Religious Reading in a Secular Society: Learning for Life in a Liberal Democracy?

The Times Educational Supplement recently carried the headline 'Christian Schools Fail Test of Tolerance' claiming that children educated in evangelical Christian schools inspected by Ofsted were not helped to acquire an appreciation of their own and other cultures. Whether schools prepare children to be good citizens and to be tolerant of others is an important issue and some of the most significant contexts for such learning are arts and humanities lessons. As children develop values and worldviews while they are reading and responding to texts this research proposes to investigate such reading in arts and humanities lessons to find out how teachers and schools seek to the shape the responses and values of young readers.

Data is to be collected in a number of different schools and the project will seek to ascertain the theological and educational influences upon schoolteachers and leaders in evangelical Christian schools. The bulk of the Principal Investigator's time in schools will be devoted to undertaking a case study of reading in humanities and arts lessons at Trinity Academy, Doncaster. Two days will be spent in this school each half term observing the lessons of fourteen year old pupils in Year 9. Each school's stated aims will be compared with what happens in lessons. DVD and digital audio recording, transcription and analysis of situated classroom discourse will provide a good evidence base from which to answer research questions about the degree to which religious values inform reading. Interviews (with adolescents, teachers, senior managers and sponsors) will be analysed to establish the ways in which religious perspectives are evident in teaching and learning in the arts and humanities lessons. Documentation, stock lists and schemes of work will be analysed and compared so that text choice, censorship and the rationale for such decisions can be explored during interviews and through observations and questionnaire analysis. Analysis of interviews will be qualitative and thematic.

For comparative purposes, data will be collected in 9 other Christian schools, specifically: 2 further ESF schools also sponsored by Sir Peter Vardy as well as 4 of the largest CST (Christian Schools Trust) schools and 3 schools in Europe that have links to these Christian schools. Lessons observed will not be selected randomly but those lessons will be chosen for observation that teachers consider to be most distinctive and to demonstrate the values, aims and mission of their school in the classroom. In other words, lessons will be selected for observation and data collection that are perceived to be as different as possible to those occurring in non-faith schools. If a teacher believes a particular text-based lesson or sequence of lessons offers what he or she considers to be an example of 'faith-learning integration' these will be observed.

In each school visited the Principal Investigator will, as a visiting teacher-researcher, teach the same 'portable' text-based arts/humanities lesson so that the responses of adolescents in different schools can be compared. Recording and transcription of these 10 lessons will provide unique comparative data. Teachers in the schools will also keep 'faith and values' journals, recording any perceived integration of faith and learning in their lessons and these journals will inform interviews and observation. When teachers in one faith school are interviewed they will be asked to comment on data (DVD recordings) collected in other faith schools. Selected recordings of lessons in these 10 schools will be shown to teachers from county and church schools to facilitate analysis of similarities and differences. In this way the contribution of reading to citizenship in different contexts can be established.