Schooling Indifference: Reimagining Re in Multi-Cultural and Gendered Spaces

By John I'anson and Alison Jasper

This book is concerned with re-imagining Religious Education (RE) as this is practiced in schools, colleges and universities throughout the UK and in a wide variety of international educational contexts.

On the basis of a critical analysis of current theory and practice in RE the authors argue that this educational framing is no longer plausible in the light of new theoretical developments within the academy. A new educational approach to RE is outlined that challenges students to think and practice differently. This includes a 'becoming ethnographer' approach that can acknowledge socio-material relations and engage the broader literacies necessary for such study.

Part One examines how RE has been constructed as a discipline in historical and spatial terms that abstract its study from material concerns. Part Two offers some new starting points: Spinoza, Foucault and feminist theory that differently foreground context and relationality, and 'Islam' read as a discursive, located tradition rather than as 'world view'. Finally, Part Three proposes a new trajectory for research and practice in RE, with the aim of re-engaging schools, colleges and universities in a dialogue that promotes thinking and practice that - as educational - is continually in touch with the need to be critical, open-ended and ethically justifiable.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1138184691
• ISBN13: 9781138184695
• Release Date: June 2017
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 190 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"