Rethinking Religious Education in a Postcolonial Space

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Religion, Education and Social (In)Justice

Proposal

As a white Christian employed in a postcolonial Global South context, I became troubled by the compulsory Christianity-centered religious education in the international school in which I enjoyed privilege. My colleagues and students represented multiple religious, secular, and spiritual (RSS) identities (Snipes & Manson, 2020) and there existed clear tensions between the curriculum, its delivery and the students. Layered onto these dynamics was the religious founding and character of the institution, the push and pull of present day religious and secular influences, and the potential to imagine a different future, as the school underwent a significant school wide curricular transition. The project was conceptualized as a curricular revision opportunity to rethink the school’s delivery of religious education while remaining within the bounds of board expectations and guiding school documents. As a practitioner-scholar who has since engaged critical scholarship about religious studies, internationalization, and decolonization, I reflect on this religious education redesign project in the recent past as a curricular innovation in a contested space. Applying a critical religious studies and comparative perspective, I assess its impact on students and within the educational system by problematizing the ways the project was cloaked in and constrained by power, and examine how it is nested within past, present, and future global policyscapes (Carney, 2009). It is my professional duty to own mistakes and to share lessons that may be of value for others, particularly other white practitioners. It is in this vein I share this autoethnographic analysis of rethinking religious education and discuss potential decolonizing pedagogical approaches (Shahjahan et al., 2021).

First, I will provide an introduction to the context of the international school and its political and religious landscape. Adopting a critical religious studies perspective (Edwards, 2018; Small, 2020; Snipes & Manson, 2020), I will examine my own positionality and the power dynamics that were at play in the leadup, implementation, and after-effects of this curricular redesign project within the particular international school context. Applying the concept of global policyscapes (Carney, 2009) from comparative case study methodology (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2014), I will explore the transnational ideologies that were and are in play connected to this project across the temporal domains of past, present, and future (Shahjahan & Edwards, 2021). Finally, I will discuss lessons learned about decolonizing practices in religious education for others who may be interested in the topic.

Author

• Renee L Bowling, The Ohio State University