Religious Education Teachers and Character: Personal Beliefs and Professional Approaches

The research goals of this report are: 1) How do RE teachers’ personal beliefs and worldviews relate to their professional motivations? 2) How do RE teachers negotiate religious diversity? 3) What do RE teachers think about RE and pupils’ character development? 4) What differences in beliefs about pupils’ character development are there between RE teachers holding different worldviews? How was this study completed? This study explored the lives of RE teachers using a mixed-method design, comprising an interview phase followed by a survey. This approach allowed for inductive inferences to be made from the interviews, which could be then substantiated through the deductive testing of preliminary hypotheses with the construction of the survey instrument. For each phase, a separate non-probabilistic sample of practising RE teachers who taught RE as their main specialism was recruited through professional organisations and advertisements, including social media. The first, qualitative phase of the study was inspired by the narrative identity paradigm (McAdams, 1996; 2013; McAdams and Guo, 2015). This uses semi-structured interviews to explore participants’ self-understandings of the development of the course of their lives. In addition to standard questions used in this paradigm, the interview schedule also included questions about teachers’ perspectives on RE and character development. The second, quantitative phase, was designed drawing on initial analyses of the interviews and employed measures of religious practice and style, as well as individual items about RE teachers’ perceptions of character education. The data generated from these questions allowed for analyses of the relationships between RE teachers’ worldviews, their perspectives on character education and their professional motivations. There were four key findings. These are: 1) Personal worldviews informed RE teachers’ approaches in the classroom: RE teachers working in faith and non-faith schools were found to have a diverse range of personal worldviews – from atheism to theism, and all positions in between – but each kind of worldview supports a particular vision of what RE should be, and therefore generates an individual’s motivation to be an RE teacher. 2) RE teachers were found to have fair and tolerant views of other religions and worldviews: RE teachers who did or did not have a religious faith, in faith and non-faith schools, were found to have a fair and tolerant approach to religious diversity. However, this study’s findings suggest that RE teachers that have a religious faith were more open to interreligious dialogue and learning from other religions. 3) There was strong agreement among teachers with a religious faith that RE contributes to character education, and RE teachers should act as role models for their pupils. 4) RE teachers that have a religious faith were more likely to think religions promote good character: There were significant differences in perspectives between RE teachers who reported belonging to a religion, and those who did not. The former were found to be more likely to think that religious traditions provide a source of good role models; they were also more likely to care about their impact on pupils’ religious beliefs and to believe pupils emulate their religious views. The reference for this research report is: Arthur, J.; Moulin-Stożek, D.; Metcalfe, J. and Moller, F. (2019) Religious Education Teachers and Character: Personal Beliefs and Professional Approaches, Research Report, Birmingham: University of Birmingham. This report is freely available for download