Conference Agenda

In the sociology of knowledge according to Berger and Luckmann, it is assumed that reality is socially constituted and must be renegotiated from one generation to the next (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1969). The institution of school is not excluded from this process, which becomes apparent with the introduction of new curricula again and again. A few years ago, the curriculum 21 was introduced in the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland, irrespective of historical and confessional boundaries, which contributed to the harmonisation of learning content. Religious education in particular experienced an innovation, which was replaced by the subject "Ethics, Religions, Community" (ERG). Religious education in the singular is now a thing of the past and has been transformed into the teaching of religions. The authors of curriculum 21 take it for granted that children are surrounded by a heterogeneous environment and have to deal with many religious traditions and world views. It is still worthwhile to deal with the Christian traces in society, but a lesson that deals with religions cannot stop at other world views. Adolescents should be introduced to different religions and thus be made capable of tolerance and democracy (Lehrplan 21). In the curriculum of 2003, religious education still focused on the Bible, the knowledge of which seemed indispensable for general education and the children were supposed to get to know the Christian cultural heritage (Lehrplan 2003). Social realities with their institutional knowledge are subject to constant processes of shift (cf. Foucault, 1974, p. 13). These processes of change are particularly noticeable in textbooks and their contents. Drawing on the sociology of knowledge, this means that the content of textbooks can change over time. Whereas in 2000 just over 75 per cent of the Swiss still belonged to the Roman Catholic or Protestant Church, the balance of power has shifted drastically in the last 20 years. Today, just under 54 per cent of Swiss citizens still feel they belong to a traditional Christian church (Bundesamt für Statistik). In 2023, we will encounter a diverse religious landscape in Switzerland, and this presentation is based on the assumption that the diversity of Swiss social relations should also have an impact on the content of religious textbooks. Textbook contents are not random products, but rather sources that are constantly renegotiated by various actors and textbook developers in social-historical discourse (cf. Wiater, 2003).

Using the example of the religious figure called Mary, which is exposed to different interpretive sovereignties beyond interdenominational boundaries and therefore it can be assumed that the perception of this person can manifest itself in different ways in a certain social construct in religious textbooks, this contribution to textbook research aims to show how representations of Mary in image and word in the textbooks of the curriculum 2003 and the curriculum 21 come to light and do or do not do justice to a society of diversity. Thus, this paper is interested in the following questions:

How is the religious figure of Mary portrayed in the textbooks of curriculum 2003 and curriculum 21? Do they do justice to a heterogeneous Swiss society? Could there have been shifts in the representations of Mary in the period between 2003 and today? And if so, what social events might have contributed to this?

Since a pluralistic society changes the interrelationships among the various religious institutions and promotes ecumenical as well as interreligious exchange (cf. Berger, 2014, p. 48), it can be assumed that the representations of Mary must also be affected by this fact.

Globalisation, socio-political shifts and increasing diversification of religious beliefs and practices present challenges for schools around the world. This is a time of transition and school communities face challenges between traditional and new ways of understanding. Teachers are at the interface of this change, including how their personal identities fit within professional environments. This paper presents an investigation into nonreligious teachers' experiences in traditionally religious schools in the Republic of Ireland (RoI) and Northern Ireland. In the RoI and, until recently, in Northern Ireland (NI) schools with a religious ethos were exempt from employment equality legislation in relation to religion (NI Fair Employment and Treatment Order 1998; Irish Employment Equality Act 1998-2011 Section 37 (1)). Historically this has been justified on religious grounds and the right of religious schools to appoint teachers who share their beliefs. Over time, populations on both sides of the border have become more religiously diverse and there has been a significant rise in the number of people with no religious belief. Some schools have responded to this increasing plurality by changing how they describe their stated ethos, this has resulted in further uncertainty around what counts as a religious school and raises questions regarding the applicability of exemptions from equality legislation for all schools on the island. Furthermore, the continued use of exemptions from equality legislation in RoI would appear to be overly generous in comparison to other European states. The research question, therefore, was as follows:

To what extent is religion or belief a factor in the appointment or promotion of non-religious teachers in Post-Primary schools with a religious ethos on the island of Ireland?

The epistemology underpinning this research is social constructivism. Theories of identity and teacher agency, particularly ecological agency (Priestly et al. 2015), underpin the analysis of the findings.

The research methodology was qualitative and the researchers undertook semi-structured interviews with fifteen non-religious post-primary teachers. Thematic analysis supported by NVivo 10 computer software was used to analyse the data.

The key findings are that religion or belief was a factor in the appointments of all the teachers to varying degrees. In schools managed by Catholic authorities, candidates’ beliefs were explicitly taken into consideration. While in other schools, that hold religious values, implicit religious influences were at play in teacher appointments. It was also found that temporary contracts and probation periods meant teachers were subjected to a protracted assessment of their suitability for posts, including their ‘fit’ with a school's religious ethos. The majority of the participants felt a need to suppress their non-religious identity and conform to the schools’ religious culture, causing identity dissonance and personal ethical conflicts.

This paper is part of a mixed methods research project on the factors in and out of schools that shape young people’s expression on race and faith equality issues. Focusing here on policy discourse, the paper presents an analysis of two key questions: (1) how liberal political concepts including those of freedom of expression may be mobilised in education policy to facilitate wider right-wing political goals, and (2) how education policy in this context shapes young people’s ‘free’ public political expression - in particular on race and faith equality issues - at school. The international significance of this paper lies in its analysis of how education policy discourse is aligned with the revival of freedom of expression as a topic of right-wing political concern across the global north. This revival, it has been argued, seeks to undermine fragile race and faith equality progress through the translation of narrow ‘free speech’ and ‘cancel culture’ claims into policy and political discourse (Mondon and Winter 2020; Titley 2020).

Our focus is on education policy and politics in contemporary English education, where government figures have defined the anti-racist organising of movements such as Black Lives Matter as ‘cancelling’ freedom of expression in higher education, and as creating risks for impartiality on the teaching of equality in schools (Trilling 2020). Political figures in the US, France and Australia have made similar claims (Goldberg 2021), advancing an “antagonistic vision” of “who constitutes the public and what values should guide public discourse” (Titley 2020: 3). However, education policy texts are typically more politically measured, and freedom of expression is a far more complex phenomenon than binary notions of ‘free speech’ and ‘cancellation’ put forward in such political discourse allows. For example, in the context of curriculum-making, mundane processes of foreclosing what is not/cannot be taught, processes of editing, and the pursuit of efficiencies and profit all play a role in shaping what can be thought, said and felt in education contexts (Mondal 2018).

The paper analyses 80 education policy texts in the English and UK policy context with a view to unearthing not just how freedom of expression is directly defined in such texts, but to identifying the ways education policy contributes to the political, cultural and affective environment that makes certain kinds of expression possible for young people. Education policy has long been theorised in terms of discourse, i.e., a body of ideas, concepts and beliefs established as knowledge or truth, framing “what can be said, and thought, but also… who can speak, when, where, and with what authority” (Ball 1993, 14). The paper draws on this theoretical tradition to understand ‘freedom’ as existing in a complex, contextual relationship to power/constraint, rather than being its simple opposite. As notions of disciplinary power and subjectivation arising from Foucault (1975) and Butler (1990) indicate, a focus on discourse helps us see the performative, i.e., normalising power of discourse in shaping the possibilities of everyday youth expression (Youdell 2006), alongside more commonly understood juridical/legal forms of constraint on expression (e.g. hate speech).

As such, a key analytic goal in this paper is to identify what kinds of subject positions and thus, possibilities for expression, are made available to young people through education policy texts. But freedom of expression, and questions of race and faith equality involve political passions (Youdell 2011). Therefore, drawing on affect theories, we seek to analyse how the possibility of young people and their political expression on race and faith equality becoming a particular subject and object of feeling is also created/closed down through policy discourse (Ahmed 2004; Kitching et al. 2015).