a member of a Council of Europe working group on the development of intercultural competences and is involved in training educationalists across Europe in this field. She is an education specialist member for the Christian Muslim Forum. E-mail: [email protected]