Persons, pedagogy, policy and philosophy

In different countries around the world, universities and research have better or worse public reputations. I am based in England, in which universities and research currently have a peculiarly poor reputation. What is peculiar is that the university system and the people within it are regarded very highly elsewhere in the world. It is just at home that there is a reputational problem. (The English situation is – happily – not entirely replicated in other parts of the UK.) Government ministers have complained, saying, for example, ‘I think people in this country have had enough of experts’ (Deacon 2016). One of the complaints is that the preparation of teachers should be less influenced by the ‘experts’ from universities, especially those dealing in ‘theory’ rather than treating joining the teaching profession as a simple matter of completing an apprenticeship in practical skills. A number of universities are considering withdrawing from teacher training in the light of a forthcoming review of the contracts, and a narrowing of the curriculum, for such work (Speck 2021). Given these challenges, a number of educational researchers in England have themselves either focused on narrow government-inspired work, or, in contrast, on research unconnected with what happens in schools. Happily, religious education research in England seems to have maintained a continuing interest in the vital, personal, experiences of students and teachers in classrooms and also on the philosophies and theories underpinning school-based education. The same is true of religious education research around the globe, notwithstanding the various different pressures on research in every country. (Pressures currently include the tragic consequences of the covid-19 pandemic, now affecting much of the Global South far worse than the Global North.) So this issue of the BJRE tries to represent some of the variety of concerns within the field from the personal through the pedagogic, the policy-related, and the philosophical, in a way that also, we hope, shows the need for the range itself. There are articles addressing the personal experiences of teachers and students of the subject, along with work on pedagogic practices, local and national policy debates, and the complex philosophical principles underlying religious education research and practice. Research – and the universities which host and support so much of the research – has its place at every level of theory, policy, practice, and human experience. The same could be said of religious and nonreligious ways of life. They are not ‘merely’ sets of ideas (although they also include sets of ideas) or merely sets of ritual practices (although these may also be vital): they are rich and complex sets of personal experiences, practices, policies, cultures, philosophies, and more. In the first article, Elmarie Costandius and Neeske Alexander explore how the personal religious beliefs of students of visual communication design in South Africa were lived out in their community interaction activities. There had been no plans to incorporate religious positions into the programme, and yet students’ beliefs seem to have significantly affected their community practices. This is a complex study, taking account of the role of Christianity within the apartheid period, and the potential for Christian ‘helping’ to continue contributing to colonial attitudes and practices. Bruner noted that ’pedagogy is never innocent’ (Bruner 1996, 63); the same can be said of ‘helping’, as described in this article, and of all our educational activities whether as students or as teachers. The authors suggest we must go ‘beyond religion to negotiate ethics’, and although others might contest what ‘beyond’ means in this context, we must certainly avoid simply relying on a single religious viewpoint in an ethically and religiously plural world. Other ways of negotiating in difficult circumstances were researched in the article by Tara Malone, Barbara O’Toole and Aiveen Mullally. Their work also focused on an increasingly pluralist context in which a dominant religion has lost BRITISH JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 2021, VOL. 43, NO. 4, 361–363 https://doi.org/10.1080/01416200.2021.1938423