The Plural Child in Ireland's Secular and Religious Schools

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Faith, Difference, and Socially Just Public Pedagogies

Abstract

This paper analyses a qualitative study of over 100 diverse children’s experiences of faith difference across Ireland’s historically privately (Catholic) run, and increasingly marketised school sector. The argument of the paper is that children’s encounters with the world, and their personal worldviews, teach a significant amount about the possibilities of children’s engagement with faith difference in the context of an exclusionary (Catholic-dominated) school sector, where secular and religious school providers compete for parental attention.

The paper demonstrates how children from both majority Catholic and minority secular schools find multiple ways of engaging and closing down encounters with difference, conflict and the unknown at school, drawing on discourses of reason, science, religion, rights and the nation to name a few. The ethical and conceptual basis of the paper lies in the poststructural feminist view that in order to challenge the divisive, absolutist, and neoliberal commodification and privatisation of faith difference in Irish and international education, we need to reconceptualise difference in a way that does not present faiths, worldviews or bodies as entirely autonomous entities (that can be commodified and divided; Braidotti 2011).

Difference or plurality involves qualitative processes of encounter between, and unchosen obligations amongst, various human and non-human (material, cultural and supernatural) entities. This centralising of encounters fundamentally challenges secular-rationalist understandings of agency as individual. Faith in religion, science, reason and beyond, instead of being a wholly autonomous choice, involves multiple forms of interdependency with human and non-human others, including religious and consumer material culture (clothing, icons, digital and non-digital visuals etc.)

Methodologically, the paper examines participatory research with children from a variety of religious and secular schools in urban and rural locations in Ireland. It shows how children’s encounters with people and material culture complicate prevailing, commodifiable, individualised notions of religious, spiritual and non-religious experience. The data analysis is divided into three themes, which explore (1) diverse children’s experiences of transcendence, or other-worldly experience; (2) ‘watching/being watched’ by human, technological and supra-human forces and (3) their experiences of ‘classed, gendered and (a)sexual bodies’. Through these themes, I demonstrate the messy secular-religious nature of children’s everyday experience, and the often creative ways that children deal with the pain of religious, classed, racialised and gendered exclusion in child culture and at school.

The significance of the paper lies in demonstrating how children encounter and understand religion, consumption, injustice, nationalism and other aspects of their worlds in ways that complicate simplistic public education discourses advocating individual choice of school or fixed worldview. The paper argues for public pedagogical engagement of each child as plural and entangled with the world; as experiencing knowing, not knowing, dependence, independence, reason, wonder, pleasure, pain, and as such, finding ways to deal with and challenge racialised, classed and gendered forms of faith belonging and exclusion. Along with recognising children’s fluid engagements with difference, this focus demonstrates that absolutist faith in the market, religion, science or nation in public education discourse must be challenge by a socially just focus on our cross-cutting, mutual interdependencies.

Author

• Karl Kitching, University of Birmingham