Pedagogy and purpose

The challenge of understanding and implementing a ‘worldviews’ approach in Religious Education is one that continues to dominate the thinking of many experts in the field. Andrew Wright and Elina Wright, in their contribution to this issue, highlight the hermeneutical and pedagogical implications of the concept of ‘worldview’, and how these transcend a content-driven notion of curriculum planning. Highlighting a worldview theory that focuses on a critical realist ontology, recognising the relation between the ‘world’ viewed by any given worldview, without which, Wright and Wright argue, Religion and Worldviews risks being ‘lead … into a relativistic cul-de-sac’, against which they advocate for an understanding the ways that many religious and non-religious worldviews emphasise ‘faith-seeking-understanding’ or judgemental rationality, the ways in which adherents to a given worldview seek to enhance or perfect their knowledge of the world and ultimate reality. Wright and Wright highlight that these approaches are always communal, but not necessarily institutional, and increasingly these communities can be mediated digitally as much as through families, places of worship, or public ritual. Highlighting the fundamental difference between teaching that aims at this critical perfecting of our many views of the one world we share, and a mere presentation of the diversities within a plurality of worldviews, Wright and Wright perhaps elucidate one of the lacunae that accounts for the continuing lack of clarity about what constitutes a ‘worldviews’ approach to Religious Education.

Often, agreement about pedagogy in Religious Education masks these deeper divisions as to the purpose of religious education. This is an insight that emerged from professional discussions during the ‘Does Religious Education Work?’ project, in which deep divisions between advocates of confessional and multi-faith RE gave way in professional conversations to broad agreement as to the methods and mechanisms that constituted good, academically engaging classroom practice (Baumfield et al. 2012). In relation even to problematic models of purpose, pedagogical efficacy sometimes masks challenges. For example, during the series of Section 5 inspections carried out by England’s school inspectorate, Ofsted, that followed the Trojan Horse allegations of extremist infiltration in Birmingham schools, inspectors in one school found both that RE’s narrow focus on a single religion contributed to the isolation of the community, while also commending the pedagogies employed by RE teachers in the school (Lundie 2014). This begs the question whether RE can be both ‘bad’ in its ends and yet ‘good’ in its means of achieving them? Pedagogy, however, is not merely a matter of tactics, as a number of contributions to this issue of the Journal highlight, but is fundamentally tied to the moral purpose of education.

Pedagogical practicalities are addressed in detail by Ahmed Aseery’s systematic review of literature on motivation and engagement. Employing a systematic methodology to identify and synthesise 36 studies. These point to a positive correlation between motivation and students’ freedom to express themselves, make connections, share knowledge with one another and their teacher. Echoing Wright’s concern with rationality, critical yet positive feedback and application to real life scenarios are factors Aseery identifies with increased student motivation. That such commonalities could be extracted from a study of contexts as diverse as the Laïque French-Canadian elementary school system and Islamic religion teachers in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, suggests there is much we can learn from pedagogical traditions beyond our own.

The links between pedagogical practices, culturally sensitive curriculum and fundamental purpose are further explored by Ahmed Alhazmi, in relation to tolerance and violence prevention in the Arab world. Drawing on a tradition from other scholars that understands tasamuh, tolerance, as synonymous with harmony, derived from principles of harm reduction and desired ends in Islamic jurisprudence, so as to make tolerance an understood and shared goal among the Islamic faithful, not merely a precept imposed by governments or international order. Locating this within a culturally sensitive reading of Freirean critical pedagogy, Alhazmi argues for a critical pedagogy of tolerance that helps students to understand the economic, political and psychological dimensions of the world, again through an improved understanding of their religious worldview.

In an Editorial in these pages in 2022, I noted the absence of inter-faith (as distinct from multi-faith) approaches to Religious Education in much of the academic literature. While multi-faith Religious Education proceeds from explicitly non-confessional aims and methodological agnosticism, inter-faith Religious Education seeks to help learners to understand the ways one religious tradition understands and dialogues with another. Very often, the most interesting interactions in the classroom come from such encounters. In another welcome contribution from the inter-faith perspective, Toni Foley, Maree Dinan-Thompson and Nerina Caltabiano explore interreligious learning in a Catholic school in Australia, employing an inquiry-based learning approach to understand the relationship between Catholic Religious Education and religiously diverse student community, finding that the Catholic ethos provides a space for recontextualization, for Muslim, Buddhist and Indigenous spirituality students to deepen a comparative understanding of their own faith traditions.

Bringing together, again, Christian confessional pedagogy and a communal worldview dimension in relation to individualism, Jarosław Horowski explores forgiveness, as understood within a Christian critique of individualism. Again, highlighting the methodological and epistemic individualism in many social-scientific understandings of forgiveness, the Christian worldview provides, for Horowski, critical resources to aid in understanding the distance between the subjective human experience of forgiveness with its hurts and resentments, and the ultimate reality of divine forgiveness, and seeking to perfect it.

Drawing now on empirical data, from Poland again, together with Italy and Spain, Oviedo and colleagues address the pedagogical challenges that can arise from the perceived epistemic incompatibilities between science and religion. Proposing a role for spirituality, as distinct from organised religion, in mediating the relationship and moderating tensions, highlighting similarities with Wright and Wright’s communal and plural understanding of worldview, rather than a merely institutional and personal.

Finally, bringing us back full circle to an expansive understanding of worldview that incorporates religion, food and relationships, Vishakha Kumar explores the ways these discourses and practices influence the moral worldview of teachers in Delhi, India. This research highlights the role religion plays in the pedagogical and moral orientation of teachers, even in a context in which schools do not explicitly teach about religions. Together with theological reflections from Alhazmi and Horowski, rigorous empirical data from Oviedo and Aseery, such an attentiveness to lived practice completes the pedagogical picture, rather than competing with or masking it.

Pedagogy and purpose are interlinked. The challenge of understanding worldview is essential to understanding a number of the challenges of the contemporary world. Empathy between human beings across diverse contexts requires an understanding of a common world we share, as well as an understanding of the deep differences in the starting points from which we construct even the concept of empathy itself; whether from the individual subject of psychological science, concepts such as harmony rooted in Islamic law, or forgiveness divinely exemplified in the Christian atonement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.