Rupert Wegerif
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Re-inventing Religious Education for the Internet Age

29/8/2021

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Martin Robinson (@Trivium21c) recently shared on Twitter a report by the National Secular Society (https://www.secularism.org.uk/opinion/2021/08/its-time-to-move-on-from-religious-education). Martin asked the question: ‘Is it time to ditch Religious Education?”. Having trained as an RE teacher (Bristol, 1990-91) I felt challenged enough to reply. I wrote that we seem to need ‘a shared frame’ so maybe we should revise RE rather than scrapping it altogether. In this blog I unpack what I meant by this and put forward a suggestion for the future of RE.

Why we need ‘religion’
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This uplifting quote came into my facebook feed the other day. As a frankly ‘troubled’ young man, I read Camus, especially his books ‘The Outsider’ and ‘The Rebel’. I recall his line ‘je me revolte, donc je suis’ (I rebel, therefore I am). I was a little surprised then that Camus might have written such sweetly positive lines. I googled and found that it really is by him, from ‘Return to Tipassa’, which can be found  in the collection, Lyrical and Critical Essays 2012.

Reading this took me back. In the Autumn of 1983 I found myself cycling down the coast of Spain towards Morocco. All that I owned was wrapped in black bin-bags on the back of the bike: a cheap bike that I had bought in a supermarket in France about a month before. I was alone. I slept rough or in campsites when I found them. I had no home to go to, no money in the bank, no job, no plans – I was just drifting. And it was raining. It rained a lot. I had been cycling all day and as the rain poured down I looked for some shelter. All I could see were flat fields of corn. I kept thinking that if I just kept on a bit longer I would find something. But nothing, not even a tree. Before the day faded completely I turned off the main road onto dirt paths across fields and, after some anxious searching, I found a sort of circular concrete drain big enough for me to shelter in. I was cold, I was wet, I was hungry, I was uncomfortable. I sat and watched lightening play over the fields. I listened to the thunder. Then suddenly it hit me. The Camus experience. Waves of joy welling up from inside. It was a feeling, not a theory, not something easy to express, more from the guts and the heart than from the head. A feeling that, despite all appearances, things were good. Not just a little bit good but really good.
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Tipassa, Phoenician and Roman ruins in Algeria, where Camus had his ‘invincible summer’ experience in 1948
 
I was not brought up in a religion and I did not think of my experience as meeting God. However, I can easily understand why others might have interpreted such an experience that way. The feeling of joy had bundled up with it a kind of emotional warmth, as if I was not alone, as if I was loved and had always already been loved. In return I felt love also for everything in my odd life, even the dark night and the pouring rain. ‘Born again’ Christians tend to use similar words to describe their conversion. They hit rock bottom, then they are ‘surprised by joy’. ‘Surprised by Joy’ is the title C S Lewis gives to his autobiography, words borrowed from a poem by Wordsworth which could also apply to my experience or to that of Camus.
 
If you do the research you will find that ‘religious experience’ of this kind is common in people of all faiths and none. Camus was mostly counted as an atheist. (Although he did once say, ‘I do not believe in God, but I am not an atheist nonetheless’). Nietzsche went as far as to write a whole book called ‘the Antichrist’ and yet he clearly knew about the kind of experience that Camus describes, writing: 
 
“Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness.... We have discovered happiness, we know the road, we have found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? 'I know not which way to turn; I am everything that knows not which way to turn,' sighs modern man.... It was from this modernity that we were ill” (in Twilight of the Idols)

I tend to agree with Nietzsche – modernity made me ill. I was good at school but it was not good for me. I left school with qualifications and a feeling of desperate emptiness. The meaning I was offered at school and that I gleaned from the TV growing up in the UK felt like very thin gruel: Insipid, anaemic, bloodless stuff. The secret of my eventual stability and relative usefulness was the discovery that I made on that cold wet sleepless night in Spain. That I am part of something much larger than myself that sustains me and flows through me, that is me, as I am it, even though I do not fully understand how or why. Not a verbal meaning, not a creedal faith but a gut meaning, something we should perhaps investigate through physiology more than through philosophy.
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The biggest cause of death of young people in the UK is suicide. But a far greater number suffer from so called ‘mental illnesses’ such as addiction to drugs, self-harm and depression. I say ‘so-called’ mental illnesses because the symptoms look to me suspiciously like what you would expect of anyone who has no deep sense of meaning in their life. 
 
This experience in a field in Spain was the opening of a source of rich nourishment for me. Nourishment that, after that night, I found that I could always regain when I really needed it using simple meditation-like techniques such as listening to my breath. All I have to do is to put myself on hold as it were, wait hopefully, and this other thing, this energy that is not me, comes in and revives me.
 
Now you might say that this is not religion but ‘spirituality’. Maybe so. Spirit is a good word. I associate it with a kind of dialogue – or perhaps a kind of lightning – a relationship or connection between the ultimate context of our lives and the here and now. When all the everyday ways of framing experience fall away then that which we call ‘spirit’ enters into play.  
 
But for me religion is also not a bad word. Re-ligare – to tie again – to reconnect. Rituals like Muslim prayer or Buddhist meditation are meant to be a remembering of what is most important. With religion the spirituality, which might be thought as purely personal moments, takes on form and becomes cultural and collective. A kind of guidance, an educational technology perhaps. 
 
In my opinion, religious faith is not about, or should not be about, propositional knowledge. It is more fundamentally, a relationship. A relationship of trust. Trust in the world. Trust in life. 
 
Reinventing ‘Religious education’
 
I was disappointed by the practice of Religious Education that I experienced in the UK. There was no actual teaching of religion. In place of the real stuff there was mostly teaching about religion.  I had to get children to list facts like what Jews put on the table at the Passover or what Sikh’s wear and why. Vaguely interesting in a pop quiz kind of way perhaps, but not something  that will open a channel of nourishment for young people. 
 
Given this experience I am not surprised that the National Secular Society write that: ‘It is time to move on from RE and ensure that the established curriculum requirements, especially citizenship education, are enhanced to provide children with a secular schooling which prepares them to consider and understand their future rights and obligations as citizens’. 
 
The report offers arguments as to why RE has become unnecessary. The main one is that, in a diverse society, RE has no longer any raison d’etre: 
 
‘RE in the 1940s essentially said to children "you must accept the Christian worldview because it is the only truth", but in the 2020s RE says almost the exact opposite, telling children "you must respect each person's different worldview because it is true for them"’. 
 
They do have a point here of course but from my experience and that of many, we still need religion. The ‘secular’ worldview of rational autonomous individuals interacting in regulated markets with rights and obligations, pretends to be free of religion but it is, in fact, I suspect, just another world view or way of life and probably not the last one or the only one that we need. Maintaining the kind of individual identities required for secular rationalism, selves separate from each other, separate from the tribe and separate from the cosmos, does not come easy for many of us and seems to make a lot of young people anxious and sometimes very ill. 
 
In re-inventing RE for the Internet Age I think that it is possible that we have something to learn from indigenous oral societies.  If I may generalize from many cases, the induction of young people into the shared way of life in indigenous cultures often involves rituals that help them step aside from their individual physical selves and acquire a more collective spiritual sense of self. In a visit to Waikato, to give one example, I learnt from a Maori woman, a religious educator, about how the elders guided her through rituals to the point when she could hear for herself the voice of the main ancestor of the iwi or tribe speaking to her, walking with her and guiding her. Her presentation of this story was more than just verbal, the emotion and security that she felt now that she was not alone but always guided by an ancestor was evident in her glowing eyes. There was love in her eyes as she spoke about her experience of religious education.
 
Successful induction into a single cultural tradition is increasingly difficult to achieve. Children are exposed to many voices on the Internet. It seems as if there is no shared worldview or way of life to induct people into such that they could have a rich experience of belonging of the kind the Maori religious educator described. On the one hand that is a problem that we all face, the unsettling challenge of the death of God, precisely as Nietzsche described it, but on the other hand, maybe this is an opportunity for us to create something new together, something that has not been seen before, a genuinely nourishing religion that has no cultural boundaries.
 
Instead of a single curriculum document we could have a living dialogue. A carefully designed and moderated platform for all those in the world who have something to share about what gives life meaning for them. Of course, this must include the secularists, the rationalists, the humanists, the communists as well as the more obviously ‘religious’ voices. It should include ordinary people, living ordinary lives who are willing to share with others what they have found that gives their life meaning and enables them to get up in the morning, carry on and maybe even feel joy in the midst of anxieties and tears. As well as a willingness to share, the other condition of participation would be a willingness to listen to others and to be open to the possibility of learning from them. Benevolence would be expected and ruthlessly enforced!
 
In RE classes young people could be invited to participate in facilitated dialogues with others from the locality as well as from around the world asking and answering the question ‘what gives life meaning for you?’. The aim of the course would not be propositional knowledge, it would not end with an exam, it would seek to facilitate each child in the personal development of their own meaning of  life, their own inner guiding voice. If that proves too ambitious for some then at the very least having a better understanding of the different ways that people seek to make sense of their lives will be valuable for anyone and everyone. Imagine how useful such awareness might be for the head of sales in any multi-national for example. 
 
My simple proposal then is that we reinvent RE as a social media platform supporting a guided global dialogue about what gives life meaning. This would not only be a journey of discovery for individual students carefully supported into joining the dialogue. It could also potentially be a useful journey of discovery for all involved, perhaps all of us. Is there a shared basis for values?  Is a shared ‘religion’ possible with a real sense of community and perhaps even shared rituals and initiation ceremonies? The best way to find out is to start a global dialogue inquiry into what gives life meaning. And maybe that shared experience of going on a journey together, of seeking to understand each other without abandoning cultural differences, will prove to be, in itself, all the answer that is needed.  

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What is a 'dialogic self'?

8/8/2021

3 Comments

 
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[Picture from CEDiR website: https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/research/groups/cedir/]
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One of the aims of dialogic education is to produce students who are more dialogic or who have a more dialogic self-identity. But what exactly does that mean?
 
Research has shown that groups of students can be taught to talk together better and that this can improve group learning and also group performance on reasoning tests. 'Talking together better' is about being more dialogic - being able to listen, share ideas, change minds and so on. There is also evidence that teaching groups to talk together better is a good way to teach individuals to think better when they are on their own.
 
It is not difficult to understand how this transition from group thinking to better individual thinking  works. In an experimental study I ran, one boy got a very low score on the pre-test by rushing through a multiple choice reasoning test ticking answers almost at random. After ten sessions of group work, he was given the same test again and did much better. Observing closely and talking to him it was possible to see that he had learnt to slow down and talk to himself more, asking himself the same kind of questions the group had asked when they worked on problems together, questions like 'why do you think it is that one?', 'have you checked all the other possible options?' and of course, crucially, before clicking the button to submit the answer 'do we all agree?'. In the individual condition checking 'do we all agree' translated as him asking himself  'are you sure? and again 'are you sure that you're sure?'
 
Recent research by Ethan Kross and colleagues shows that talking to yourself better can help with depression and other problems. The issue seems to be that people get trapped in their first person 'I' and 'me' perspectives. Guiding them to step out of this and take the perspective of an outsider, addressing themselves by their own first name and asking questions like 'have you looked at all the options' can really help.
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This exercise, self-distancing or talking to yourself as if from the outside, is similar to the way some teachers teach the first stage of our 'thinking together' dialogic education programme. First, they get the class to work in small groups on a task, any task will do, and they video-tape them. Then they show clips of the video and discuss with the class what worked well and what did not. This is scary but powerful. The child who dominates the talk and refuses to listen to others has to look at their own behaviour now on the screen and, simply by seeing themselves as if they were another person, they see that the way they were behaving is not helpful and they change, usually without needing to be told.  
 
It is interesting to think about what is happening here when someone takes both sides, both talking and also listening to themselves talk. I think that this being on both sides at once is what it means to be a more dialogic self. You do not simply talk but you hear yourself talking as if from the point of the view of the other and correct yourself in order to try to communicate better. This is identifying not only with yourself talking but also with the other listening. The 'other' here might be a specific other that you listen to closely but as we can see from the example of having a distanced conversation with yourself, 'as if one was an other', it is also more than that. In any dialogue there is not just a specific other or specific others, but the real dialogue is often more with a kind of witness position. You can’t really take on the position of the other person and hear your words as they hear them, but you still hear yourself speaking as a witness to your own words and you can tell if they make sense or not.
 
Dialogic self and community 

Dialogic education is about empowering children by giving them opportunities  to speak and to find their own voice. Yes, that is true, but it is also about creating communities of mutual trust. Students are not going to talk unless they first form a bond and trust each other. That is why we begin teaching thinking together by raising awareness of how the way we talk affects others and then by establishing shared ground rules which create an atmosphere of trust. But this 'thinking together' approach is not about forming closed friendship groups. We can also mix up the groups with others in the same class or in other classes that have also established shared thinking together ground rules and the dialogue still works. In other words children taught to think well together with others are better at forming a constructive dialogic community with strangers.
 
The ability to take a distanced position from yourself and hear yourself as if from the outside is very important to the ability to bond together with others in order to form a community within which to think things out together. Often this takes the form of a sense of humour, being able to laugh at your own pretensions and see the irony of things. Even when you have quite different interests, if you can see yourself as if from a distance, and the other person can see themselves as if from a distance, then bonding can occur.

Becoming more dialogic 

According to the 'dialogic self' movement in psychology selves are never unitary but always made up of a community of voices. So when in education we write about a self becoming more dialogic we are really talking about a change in self-identity. We can only know ourselves because we are in relationships with others and able to see ourselves as if from their point of view. So we are really dialogic anyway but somehow it seems easy to forget that and become trapped into experiencing oneself as closed off from others in a limited self-position. Using techniques like agreeing and acting on shared ground rules for talk can help children become more dialogic by realising that they are both the inside talking outwards and the outside listening inwards.

Education as expanding dialogic space 

The Russian philosopher of dialogue, Michael Bakhtin, once wrote that 'I hear voices in everything'. I agree. When spaceships explore parts of the solar system that have not been seen before I think that we are expanding collective dialogic space. Things that could not be talked about before because we did not know about them have now entered into the dialogue and can be referred to and discussed. Learning is not a piling up of facts but an expansion of dialogic space, each new voice adding a new perspective from which to experience and understand the world. The same 'expansion of dialogic space' process is true for each individual student drawn through a process of education to discover new vistas. Children might start their educational journey only talking to people in their immediate family and end up talking to Shakespeare, Confucius and NASA scientists.
 
It might sometimes seem that students are inducted into a narrow culture and led only to participate only in closed communities. But a certain unbounded openness to the possibility of learning new things is part of the ideal of education.     
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[Picture of 'Sky Mirror' artwork by Anish Kapoor]]
The Greek word for everything, the whole world as we experience it, is cosmos. One aim of education is to induct students into global unbounded dialogues such that they become 'cosmopolitans' or citizens of the cosmos. But that does not mean that they lose their uniqueness or their embodiment and roots in a culture. It is only because we have a physical body that we have eyes to see the world around us. It is only because we come from somewhere that we have a language, a culture and a voice with which we can learn to engage in conversation with all the other voices that make up the cosmos for us. One can only know oneself out of reflection within relationships and so education into a dialogue with the many voices of the cosmos is also education that can deepen understanding of oneself, and one's unique history and culture.

Ethan Kross, in his book 'Chatter: the voices in our head' argues that promoting self-distanced conversations is a way to educate for wisdom. Wisdom, he claims, citing a considerable research literature:
 
involves using the mind to reason constructively about a particular set of problems: those involving uncertainty. Wise forms of reasoning relate to seeing the "big picture" in several senses: recognising the limits of one's knowledge, becoming aware of the varied contexts of life and how they may unfold over time, acknowledging other people's viewpoints, and reconciling opposing perspectives. (p57)
 
In other words wisdom can be learnt by talking to people to take on board the different ways in which things can be seen, understanding one's own inevitable ignorance and, most importantly, holding distanced conversations with oneself to see things as if from the outside to get a sense of perspective. It sounds from this description as if Kross thinks that perspectives can all be reconciled but it might also be that wisdom sometimes consists, as Bakhtin suggests, in a profound belly laugh.
 
The transmission of knowledge is important in education. Ultimately this means inducting student into participation in often quite focussed communities of practice in which concepts are discussed, developed and applied; the community exploring random numbers in mathematics for example, the community of hairdressers, boiler engineers, heart surgeons or nature poets. In addition to teaching knowledge by equipping students with all that they need to be able to join such specialised practices and dialogues, education also needs to teach the bigger picture by drawing students into dialogue with outside voices. This is about expanding the dialogue so that they can take up their place not only within a specialised community but also within the cosmos.
 
The importance of developing this kind of expanded dialogic self, a self in dialogue with the outside, is brought out well by a quote from Barack Obama which Kross includes in his book:
 
The biggest challenge, I think, is always maintaining your moral compass. Those are the conversations I'm having internally. I'm measuring my actions against that inner voice that for me at least is audible, is active, it tells me where I think I'm on track and where I think I'm off track
 
A dialogic self is a self that sees both sides, that can listen as well as talk and that finds it easy to form a community with others. Ultimately being dialogic is not just about being in dialogue with this or that other person or participating constructively within this or that specific community but it is also about seeing oneself from the outside and so, in a sense, being in dialogue with the cosmos.
 
Producing more dialogic selves would be a good idea. There is evidence from research on dialogic education that this is surprisingly doable.


References and further reading 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/platform-success/202108/how-have-better-conversations-yourself
 
Kross, E. (2021). Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It. Random House.

https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/what-are-types-of-talk
 
https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/defining-dialogic-education
 
https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/dialogic-space-why-we-need-it
 
Wegerif, R., Mercer, N., & Dawes, L. (1999). From social interaction to individual reasoning: An empirical investigation of a possible socio-cultural model of cognitive development. Learning and instruction, 9(6), 493-516.
 
 

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    Rupert Wegerif. Professor of Education at Cambridge University. Interested in Dialogic Education, educational technology and teaching for thinking and creativity.

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