Abstract
Religious Education (RE) is an important part of the school curriculum in the United Kingdom. Where two generations ago it was clearly intended to teach religion, increased religious diversity has reframed it as teaching about religions of all stripes. The requirements are different in each of the U.K.'s four nations (England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales), but the concerns are the same: how to provide religious literacy and interreligious understanding in the context of an increasingly plural society. Students are encouraged to take the program but it is not required.
This volume presents the results of an empirical investigation of what students in U.K. schools actually think about their RE programs, and how they think about religious diversity in general. Though reports from that study have appeared elsewhere, this is the most complete summary of the project's findings. As such, it is a useful source of information about young people's attitudes. It also has lessons for other research teams seeking to use multiple methods in religious research.
The project was based at the University of Warwick's Religions and Education Research Unit and included both qualitative and quantitative researchers. The former gathered data from focus groups of 13- to 16-year-old pupils enrolled in 21 secondary schools spread across the four nations of the U.K. plus London. The latter used a representative sample of 12,000 pupils taken from the same areas. The design called for the qualitative study to identify pupil's own experiences and perspectives, which would frame the research questions that would animate the survey.
The qualitative strand found several overarching themes. First, students reported that schools and their RE programs had less influence on their religious attitudes than did their families and friends. They reported being influenced by the media and also by community attitudes toward religion. Students who were not personally religious and who lived in relatively non-religious areas showed less tolerance for religious minorities than did those who encountered religious people in their everyday lives. Students reported that their approach to religious diversity arose from direct contact with people unlike themselves. They also thought that RE helped increase their understanding of religious diversity.
The quantitative strand found, unsurprisingly, that students who identified themselves as religious found religion more important than did students who were not. They were also more supportive of religious diversity than were “nones”, and those from minority religions were more likely to affirm the importance of tolerance of religions of all kinds, not just their own. These relationships were stronger in some nations than in others, which demonstrates the importance of the U.K.'s national contexts.
Perhaps for this reason, the volume does not spend much time providing a picture of the U.K. as a whole. Instead its core ten chapters present case-studies of qualitative and quantitative findings from each of the five U.K. regions. Each chapter presents data that answers a different research question.
For example, one chapter reports on the focus group at a Muslim-dominated school in central Birmingham. It shows how these Muslim students accept and even seek out the authority of religious leaders—despite the standard expectation that teens prefer autonomy and independence. It turns out that they do, but their independence is from their parents, whom they report criticizing for being insufficiently religious.
Another qualitative chapter reports on student attitudes at a Scottish Roman Catholic school, particularly the question of how students validate their personal religious participation. It uses Danièle Hervieu-Léger's notion of ‘validation regimes’, comparing the strength of institutional, family, and self-validation against the validation they receive from peers. The cases from Wales, Northern Ireland, and London are similarly focus on issues arising from the schools’ local contexts.
The quantitative chapters are also oriented toward different research questions. The Northern Ireland chapter, for example, tests the “worlds apart” thesis by looking for worldview differences between Protestant and Catholic male students. It finds several such differences, which it connects to previous research on the topic. What links these chapters is the survey data itself. Each chapter compares two or more groups on measures of religious identity, life influences, beliefs, attitudes toward diversity, pluralism, tolerance, and so on. The groups change from one chapter to another, in response to the research question being asked.
The volume ends with three comparative chapters that were not part of the original project. One reports data from Canada, another from the United States, and a third from Continental Europe with a focus on Germany. None of these directly parallels the U.K. data, but each adds interest.
This structure produces some frustration. In particular, it is not clear that the qualitative and quantitative parts of the project were well integrated. The rich focus-group results don't seem to have generated survey questions directly, so we don't know how widespread the teens’ attitudes are, even within their own areas. Nor does a single focus group meeting at each school give us a deep understanding of students’ worlds.
Still, the volume does provide evidence for the importance that U.K. students see in Religious Education.