Design/Methodology/Approach

Purpose

This study seeks to critically investigate a group of year 11 boys’ relationship to RE in response to debates about boys’ underachievement in RE.

Design/methodology/approach

Qualitative data was collected through observations and semi-structured interviews. Data analysis draws upon pro-feminist and post structuralist theories of the gendered subject.

Findings

The data presented in this paper reveals how RE functioned as a political space for the exploration of social justice issues that formed part of the boys’ daily experiences, serving to increase awareness and understanding of diversity.

Research limitations/implications

At a time of curriculum change where RE has been marginalised by exclusion from the DfE’s English Baccalaureate this paper also seeks to contribute to debates about education for social justice through critical, pluralistic RE within a neo-liberal policy context.

Practical implications

RE is shown to be a potent educational resource for challenging pupils’ negative social practices and producing more reflexive masculine subjects.

Social implications

The contribution of RE to ensuring greater understanding and dialogue requires reassertion and protection within the curriculum.

Originality/value

The data presented shows that where RE is taken up by masculine subjects it offers an alternative discourse with potential to create community cohesion and interfaith dialogue.

Keywords: Neo-liberalism, Religious Education, Social Justice, Masculinity

Paper type: Research paper

1. Introduction:

Education provision and policy in England is undergoing a period of intense reformulation and system-wide change. The discourse which is driving these radical changes is neo-liberalism made most visible in the English system by the introduction of the academies act in 2010 which over a period of two years has produced a 40% increase in converter academies, privately provided by academy trusts(West and Bailey, 2013). We are witnessing a dramatic process of deregulation, privatisation and liberalisation in our school system with an attendant marginalisation of local authorities. These changes have serious implications for curriculum because in academies what is taught is determined by the funding agreement between sponsors and the DfE.

In 2014 a new national curriculum will be implemented. Initially RE, as part of the basic curriculum, was ignored in the national curriculum review, however the RE Council has produced a review (2014), endorsed by Michael Gove, for use by local authority SACREs.With the diminution of local authorities, academies arenow free to either choose a SACRE syllabus or to develop their own, perhaps under guidelines stipulated by their sponsor who might represent a specificreligious interest, RE as a public good appears to be under threat. As a critical subject that addresses issues of public interest, I wish to argue that RE contributes to the functioning of a successful plural democracy. It is therefore incumbent upon the RE community and educators with a commitment to social justice to defend the place of RE as a space where critical issues can be interrogated within the curriculum.

Similarly, the emphasis on vocational qualifications and internships in the 16-19 sector (DfE, 2011:2) indicates the penetration of neo-liberalism and the ‘economicisation’ (Ball, in Souien 2013: 454) of all aspects of education provision in order to produce entrepreneurial subjects. Not surprisingly analysis of the DfE consultation document, ‘Study Programmes for 16-19 year olds’ makes no reference to the policy motifs of new Labour such as community cohesion. There is no reference to RE’s place in the16-19 curriculum, despite the requirements of various iterations of the Education Reform Act and DCSF (2010) guidance that RE is an entitlement of all pupils including those in sixth forms and further education.

This paper aims to demonstrate the capacity of RE as a critical subject to create spaces where social justice issues, which make a material impact on the lives of pupils, can be interrogated. The data presented in this paper was firstly analysed as part of an investigation of the relationship between masculinity and RE, however, it revealed the rhizomatic interconnectedness and intersection of discourses of race, religion, gender and class that were operating within the lives of the boys interviewed. The data shows that these boys were living in a challenging and complex environment but that they take up the offer of critical RE. The data shows that RE could function as a critical space where racism, masculinism and separatism could be resisted and deconstructed. I conclude that RE is a potent educational technology whose place must be supported within the vortex of educational change where private interests appear to be replacing the ‘thick democracy’ (Apple, 2013:458) of state provision. In some respects this is a backwards glance, however it is not nostalgic, rather an appeal for the reassertion of progressive, critical education practice.

1. Policy context: Boys in crisis?

There is a further policy context to this study, the ubiquitous ‘boys in crisis’ debate which has dominated UK education policy since the introduction of GCSE league tables in the 1990s (Martinoet al, 2001).The crisis debate itself is the discursive construction of neo-liberal education policy. In this context the possession of credentials, such as qualifications are necessary if pupils are going to, “demonstrate their potential as flexible, entrepreneurial economic subjects” (Skelton and Francis, 2011: 443). The moral panic about boys’ underachievement, as measured by league tables, shows little sign of abating as recent media reports demonstrate (TES, 2013). Being a boy has become ‘the problem’ in schools according to Tim Leunig, DfE advisor who is calling for schools’ performance to be measured in terms of the success they have in ensuring that the academic gap between girls and boys is closed. Policy makers’ concerns with boys’ underachievement are also highlighted in respect of specific subjects. RE is no exception. OfSTED draws attention to the substantive issue of the, ‘persistent underachievement of boys’ (OfSTED, 2007), mostnotably in terms of examination results where boys’ outcomes predominate in the lower grades.

The failing boys’ crisis discourse provides the policy context to the research which produced this study. However, field work in the school which formed the site for this study revealed a far more complex, sometimes contradictory reality shaping the relationship between masculine subjectivity and RE than the crisis discourse suggests.

Feminist social theory has shown the propositions of the crisis debate depend onan essentialist ontology of the gendered subject, resulting in thereification of the ‘boys will be boys’ discourse (Zyngier, 2009).Critical empirical studies show that boys frequently elude the reductive categories of this unitary construct of the ‘failing boy’, as O’Donnell and Sharpe suggest:

“Although our research confirms some widely held views of boys in contemporary society, their accounts testify to the complexity and difference in their situations. Class and ethnicity interplay with gender to an extent that tends to undermine sweeping generalisations” (O’Donnell and Sharpe, 2000: 1).

1. Personal and professional positioning:

The initial reasons for this paper emerged against the backdrop of the crisis discourse; however, it is also the outcome of my personal and professional narrative. As a reflexive researcher this study is situated as much within my own biography (Jarviluoma et al, 2003)as it is in wider policy debates.I am an ITT tutor specializing in secondary RE, but prior to that I was a teacher of RE working in 11-18 secondary settings.In 2005 I attended an HMI OfSTED RE conference which focussed on the ‘persistent underachievement of boys’ which led me to develop the basis of a thesis proposal aimed at critically investigating the reasons for this disassociation from RE. As an educator my commitment to RE lies in its capacity to provide young people with a forum to explorequestions of meaning, purpose and value. This process I wish to argue is a philosophical practice which, drawing upon Foucault, I characterise as parresia, “a virtue, a duty, a technique’ of ‘free-spokenness’”(Foucault, 2010:43).

The apparent lack of engagement by some boys with thisproject of critical RE seemed at best a missed opportunity and at worst a gendered disenfranchisement from the resource of RE with potentially serious social consequences, described by John Bangs of the NUTas a, ‘gift to the BNP’ (TES, 2007).

I began my fieldwork in 2008 in three contrasting settings in order to explore the putative negative relationship between masculinity and RE.I began to see RE as the lens through which young male subjectivity could be critically interrogated and made visible. RE was a discursive site for the performance of masculine identity, the point of intersection where subject choice and other male discursive practices aligned.The strongest narrative to emerge through the boys’ talk across the three sites was what I refer to as the ‘respect’ narrative. In the case of this research setting, the ‘respect’ narrative emerged within the context of the boys’ experiences of racial and cultural tensions, heightened further by the gendered dimension of competing masculine gang cultures. These boys’ identities were being shaped by their experiences of the ‘other’ in the form of ethnic differences amongst themselves.

Methodologically this finding is significant. It demonstrates that the way RE is received is idiographic. Learning takes place in a social context, a realisation which required me to work with the interpretive tools of, “theories and narratives that fit specific, delimited, local historical situations and problems”(Denzin and Lincoln, in Flick, 2006: 19). This outcome also has implications for educators working within a social justice paradigm.Through my research I came to see dialogical RE as offering pupils a liminal space for existential ‘problem solving’ (Freire, 1996:60) within an otherwise striated, prescribed curriculum. As bell hooks suggests in her discussion of her work in a university setting,

“The democratic educator breaks through the false construction of the corporate university as set apart from real life and seeks to re-envision schooling as always a part of our real world experience and our real life. ...we see teaching and learning as taking place constantly” (hooks, 2003:41).

hook’s visionis just as compelling at any age phase and has particular relevance within this context. It requires educators to acknowledge the complex inter-subjectivity of their environment as a site where situated micro-narratives interact with wider discourses of the social order (Duckworth, 2013).

1. Literature on RE and Social Justice:

The relationship between RE and social justice was the theme of the 2012 RE Association annual conference, ‘Let Freedom Ring’ which provided a forum for the critical exploration of the intersection of RE, social justice, liberation, and civil/human rights movements,

‘‘Religious education in its various forms has often been a key but unacknowledged component of diverse freedom and protest movements” (Seymour, 2012:217).

When taught critically this capacity of RE to raise awareness of social justice themes aligns with Freire’s view that,

“In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world”, (Freire, 1996:64).

A brief analysis of RE curriculumdocuments produced over the past decade revealsa liberal phenomenological approach to the study of religion. In 2004 QCA produced a framework for RE and a social cohesion narrative began to emerge, becoming more explicit in the up-dated DCSF 2010 guidance for RE which makes reference to the duty of schools to promote community cohesion and the value of RE as the:

“Key context to develop young peoples’ understanding and appreciation of diversity, to promote shared values and to challenge racism and discrimination” (DCSF, 2010:7).

The post 9/11community cohesion discourse was the ‘pivot’ around which much recent RE policy and pedagogy up to 2010 revolved (Moulin, 2012). A critical response might take the view that post 9/11 RE policy is itself the discursive outcome of a wider neo-liberal discourse of ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein, 2005) as Gearon argues, “political and security justifications for religion in education risks shifting the aims and purposes of religious education towards the aims and purposes of political and security interest” (Gearon, 2013:18), however this argument is hard to sustain given the virtual absence of any references to community cohesion or the ‘Prevent’ agenda in subsequent DfE policy. DfE policy has effectively ignored RE, excluding it from the National Curriculum review and the English Baccalaureate, with many new academies choosing to ignore it altogether,perhaps,because, “privately controlled institutions are captured by private interests” (Saltman, 2007:3) rather than the public interests which are addressed in RE. It could also be argued that as a now threatened space for fostering an ethos of engaged criticism and participation in community schools, RE is a crucial “site and stake for the expansion of democratic values” (Saltman, 2007:3) and the nurture of an alternative social justice discourse to narratives of consumerist materialism (Wright, 2000).

1. Methodological choices:

Qualitative literature on the relationship between masculinity and REis limited; however there are two noteworthy contributorswhose analysis aligns to the theorisation of gendered identity offered in this paper: Wintersgill (2007) and Engebretson (2006).

In Wintersgill’s survey of boys’ attitudes to spirituality , two of her respondents, Antony and Bakir indicated that being ‘nice’ ran contrary to expectations of their peers, “you have to act hard”, “being nice don’t get you nowhere” (Wintersgill, 2007: 53). Similarly, in the data derived from research on teenage boys and their constructions of masculinity and spirituality (2006) Engebretson highlights the challenges of maintaining masculine identity. Paralleling Connell (2008), Engebretson found that many of her respondents lived the ‘hegemonic’ masculine norm in their everyday school life, but experienced it as a struggle.

The methodology presented in this paper develops these themes further through the adoption of a poststructuralist analytic framework. In this analysis there is no essential self that pre-exists ‘discourse’and I am using Foucault’s definition of discourse as, “the practices which systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault, 2002: 54).

This is not to suggest that the boys in my sample lacked agency. Fieldwork revealed the dominance of a desired hard masculinity amongst the boys in my sample, which included both boys who engaged with RE and those who disassociated from RE. These boyswere working at their identities, drawing upon the masculine resources available to them with a tacit understanding of the high stakes required by the masculine truth games which delimited their social space (Martino, 1999).In this setting successful social performance as a boy was no small matter requiring continued reiteration through social performance,

“...to qualify as a substantive identity is an arduous task, for such appearances are rule generated identities, ones which rely on the consistent and repeated invocation of rules that condition and restrict culturally intelligible practices of identity” (Butler, 2007:198).

When I began my research, questions emerged which led me to consider the extent to which RE reinforced or disrupted the masculine identities these boys were working so hard at through the daily gendered ‘social rituals’ (Butler, 2007) of fighting and territorialism. From a poststructuralist perspective I sought to investigate whether thesedominant gender discoursescould be resisted or fractured (Foucault, 1998). Engebretson and Wintersgill show evidence of ‘contradictory’ masculinity suggesting that learner subjectivity is open to, “intervention and resignification” (Butler, 2007), “becoming minor” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004 b) through alternative discourses and educational technologies such as RE. So, were the boys in my sample able to use RE as an identity resource in their lives, or did they experience duality of the self? Were these boys investing so much of their social energies in the gendered masculine truth game that they had become insulated from social, gender and racial justice issues that fashioned their communities and formed the curricula for their GCSE RE? The findings I shall present confirm a complex interplay of subject positions.

1. Data Collection:

This study focuses specifically on key stage four boys because they were reaching the end of their Religious Education programmes. Thequalitative research methods utilized in this fieldwork belong to what Denzin et al. (2003) refer to as the ‘narrative moment’, a shift from generalizable universal truths to a concern with contingent, situated micro-narratives. My fieldwork was ethnographically orientated. As a participant observer I was able to immerse myself in the everyday routines of the research settings to gain some footing within the micro-dynamics of the school as adynamic and permeable discursive site where relations of power, subjectivity and language intersected.

The school, teachers and pupils are all anonymised in the study, whichis represented as:‘Valleytown High school’: an 11-16 community high in a former cotton producing industrial town in the North West. BERA (2004) ethical guidelines were followed. Consent was sought from all respondents, including pupils’ parents/guardians. Anonymity was guaranteed and the right to withdrawal was emphasised throughout the project.

Data collection took place over a four week period and consisted of a schedule of:

• Classroom observations of lessons;
• Group interviews: consisting of one female and three male groups. This enabled ‘purposive sampling’ (Silverman, 2006) of pupils for individual interviews;
• Individual semi-structured interviews with six boys;
• Exit interviews with the RE teachers involved.

For the purpose of this study I have chosen to focus principally on the narratives of four year 11 boys, although reference is made to both the boys’ class teacher and their year 10 peers. These boys are of particular interest because they were most open to RE, thus bucking the national gendered trend of girls’ engagement with RE (DfES, 2007), but displayed the hyper-masculinity of the boys who populate policy makers’ descriptions of failing boys- on the face of it, these boys had more in common with Mac an Ghaill’s (1994) ‘macho lads’ than Connell’s ‘swots’ (2000).

The participants:

Jack lives in Valleytown with his mother and his sisters. He is regarded as a ‘gang leader’ and has an ambivalent relationship with school. He associates strongly with sport and his imagined future is as an army physical fitness instructor. PE is his favourite subject, but he articulates a strong narrative of association with RE.

Kain lives in Valleytown with foster parents. His class teacher regards him as able but ‘dangerous’ and ‘volatile’. He is interested in cars and engineering and has an imagined future in army logistics as a tank driver. He articulates a strong narrative of association with RE.

Murad is a Gujarati heritage student and a practising Muslim. He was able to articulate a strong narrative of association with RE. He lives in Valleytown with his parents. He is regarded as the ‘cock’ of the school. He is captain of the school rugby team. He aspires to University and is interested in local politics. His imagined future is as a pharmacist or a lawyer.