David Lundie

Failures of meaning in religious education

The educational aims of religious education (RE) in the UK as evinced, for example, by Ofsted have been couched in the language of meaning making. Based on an ESRC funded three-year ethnographic study of 24 schools across the UK, this essay represents one attempt to interrogate how such meanings are shaped, or indeed fail to be shaped, in the day-to-day transactions of the school. We do this by locating RE in current discussions of efficacy, as manifest in inspectoral reports and allied scholarship, illustrate how complex the entailments and purposes of RE are, explore some of the ethnographic and related data to understand how meaning is shaped inside and outside the classroom, and, finally, attempt to locate that material in more general observations about the nature of meaning in RE – observations that are informed by contemporary readings of meaning making in the work of, among others, Baudrillard. We observe that RE, so dependent upon meaning for educational justification, is too frequently a site which witnesses failures of meaning.

The Delphi method: gathering expert opinion in religious education

The ‘Does Religious Education work?’ project is part of the Religion and Society programme funded by two major research councils in the UK. It sets out to track the trajectory of Religious Education (RE) in secondary schools in the UK from the aims and intentions represented in policy through its enactment in classroom practice to the estimations of its impact by students. Using a combination of approaches, we are in the process of investigating the practices which determine and shape the teaching of RE in secondary schools through linked case studies, semi-structured interviews and a practitioner enquiry strand. In this article we focus on the first stage of the project where we used the Delphi method to elicit expert opinion on the aims and intentions of RE in secondary schools in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland. We outline the place of the Delphi process within the rationale of the project, discuss emerging themes and some of the issues arising from the use of this approach.

Seeing and Seeing through: Forum Theatre Approaches to Ethnographic Evidence.

Ethnographic findings from a large qualitative research project on Religious Education in UK secondary schools uncovered contested meanings for the subject as a social practice. In order to bring to the fore some of the ways these contested meanings manifest themselves as confusions in the classroom, a performance ethnography was conducted, making use of Augusto Boal’s forum theatre approach. This involved distilling ethnographic evidence into dramatic vignettes, performing these in front of an audience of pupils, and asking the pupils for feedback on the experience. The feedback enabled the research team to triangulate their findings, by inverting the ethnographers’ gaze, allowing pupils to co-construct the meanings which the ethnographers had elicited from the data. The method is discussed in detail, as are the ways in which resource and examination pressures in the Religious Education classroom can obscure opportunities for authentic exploration of religious meanings in pupils’ lives and the contribution of the forum theatre and pupils’ reflections on how to remedy these distortions.

The Givenness of the Human Learning Experience and Its Incompatibility with Information Analytics

Abstract The rise of learning analytics, the application of complex metrics developed to exploit the proliferation of ‘Big Data’ in educational work, raises important moral questions about the nature of what is measurable in education. Teachers, schools and nations are increasingly held to account based on metrics, exacerbating the tendency for fine-grained measurement of learning experiences. In this article, the origins of learning analytics ontology are explored, drawing upon core ideas in the philosophy of computing, such as the general definition of information and the information-theoretic account of knowledge. Drawing upon a reading of Descartes Meditatio II, which extends the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion into a pedagogy of intentionality, the article identifies a fundamental incompatibility between the subjective experience of learning and the information-theoretic account of knowledge. Human subjects experience and value their own information incommensurably with the ways in which computers measure and quantify information. The consequences of this finding for the design of online learning environments, and the necessary limitations of learning analytics and measurement are explored.

‘Respect Study’ the Treatment of Religious Difference and Otherness: An Ethnographic Investigation in UK Schools

Understanding and appreciating the beliefs and practices of others feature prominently among the aims and purposes of Religious Education in UK schools. Drawing on ethnographic data from the ‘Does RE Work?’ project, this paper presents two conceptions of ‘in/entoleration’ a deliberate process of inculcating tolerance in pedagogy. Entoleration, akin to enculturation, encourages sympathetic and transformative encounter with others’ beliefs. Intoleration, akin to indoctrination, risks eliding both difference and encounter in the service of a predetermined aim of nurturing uncritical tolerance. The former is categorised by pedagogies of encounter with the other as person, while the latter often focuses on externals and strangeness.

8.4 Theorizing Relational Privacy: Embodied Perspectives to Support Ethical Professional Pedagogies

This chapter outlines the critical processes of theorizing which draws upon normative and critical perspectives to resituate the question of privacy and ethics as a relational concern. These normative questions are framed in the context of professional education for analysts making complex decisions about private and sensitive information. An examination of the phenomenon of privacy as it is experienced from the first person perspective necessitates a degree of normative modelling which was initially inspired by empirical work in behavioural economics, but which has since departed from that paradigm. The interpretive framework adopted draws upon the phenomenological work of Jean-Luc Marion to identify two distinct approaches to the valuation of private information. These distinct approaches to the meaning and value of privacy point to a disjunction between the ways digital systems and human beings process and value information. The implications of this approach for interpretive research and pedagogy in the age of massive open data repositories (‘Big Data’) are also considered.

Metacognition in schools: what does the literature suggest about the effectiveness of teaching metacognition in schools?

Abstract This paper focuses on a neglected area of school policy and practice: metacognition. As education becomes increasingly evidence-informed policy makers, school leaders and teachers are becoming increasingly research literate and have ready access to an ever-growing range of evidence about ‘what works’ in schools. Influential sources of evidence, such as the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit, often indicate that teaching metacognition in schools can have a very positive effect on pupils’ outcomes. In this paper, we examine over 50 studies to ascertain the effect of teaching metacognition in schools on pupils’ outcomes and their wellbeing. Following our review it is clear that there is strong evidence indicating the when metacognition is effectively taught in schools then there is a very positive effect on pupil outcomes; there is less evidence about the relationship between teaching metacognition and pupil wellbeing, but the evidence which does exist is also very positive. Having identified that teaching metacognition can help improve pupil outcomes in schools, we then pose questions about the English government’s attitudes towards evidence-based practice. We ask why the government adopts some policies and strategies which have an international evidence base, while not adopting other policies or strategies which have at least an equally strong evidence base. This paper concludes by suggesting how policies and practices can be improved in schools, Initial Teacher Education establishments and at the level of national policy.

Educating Global Britain: Perils and possibilities promoting ‘National’ values through critical Global Citizenship Education

ABSTRACT Global citizenship education (GCE) within schools in England is increasingly being reoriented to address a statutory duty to promote fundamental British values (FBV). This multi-method study investigates the influence of critical GCE within initial teacher education in reshaping awareness, understanding and disposition towards FBV amongst beginning teachers. Findings highlight a tension between growing confidence and understanding of how to implement the FBV agenda and the development of autonomous dispositions of the kind demanded for the practice of critical GCE. Four teacher orientations towards FBV are developed and explored, demonstrating the role of practice-based learning for the cultivation of critical dispositions.

Security Networks and Human Autonomy: A Philosophical Investigation

Data transactions in complex information networks have their own philosophical and mathematical logics. This chapter introduces the reader to key philosophical debates about the nature and effect of information technologies, and seeks to apply these to the philosophy of information. Drawing on personalist philosophy, the chapter redirects attention to questions of moral agency as they relate to security and intelligence work, and questions whether overreliance on data may fail to account for important aspects of human experience and action.