Understanding Religious Diversity in a Plural World: The Interpretive Approach

Abstract

The interpretive approach outlined in this chapter was originally developed for use in religious education (RE) in publicly funded community schools in England and Wales, where the subject is primarily concerned with helping pupils to gain a critical and reflective understanding of religions. The approach has subsequently been developed further in the UK, and has also been used in Norway, Germany, Canada and Japan as well as in a Council of Europe project on bringing the dimension of religious diversity to intercultural education across its 46 member states (e.g. Council of Europe, 2004, 2007). The approach forms the basis of the theoretical framework for pedagogical studies being conducted as part of a European Union Framework 6 research project on religious education by a consortium of ten European universities (Jackson, 2006; Jackson et al. 2007). This chapter is concerned with describing the methodology of the approach, showing how it developed from ethnographic studies of children from religious groups (some of which are outlined by Eleanor Nesbitt in the previous chapter) and developed further through curriculum development and school-based action research. Though the approach draws on the social sciences, it does not reduce religious education to ‘sociology’, but provides rather a means to personal engagement with religious ways of life. However, it does bring from recent social science practical techniques for interpreting the worldviews of others, and a concern with issues of reflexivity. This last point is important, since arguments against drawing on pupils’ own personal views in religious education (see the chapters by Grelle on the USA and by Estivalezes on France below, for example) tend to assume that this element is derived from religious or theological sources, rather than from social science disciplines such as recent social and cultural anthropology.