A doubly reflexive ethnographic methodology for the study of religious diversity in education

Abstract

The fruitful and intensive political, academic, and pedagogical debate on religious education in contexts of diversity seems, to suffer from an ostensible imbalance. On one hand, models, proposals, and programmes destined to face the ‘challenges’ and ‘problems’ generated by religious diversity in the classroom proliferate. On the other, in many countries and school systems there is a scarcity of empirical studies about intercultural and interreligious processes and relations as they occur in the school and extra-school educational spheres. This striking gap between the normative-prescriptive and the descriptive-empirical area is a feature of educational systems, which we are trying to close with comparative projects such as the REDCo project (Religion in Education: A Contribution to Dialogue or a Factor of Conflict Transforming Societies of European Countries, a European FP6 STRP project). In order for the distinctively anthropological attitude not to be limited to a criticism of the often essentialising and reifying conceptual and ideological uses of the concepts of ‘religion’, ‘culture’ and/or ‘identity’ in this domain, I hold that ethnography can contribute to overcoming this gap by empirically analysing the interwoven and often dialectic relationship between the discourses of the pedagogical-intellectual sphere and daily educational praxis. In the following pages, summarising experience gained particularly in the Spanish REDCo project contribution, I analyse, from a methodological point of view, ethnography’s possible contribution to the study of interreligious relations in school contexts. In order to do this, I present and discuss the elements required to develop a conceptual-methodological model that can integrate ‘syntactic’, ‘semantic’, and ‘pragmatic’ dimensions that will articulate this dialectic relationship between ethnic discourses and cultural practices.