Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE
Interview with Deirdre Burke
Author: Simon Smith
Journal Title: Discourse
ISSN: 2040-3674
ISSN-L: 1741-4164
Volume: 6
Number: 2
Start page: 79
End page: 106
Return to vol. 6 no. 2 index page
Continuing our series of interviews with noted academics, Simon Smith, Associate Director of the Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies, talked to Deirdre Burke about her teaching career across the education sectors, her work on the Holocaust and genocide and becoming a National Teaching Fellow. The interview was conducted in Wolverhampton on 12th March 2007.
Good afternoon, I'd like to begin by asking you to speak a bit about your career to date. How did you come to work in religious studies?
You've heard of the accidental tourist? Well I'm the accidental religious studies lecturer!
I didn't even study RE at school until A-level. I played the Catholic opt out card up to O-Level, and I only took it up then as there was far too much homework for French, and I had extensive sporting commitments and a horse to look after.
I actually applied to do PE at college, but due to a serious sporting injury to my knee I was rejected by all my choices, so I went to university as a second option. I went to Lancaster to do a degree in history and religious studies. Again, the choice of religious studies rather than theology was accidental, based more on the geographical location of Lancaster than an appreciation of this new way of studying religions. I wasn't a very engaged student as an undergraduate. I think I learnt more about popular music in my time at Lancaster than I did about religion and history. I probably went to more concerts than lectures! The only thing I got fired up on was my special subject, Henry VII. I did a study on the Lambert Simnel rebellion, and that was great fun, and I was able to use my grandmother's links at Trinity College Dublin to access archives.
I started teaching as a secondary history teacher, as history had been my major subject for my BA and for my PGCE. My switch from history to religious education happened when I was appointed as Teacher in Charge of RE to cover maternity leave. I found that I really enjoyed the freedom to teach aspects of religion that we (myself and the pupils) thought were interesting. My first RE post was in Southampton, which as a port city had a very diverse intake, and it was great fun to explore all the religions present in the city. Hampshire was using an 'Agreed Syllabus' that was ground breaking at that time, based around a phenomenological study of religions, so we had free rein to explore lots of varieties of religion.
Are there people that you came into contact with early on in your career that you think inspired you?
In Service support was very good in Hampshire, and inspirational people like Janet Trotter gave new teachers a vision of what religious education could be like. We were also encouraged to attend the annual South Coast Shap1 conferences, where Alan Brown and other lecturers encouraged new developments in RE. Vida Barnett, who had been my main RE lecturer at Ethel Wormold College for my PGCE, was also very active in practical approaches to RE in such conferences.
So how did the move into religious studies as the focus of your career come about?
After a couple of years I realised I wanted to undertake more study and returned to Lancaster for the MA in Religious Education, based at St. Martin's College with links to the university. Looking back, this really was the seminal year for my career. I developed a sound base in the subject—the St. Martin's / Bailrigg mix enabled us to benefit from the best in RE and RS.
I had been rather a reluctant student up to that point, and my starting point was so much lower than the rest of the cohort that I think they all must have made a pact to help me through the year. I always say to new students that you should follow the advice of the Talmud that having found yourself a teacher you must now find yourself someone to study with. During that year at Lancaster I lived that advice. I learnt so much from experienced RE teacher / lecturer colleagues from the UK and overseas. I was just reading Gilliat-Ray's article in Discourse2 on 'Breaking down the classroom walls', and it struck me that even in 1981 and 82 we were exploring a similarly wide range of creative approaches to RE, apart from the Internet of course. In fact one of my assignments explored how pop music could be used to explore spirituality and youth culture.
After my MA, I spent four years in Rotherham at Thomas Rotherham Sixth Form College. I enjoyed having the opportunity to move away from biblical A level options into studying different religions, and philosophical aspects of religion. The philosophical side went down so well with students that I introduced A Level Philosophy, and I managed to persuade a number of RS students to take the course as there was a substantial overlap between JMB RS and AEB Philosophy. Sixth form teaching was a very good grounding for higher education as we had five hours a week so that gave us opportunities for in-depth study.
I moved to Initial Teacher Education largely due to the frustration of facing small student groups. Working at a sixth form college, it was harder to recruit as you couldn't attract pupils from their earlier study in RE with you. The new post I applied for was in Walsall, which was close to where I had grown up. I didn't expect to get the job as the ITT focus was primary, and I didn't have any experience of primary teaching. Again I was fortunate as West Midlands College was prepared to let me learn on the job, and I spent one day a week in a primary school to familiarise myself with the sector before starting to supervise students on teaching practices.
I've now been here for 20 years, with name changes for the institution following mergers to Wolverhampton Polytechnic to the University of Wolverhampton. My base has also moved from Walsall through Dudley to Wolverhampton. We joked about this move as our short sojourn in Dudley being like a period in the wilderness before entering the promised land of Wolverhampton! Although I was very happy in Walsall, and lived close to the campus, the move to Wolverhampton really has opened up so many new possibilities for studying local religious communities.
Wolverhampton is just the best place for the study of religion. All the major religions are present here, and there are more than 150 places of worship. There is a rich variety of Christian denominations including Black-led churches, and also variety in other religions, including a Shi'a mosque.The city has a strong history of inter-faith relations, at least partly as a response to Enoch Powell's inflammatory comments about Commonwealth immigration in the 1960s. Because of this, there's a strong commitment among local communities to providing opportunities for students to visit places of worship. But the main factor is that there are so many places of worship within walking distance, so we can go on as many field visits as we like without any financial implications. I've been actively involved in many city-wide activities, developing contacts through the Inter Faith group, representing the university on the Community Cohesion Forum, and the Jewish community on the Faith Network.
In my 20 years at the university I've undertaken a wide range of roles, with involvement in religious education and religious studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and more recently learning and teaching in higher education. My profile isn't particularly strong in the area of publications, but I have been very active in grassroots developments and conference papers.
In the 90s I was involved in innovative religious education curriculum projects at the universities of Birmingham and Warwick. Both projects were based around pedagogy, developing distinctive teaching methods in order to encourage active engagement with religion. My MAdissertation, on the way Islam was presented in textbooks, also led to an invitation to join the European project on Islam in textbooks, which was disseminated at an international conference and led to the publication of guidelines for educational publishers.
During this period I was an executive member of the Professional Council for Religious Education (PCfRE), and the PCfRE representative on the Religious Education Council of England and Wales. Since the restructuring in the School of Education in the late 90s I have not had a role in initial teacher education, but I've maintained contact with the sector through external examining and I still receive invitations from professional RE bodies to produce resources for teachers.
I still have input into religious education in Wolverhampton as a co-opted member of the Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education. The website I developed at the worlverhampton Centre for Learning and Teaching technology retreat in 2003 is available as a resource for local teachers. I've been working closely with English Heritage for the past two years to develop activities and resources with local religious communities for Heritage Open Days. English Heritage employed one of the graduates involved in the Entrepreneurship in Religious Studies3 project to act as a Faith Development Worker for the Heritage Our Faith Buildings DVD project in Wolverhampton. This local focus has been strengthened through involvement in the Community Cohesion forum, as a university representative, and more recently as a Jewish representative on the Wolverhampton Faith Network.
I've also benefited from involvement in religious studies sector developments. I was a member of Executive Committee of the NATfHE Religious Studies Section, with a responsibility for the West Midlands region and involvement on the annual national conference sub-committee. My understanding of the sector was enhanced by my appointment as a QAA subject reviewer for theology and religious studies.
I think I'm likely to see my career out at Wolverhampton. I'd like to engage in serious research on local religious communities and I've got the contacts here to carry this out. I'm also in a position to balance my commitments between religious studies and learning and teaching.
For the next two years I am spending half of my time on my National Teaching Fellowship project. I'd originally intended to explore issues in teaching about atrocity, and I went on a study visit to Rwanda in 2006, but I need hip and knee replacement surgery so my mobility problems led to a rethink and the specification of a project that I could do in-house. My NTF project is 'Getting more out of feedback'. The project methodology builds on my research with undergraduates in a Personal Development Planning module, detailed more in the paper, 'Engaging students in personal development planning: profiles, skills development and acting on feedback'.
The project aims to benefit the leaning and teaching community through the development of practical activities to support student engagement with feedback. Whilst there is a lot of activity in the area of feedback it's mostly focused on staff and the feedback they provide. This project shifts attention to the students receiving the feedback, providing empirically based research on ways that students can use feedback to enhance their learning.
To date I have run a number of conference workshops on Getting more out of feedback, and am currently involved in a Delphi study with students on their experiences of feedback. I'd like to develop resources linked to subject disciplines, so if colleagues in religious studies and theology have an interest in this area, please get in touch.
You have taught in schools as well as higher education. Could you say something about the similarities and differences of each sector?
The main similarity I see is that the principles underpinning teaching and learning are essentially the same. I see myself as a teacher, I've taught in schools, sixth form and HE, and observed students on teaching practice and acted as mentor for our learning and teaching programme, and I think the way you present learning experiences is as important for twenty year old students as for five year old pupils. Learning experiences for all ages need to be well prepared, stimulating, and linked to learner readiness. We quite often think that because students are more mature, they don't have the learning needs that we'd assume pupils would have in school, and I think this means that students don't get as much out of their experience.
In an induction questionnaire for new students here in the school of Humanities, we ask students about their anxieties about higher education, and so many of them are lacking in confidence. We've got all this support available for students: you can go and see someone to help you with your written English; you can go and see librarians for information retrieval; you can see your tutors if you've got a problem with your assignment; but a lot of students haven't got the confidence to go and ask anybody for any help. They're worried about being in lectures and asking a question, they're worried about talking to students who are older than themselves, or if they're mature, talking to students who are younger than themselves, and so I think the concept of an adult learner is one that we've invested with far more confidence and maturity than students actually have.
Thinking about the similarities between sectors, when you set up learning experiences, pupils, students, will follow your approach, so if you go in confident, and set up tasks that students can do, then they'll engage with them, and I think if you go in open ended and say, 'OK, I asked you to read an article, have any of you got any questions about it?', very few students are likely to have the confidence to put their hand up, and I don't think there's that much difference.
I remember a New Testament lecturer I had at Lancaster, his lectures were really good, but in his seminars he expected you to have done an awful lot of work, and in the first seminar he ripped somebody to shreds because they hadn't done the reading. For the rest of that semester the rest of us were like, 'Oh no, he's going to ask us a question', and so I think in terms of interaction, the age doesn't make much difference, certainly between secondary and higher education. Students can be as nervous as school pupils, and are as in just as much need of supportive learning activities.
I think the main difference between secondary and higher education is the opportunities students have for independent learning, within a setting of mass education, which can be impersonal and threatening. In biblical terms this could be seen as the blessing and the curse! At induction I do the study skills for the whole of the school, so I emphasise the 'blessing', the opportunity for independence, and to take charge of your own time, and all the resources here to help you, but then the curse is the impersonal stuff. We've been lucky I think here in that we've had small student groups, and we're used to interacting with students on a first name basis, but across the school that's not the case. I have a history module I teach on the Holocaust where we have a hundred students, so you only get to know a few, but I do wonder what it's like for students when they're constantly in that situation, nobody really knows them, doesn't know their name and doesn't interact with them.
So you think that the student experience itself isn't that different, in terms of the learning expectation, it's just a bigger experience with more uncertainties, which makes it more problematic? Or do you feel that there is a kind of step change in expectation there? Does more need to be done to ensure better student progression, especially from schools to HE? And if so, what?
Progression is certainly something we're trying to address at Wolverhampton.
We have study skills advisors, who are mostly graduate students, who operate a rota in the learning centre, and students can book two 20 minute sessions a week. It's an opportunity to take an essay that they've had feedback on, or something that they're working on, and say, 'last time I had some feedback saying that I didn't introduce the essay very well, I'm not sure what they mean by that, can you give me some guidance on what I should do with an introduction?', or to go back to a study skills advisor and say, 'I've had a go at an introduction', they don't give them any subject advice, it's just on writing skills, and what most students want when they go along is proofreading.
My role as Student Support Co-ordinator for the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences included the key area of retention of students. We aimed to induct students into the higher education learning environment through an initial session and then weekly workshops. The Being a Student school induction programme was developed with two colleagues in the school, one a philosopher and one a writing tutor. Together we put together a three part induction session. This started with Rob's philosophical reflection on what it meant to be a student, aiming to encourage students to think about why they had come and what the purpose of higher education was. This situating of higher education within the framework of critical thinking led to practical sessions on the higher education learning environment, and developing skills to fulfil one's potential. This programme led into a weekly Develop your Study Skills drop in session, supported by materials on our on-line learning framework. This was extended into a new level module Personal, Academic and Career Enhancement (PACE) for level one students to facilitate their adjustment to the demands of higher education. This new school initiative is taking our work in student support forward by developing a cohesive cross university support team. These links led to the development of a collaborative research proposal with academic librarians to develop an information skills programme. This work was the subject of a PRS mini-project Supporting Diverse Students, and there's a report on this in this issue of Discourse.
I know quite a lot of your students aren't what you might call typical entrants in terms of coming straight from A-levels at 18, but of those who are, do you detect any changes in terms of the level of knowledge and level of skills that they have?
I was looking at Ursula King's interview, where she was asked about how students have changed over the years, and I don't think they have that much, we've had some cohorts that have been wonderful, where you've had a group of students who get fired up by the subject, and interact with each other, and support each other. When we had students on teacher education programmes, perhaps they needed to do that because teaching practice was so stressful, and they needed more support networks, but they talked to each other, they'd share ideas about their work, they'd talk about assignments, and they'd want to do things related to religious studies, more field visits. We'd say, 'There's a lecture on in Birmingham', and a lot of them would want to go, and they do seem less inclined now, but more students have to work, and I don't think they have the time.
I wouldn't call the present situation a dumbing down, but for example I've just been marking some learning logs, which were for 30% of the module, and I was very disappointed with the way many students had engaged with the tasks. Some of them have just done a couple of sides on the book they've used, and given detail like, 'I used these keywords', but haven't explained the decisions they made, so maybe there is more surface learning for some tasks. Maybe 10 years ago, students would've been more disciplined, in terms of doing the work gradually, week by week, whereas a number of students, perhaps because of pressures of work, family and other commitments, now find that they leave it to the last minute, and don't do a good job.
I think we've always had a written communication problem, and this goes back to when religious studies was within the primary B. Ed., I remember one year there was a test that they did on students' use of English, and there were concerns for most of the cohort, across all subjects, and of course for a B. Ed. course we could build in support, and students would be more inclined to take it. I think weaker students are a lot weaker now than they were 10 years ago, and less inclined to seek support, and where they are rushing their work, they're making errors that are just inconceivable, both in terms of accuracy and the general communications skills that you'd expect them to have, and this cuts across students whose mother tongue is English, and whose mother tongue is different. We don't tend to have overseas students as such, most of our students tend to be born here, perhaps second or third generation migrants, but the percentage who are prepared to develop their skills is decreasing, and they seem to expect to be able to make a quick fix, but some of them have deeper seated problems, which would require long term fixing.
Recently I moderated some first year essays, where the task was quite complex, and a lot of them just didn't make any sense. You do wonder how a student could present something that's nonsense, but it seems that if they haven't been successful, they don't want to admit that they don't understand, or that they're struggling, so they just carry on without any kind of intervention which helps them get to where they need to be, so I think there's a particular challenge in communication.
I think there are real issues over understanding of academic writing, and it has probably always been the case, but in the past, somehow, from the reading we did we were able to gain an understanding of what an academic essay was, and I think for a lot of students now, it doesn't seem to work, in terms of gathering their thoughts together, and engaging with a question—there's a gap. But then again, I almost did my PhD on 'Why don't students answer the question that's been set?', because I found so often in marking that you could see this student had read around the topic, and understood it, but they were writing generally rather than answering specific questions, and that was 12 years ago, when I was following that track, so it's obviously not changed that much.
So what do you think are the key abilities and skills that religious studies students either need, or should have by the end of their studies?
Our students now are combining religious studies with another subject, and when we look at their results across the board, particularly in the first year, they seem to do less well in religious studies than in their other subject, whatever that subject is, even philosophy. It seems to be that we're asking for a greater level of complexity, both in understanding and expression, than may be the case in other subjects. The understanding we require in religious studies is more abstract, and if what they're studying doesn't link to their experiences, I think that makes it more difficult for them to understand.
I suppose one of the things that makes religious studies more difficult than other subjects is that we don't really have the text book step by step approach that I think most other subjects have. I remember when I used to teach A-level philosophy, what we were asking students to do was very complex. Then when I started in higher education, some colleagues who hadn't taught in school said, “What do students do at A-level? It's spoon feeding, they don't learn to think for themselves”, and yet students had to develop their critical thinking for A-level philosophy. However, because there was an expectation that students would come in with nothing, students fulfilled it.
When you're talking about this transition from school to higher education, it does seem that students go backwards. I was looking at some research about learning trajectories, this was more primary to secondary, and there's a notion that students learn within a context, and that if they go to secondary school with peers from primary, they know that their peers are used to them acting in a particular way, and so they'll carry on with learning behaviours that they had from before.
I was involved in a pilot study with a local school on the PACE induction module based on the idea of learning trajectories, that if we could work with a group of students and bring them into university together, because they've got the confidence of knowing each other, they will learn to learn and have the experience of learning in the university context, which may then help them carry on those positive behaviours when they're here.
I think when you're talking about graduate skills, we need to recognise that in order to get to the end, they need to be developing skills throughout their course, and for both students and staff, there seems to be the assumption that you don't need to build into courses opportunities to develop skills. There's just the assumption that students know how to learn, know how to write, and that doesn't really get challenged, even when students struggle.
In terms of skills, apart from the QCA fixed skills, we refer to empathy in particular. When we validated a new programme in 1998 we included 'empathy' as a key skill as we felt it was central to our approach..Study in the humanities and social sciences enables students to gain an understanding of aspects of human experience. With the transition to a more secular society the place of religious beliefs and values in ordinary people's lives tends to be overlooked. Recognising religion's role as a motivator for action, or a source of value, is important.
What difficulties are there in teaching that are particular to religious studies?
Generally difficulties arise due to the baggage students, colleagues and others bring to religious studies. I often wonder what academic life would have been like if I had stayed with history. I wouldn't face colleagues' confusion about the nature of religious studies, and wouldn't have to make up another occupation for when I flew in the US—I always seem to be sat next to an evangelical Christian who assumes I share their faith when I tell them what I do.
I came close to resigning a few years ago due to a management decision that the University chaplains should become part of the Religious Studies Unit. The chaplains taught Applied Theology within Combined Awards, and the proposal was that we would merge the two subjects for a new joint form of RS. I took out grievances against almost everyone: my line manager, the Dean of our school, and the Head of Personnel, and finally brought the matter to the attention of the Vice-Chancellor. At this stage my line manager said that there was no intention to use the chaplains for teaching in RS, so I withdrew the grievance and the issue has not arisen again. But I was surprised at how little support we got, particularly from colleagues in the School of Humanities, where everybody's very keen to jump on high horses and follow ideologies, but because this involved religion, it was almost, 'well, you're all engaged with religion, so what's the problem with the chaplain coming from a confessional background?' because many colleagues don't really understand what we do in the first place.
Many colleagues don't seem to think that the study of religion's important. Having moved into the School of Humanities, I don't feel that so many of my colleagues in this school see religious studies as being that important. Even those who touch on religion in some way, like politics, sociology, even philosophy, maybe their RE at school was limited, and their view of what religious studies is hasn't really changed.
But things have come a long way, and religious studies is seen as more of an academic subject. When I first started teaching, I can remember going for interviews for RE jobs, and the assumption then was that you would be a Christian. I remember being asked about my beliefs at one interview, and I took the local advisor to task afterwards, because that should not have happened. Fortunately things have changed in terms of RE in schools, and even in my first year here, in 1986, the first cohort was a mixed cohort, so I think that's changing the shape of RE in schools, and religious studies at university. Students from a range of religious traditions go into teaching and so that's been a change from the bottom upwards.
I can remember when I was teaching in Southampton, and we used to meet for CSE moderation. What happened was, in the local area, everybody would go to the same school, and you'd then divide into subject groups for moderation, and when we got together as an RE group, we used to start with a prayer, and I'd go back to school, and everybody would be ribbing me, saying, 'Everybody else does it objectively, but the RE teachers say a prayer and ask for divine assistance in moderation'. So the next year, two of us plucked up the courage, and as we were about to start, and somebody suggested a prayer, we said, 'Why is it we have to say a prayer, before we're moderating? Do you realise what others think about us? If we were doing history, you might want to say a private prayer, but you wouldn't do it publicly, and we'd like to be seen as teachers. For the perceptions of our subject, we ought to change this practice', and so we did.
In terms of specific issues in the classroom, there is the issue of commitment, which is a particular problem. Many students do take religious studies because they are very religious, and they enjoy exploring religious things, but their commitment, instead of being a positive, can become a negative in an academic context, where your requirement is to study religion in a critical way, and some find it difficult to be objective about their own faith. We do get students who come to us in Wolverhampton because we're the only option, so they may be doing religious studies when really what they wanted to do is to study their own religion, and so they might not see the value of studying other religions.
I remember going through a phase where I was doing my MA in Lancaster, and I was really enjoying learning about other religions. I wasn't a Christian any more but I wasn't really anything else, and I was worried that if I was committed to a religion, would I then lose the openness—if I believed a religion held the truth, would I then be as open to truth in other religions? I wonder whether we ought to be doing more for students in taking them through that journey. Because it's not easy, if we look at religious leaders, they find it very difficult to find the right words to talk about each other's religions. John Hick's work on the Copernican revolution and theology,4 that really helped me to develop a personal theological foundation. I wonder whether we ought to be doing more on introductory courses, in helping students to develop their own understanding of the relationship of their faith to other faiths. We get such mixed groups, we have Muslim students, Hindus, Sikhs, a few Buddhists, a few Jewish, and a great variety of Christian students, there is a plural situation, but we don't really give students that much opportunity to talk about their faith position, and how that may impact upon their attitude towards study.
I was going to ask, Wolverhampton is obviously a very multicultural area, and I know that you draw in a lot of the students from this area, what would you say were the positives and negatives that that brings about, particularly in the classroom situation?
I think it's almost wholly positive, that in studying religions, the presence of students from a broad variety of religions makes a rich learning experience for all students, but I think we fall into the trap of assuming that students from particular religious backgrounds will know a lot about their particular religion, and yet in the past when we were teaching Christianity, and we had students who were nominally Christian, we wouldn't have made that same assumption about them. For example, I've just marked some essays on Islam, and the students who struggled have mostly been Muslim students, who know a lot about the peripheral issues and Muslim lifestyles on a certain level, but not the underpinnings that we've been studying in the module, and maybe this is an area that still needs to be tackled. When it comes to Muslim lifestyles, in debating issues with students, there are still aspects of Islam in Britain that haven't been subject to research, to do with multiple identities and so on, and so students know a lot on a practical level, which doesn't fit with the picture from scholarship. I think these are issues that we still haven't got to grips with.
Do you think recent events such as 9/11 and 7/7 have made the study of religion more vital?
I think it has always been vital—I can remember a lecture by Ninian Smart in 1982 on Alexander Haig and worldview analysis5. Smart's thesis was that if Haig had known more about Islam in general and Shi'ite Islam in particular, then American foreign policy would not miscalculated reactions so badly in Iran. I suppose the links I made between religion and history in Northern Ireland, in the Middle East and studies on antisemitism, meant that I came to RS in the first place because it offered a way of understanding the world. I think 9/11 and 7/7 have presented a strong case for researching and understanding the importance of religious motivation. Alongside this we need to study the development of indigenous forms of Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Sikhism, as immersion in a plural society which has a strong Christian foundation is likely to shape experiences for followers of all faiths.
What do you think are the most pressing factors driving change in religious studies?
I think one area that is going to have increasing impact is a view of higher education which is almost wholly professional and vocational, and this presents us in the humanities with particular challenges. In religious studies, the majority of our graduates have had a clear career destination with teaching, primary or secondary, and other subjects haven't and they're going to face greater challenges than we do, but we need to be exploring career options for those students who don't want to go into teaching. Graduate destinations for religious studies look good on the surface (at Wolverhampton over 80% use their degree) but these figures mask the fact that the majority of graduates either go into teaching or research, and they actually find other avenues for graduate employment difficult to access. Perhaps more than any other humanities or social science subject, applications from religious studies graduates may be pre-judged and discarded by employers due to their preconceptions of religious studies.
I think religious studies graduates have a great contribution to make to contemporary society. The Faith Literacy entrepreneurship project, funded by the Subject Centre, demonstrated the relevance of religious studies to business. This initiative, in collaboration with alumni who set up a consultancy business, supported recent graduates in their production of consultancy reports for local employers. Students were really positive about getting the opportunity to apply their knowledge and understanding of religion in real life situations.6 This project demonstrated that graduates could take an active role in diversity training, and perhaps do a better job than many of the organisations currently running courses.
A lot of your research has been about teaching the Holocaust, so would you like to say a bit about that? Perhaps you could say what led you into it as well?
I first started teaching the Holocaust as part of Jewish theology, at sixth form level. This was before I really got into feminist theology, and it seemed, looking at Holocaust theology, you could see theology as an ongoing process. In my studies up to that point theology was seen as something that other people have done in the past, and more or less fixed, whereas Holocaust theology was asking questions that authoritative answers hadn't been given to, so it led to an understanding of theology, if you link it to Smart's doctrinal dimension,7 as a way of making sense of the world.
With colleagues in education, we came up with the idea of a minor route, we called it religion and topical issues, and we identified a number of topics where we could bring together English, history, and religious studies—the Holocaust was one, the Black experience in Britain was another, literature and liberation was looking at South America and liberation theology, and I think Victorian Britain was another one, so that was a really nice way of working with colleagues and sharing expertise. The Holocaust module started there, it was called 'Perspectives on the Holocaust', and the aim was to bring together different perspectives, the historical, the religious, the creative, literature, film, and then as a result of that, students started doing projects on the Holocaust, a lot of it related to Holocaust theology or survivor perspectives.
I spent time at Yad Vashem, and I met Stephen Smith, who was setting up the Holocaust Centre Beth Shalom. He came to work at Wolverhampton as a visiting lecturer, and we took students on a field visit to Poland, which was a career changing experience for me. If you're teaching the same thing year after year, you can kind of feel that you're going through the motions, but students' reactions and questions to genocide seemed to make it, not quite more meaningful, but different. We hosted the Anne Frank exhibition, and a number of students got involved as guides, and they wanted to do more after that, so we went on a study visit to Holland and Germany. Paul and Rudi Oppenheimer came with us to share their first hand experiences.
So the work developed relating to students who were doing the B. Ed, studying the Holocaust, and then thinking about how they would teach the Holocaust in school. For some of them, it would be teaching in primary school, so they were asking questions about how you would teach the Holocaust to young children. There was an issue, in terms of how you comprehend what happened, and how it impacts on young learners, and I was interested in that because I hadn't learned about the Holocaust in school, I was an adult really when I came to the Holocaust, and I had a greater range of resources to draw on, and I was struck by a few things the teachers said, like, 'I take my pupils to Beth Shalom, they listen to a survivor, and then there's an opportunity to ask questions, and they don't ask questions'.
When we were hosting the Anne Frank exhibition, we noticed that younger pupils, aged 10 or 11, had lots of questions, but older students didn't, and this seemed to raise questions about how particularly boys cope with emotions in such a study, so this was the area I did my PhD on, really looking at the impact on learners, the questions they have, and how they cope. One of the ways they seemed to cope was by talking, talking to their friends, talking to their parents, and this really seemed to raise the importance of discussion. Which I suppose goes back to what we saw as good practice in RE, and thinking about relationships between school and university learning, do we allow enough room for discussion for students in higher education? , So my work on the Holocaust is linked to my own reactions as a learner, and my students' reactions to their learning.
This led on to thinking about the impact on secondary school pupils when the Holocaust became an optional part of the national curriculum for history, so was going to be taught more widely, and also the Holocaust was featuring in a lot of RE programmes, I think at Beth Shalom they have as many groups going from RE as from history, so there were questions about the impact on learners when there were going to be a lot more 14 year olds learning about the Holocaust. More recently, I've been interested in how our students here can be supported in their learning of the Holocaust, and how you structure a programme, particularly now as I find I've got more than 100 students on that first year module, and first years from many different subjects, who don't necessarily have friends to learn with, so I'm looking at how we can build in support. Next academic year we'll be working on learning tutorials which draw on the Newsfilm archive, as part of a project for the Subject Centre for History, Classics and Archaeology.
One of the main areas of support has been work with survivors, of genocide. Early last year I visited Rwanda. We went down to a place called Murambi, which was a vision of hell. Imagine a new school building, a Catholic school that was being built, just outside of town on this hill, and 40 to 50 thousand local Tutsis were told to move into the school premises, and then they were attacked and just slaughtered there. Many of the bodies were just put into mass graves, and survivors dug up many of these graves, and tried to preserve the bodies in lime, and you now have these skeletons set out in the classrooms. Here is a school that should be educating children, and it's now a mausoleum. As we were going round, Aegis Trust workers, many of whom were survivors, were filming and asking us questions, and asking us how we could cope, what our reactions were to this, and when you were being asked these questions by a survivor, who may have lost family, and who had lived from that, it kind of puts your emotional reaction and the emotional challenge into perspective, and I think learning about the Holocaust, the presence of survivors is almost like someone holding your hand and saying, 'I lived through this, and I coped, so you can'.
I did a paper at a conference last year8, which looked at pupil writing, either feedback on the visit to Beth Shalom, or letters that they'd written to survivors, seeing the kind of role that survivor testimony plays in their learning.
In terms of survivors, do you feel that helps you to help the students to cope with the material as well? There's going to be necessarily an emotional element, and do you feel as if that is something that, as a teacher, you've learnt from the survivors?
Yes, I suppose in the area of genocide study, you learn so it doesn't happen again. Most of learning is learning that you seek to replicate, and this is of a different nature, and I think the personal impact is important. In higher education at all levels, we don't make enough of personal interaction, whether it be peer to peer or lecturer to student. In terms of what students can get out of studying religion, they learn about the world, they have a chance to explore ultimate questions, and perhaps as for other subject areas, it can potentially change them as people.
I do think there should be significant learning experiences in a course that poses challenges. I remember when I started teaching about gender issues, that this really was a big challenge for a lot of students, particularly because at that time we had a lot of mature students. Studying got them to think about their home relationships and they began taking exception to ways that in particular their husbands had got used to treating them, 'oh yes, you want to go somewhere, I'll take you'—'take me? I'm not a child!', you know, so there should be significance in learning, and as a lecturer you have to be prepared to help your students handle the emotional aspects that this can bring about. The work with survivors links in well to the importance of faith informants in RE. If your teacher is the objective guide through your study of religion, it is important that students have the opportunity to meet with people who are unashamedly Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, and can answer from that perspective. That personal interaction is important.
Thinking about where religious studies is going, we're doing some work with Wolverhampton Inter Faith group. They organise visits to places of worship, and we are exploring getting students to act as volunteers to be faith informants, so if they belong to a particular religious tradition, they can act as a faith informant for that tradition. We've talked about putting in a bid to explore religious study leading to being a faith informant, and a model that I think could work would be if we were to take a number of individuals from a number of religious communities in the city, who'd come and take modules on individual religions, and also have a strand alongside that which is kind of religious education, looking at child development, how you present ideas to children, what the nature of their religious learning's like, so that these faith informants would be able to present material to school groups that was appropriate to their level of learning, and also they'd have a role for their own community, for learning about other religions in the city. I think in the new climate for understanding religions and the place of religion in society, this might be a way forward, and it could open up religious study to a greater range of people. We often have problems when we take students out on field visits, that no matter how well you prepare in advance, and try to give an indication of the background of the students, it always depends who's talking to the group, as to how much information they can give you, and whether it's geared towards the appropriate level. I think that this is a way of professionalising that role. If you think of the challenge that religious communities have, so many school groups want to go, but if the people who are telling them don't know what they're learning about religion in school, then there's quite often a mismatch.
Another new method of teaching and assessment that we're thinking of developing for this semester is something we originally did on a field visit. We went to Israel, I think it was in 2000, and had a group of 15 students, of various religions, and on other field visits we've really just gone as tourists and looked round, but this time we wanted them to be doing some work. It was an accredited course, they worked in three groups, and the task was to research Jewish, Christian or Muslim holy places and organise a tour for the rest of the party. We were there for 10 days, and the last three days were going to be these tours, so we had some general input, and then they worked as groups following up their particular sites. They'd done some research before they got there, so they put together a tour that we then went round on and took videos of, and it was such a good experience, because they weren't just there passively soaking things up, they had to be active, and they had to think about a timespan, what would be said where, what kind of handouts they'd produce. So for this semester, for the Religions in the West Midlands module, in the past students have gone in small groups to different places of worship and then have written reports which others can then look at on the website, but this time, students are going to prepare visits, so that there will be part lecture and then part field visit, and that field visit will be set up by the students and will give them an opportunity of developing a link with a religious community, and facilitating a visit. I think it'll be quite interesting to see how it goes.
That sounds really interesting.
Yes, and in addition I think because they're acting in that role, it will empower them. What I like about presentations is that there's an onus on you to know more than you say, whereas I think it's easy to write without really understanding, but if you know you're going to present to a group, and they're going to ask questions, then you're likely to prepare around it, so I'm hoping that students will take that opportunity. And sharing is important. I suppose one of the things we've always done in religious studies is look for opportunities to share. If students are doing good work, then it should have a larger audience than just the person who's marking it. On the website, where we've got pages on each place of worship, where students have been on a visit to that place, and have written a report as part of their assessment, that's there for students to look at. And thinking about the link between school and higher education, it provides a way of allowing school pupils, in thinking about higher education, to have a look at work that students have done, and see, maybe that's something I'd like to do. I think these exemplars are an important part of making decisions, and we don't allow this enough. And it'd be nice if there were opportunities for students to access work that students were doing in other places, so that they could share experiences. For example, here we've got a small Shi'ite mosque, and there may be other places in Britain where they've got a larger Shi'ite community, which has a higher profile, and it'd be good to get students in different places doing fieldwork and comparing their findings.
Yes, absolutely.
Last year, you became a National Teaching Fellow, the first one in religious studies or theology, or philosophy for that matter. How important was it to you to become a National Teaching Fellow?
Personally, it was very important, because I think if you're involved in a small subject that doesn't really have a high profile in your institution, then there aren't really opportunities for progression, and although in one way the job you're doing itself is enough feedback, when others in your institution have career routes, and move to positions where they're able to make decisions about what you do, it can become frustrating that there aren't opportunities. I think the whole area of learning and teaching is opening up a new route, and I think for staff who are in my position, coming into religious studies through religious education, and in working within that kind of school based RE, and school linked religious education, our approach has been fairly eclectic mixture of education and religion, but we lack the specialism that colleagues in education studies, or colleagues in larger religious studies departments have. It's the norm here that we would cover three or four broad areas, we would lecture in several religions, and different aspects of religions, so when it comes to RAE work, it's not clear whether our work would go into education, learning and teaching or religious studies. Whilst we can make a contribution, we can't always compete with people who specialise maybe in a specific aspect of one religion, so I think this is opening up recognition that we're making a contribution that is equally important to that of scholars in other areas. It has given me the opportunity, which I haven't had in 20 years, of a part sabbatical, and the opportunity to be working around my subject, and looking at teaching and learning issues that impact on my experience, and the experience of students, so I think that's important. It's a recognition that the application of subject research in pedagogically appropriate ways is valuable as it improves the student learning experience.
My research has always been linked to teaching, in either developing my own subject base or considering how to present knowledge in the classroom. In teaching philosophy of education I always remember the question: 'Has a teacher taught if the students have not learned?' which brings home the fact that teaching is a relational activity and we need to monitor the effectiveness of our teaching approaches for student learning. I think also as I get older, that although I will be teaching topics I have taught every year for over twenty years, that each iteration unique. Through the questions they ask, the aspects of the topics they are interested in and their responses to questions, each cohort of students helps me to understand my subject in a different way.
Over the years since the Subject Centre started, you've done various things for us, and I wondered how the presence of the Subject Centre and the work you've done for it has helped your work.
I think, since we've started to discuss learning and teaching in higher education, there've been opportunities to do research around our subjects, on a practical level, providing a resource. You've been able to buy time to do that research, and I suppose it helps you to enter debate with colleagues. Those of us who came from an education background were already used to discussing pedagogy, but for those who came into religious studies without any kind of educational background, it's perhaps more important, and for the past ten years, any new staff that we've had here have had an opportunity to do part of our MA in learning and teaching, and have been keen to do that, so I think questions about how we teach are very important. The Subject Centre provides a port of call, so if you've got questions about work going on in a particular area you're able to make links. It also provides a way to draw attention to new areas of development, like the entrepreneurship project, where the Subject Centre basically said, 'You're doing some work in this area, why not take it a bit further?' Applying for bids can be a frustrating experience, and when it is a new area, as I think learning and teaching in higher education is, for most staff, you're not sure whether where you're coming from is going to be an appropriate position, and whether you're wasting your time, so that I think that link is important.
From the beginning of the Institute for Learning and Teaching, I was doing some work on key skills, and so I went to the first conference, and I don't think anyone was there from religious studies or theology. There may even be an expectation within religious studies that what's happening is at a far higher level than it is. People think of applied educational research, which is very specific and quite often a bit abstract, but what we're doing in higher education is a lot more practical. A lot of it seeks to be evidence based, but it's essentially disseminating good practice.
I've learned a lot through involvement with ILTHE, and then the HEA and the Subject Centre. I've been to most of the annual conferences and have made a lot of links with colleagues in other subjects, and I've benefited from doing that. And I think what's happened with debates about learning and teaching is, for those of us who've been around a long time, it kind of recharges your batteries. Sometimes we might return to the same kind of projects that we've gone through before, but with new technology, for example. We have a chance now with peer observation to go in and see somebody doing something, whether it be the e-portfolio, WebQuests, seeing the way students engage with those creative learning experiences, and then having seen it in action, you can see how you can apply it within your own area, so I think it's important in having these insights into new learning methods.
My recent research on PowerPoint and Pedagogy was a collaborative CeLT project with school colleagues that we presented at the HEA conference. Napier University invited me to present two workshops for staff, which were evaluated very positively not only in terms of content but also in my 'excellent role modelling of good practice.' I have run two workshops for colleagues across the university in CELT learning and teaching professional development and been invited to run the session for two schools.
I'm actively contributing to current university-led learning and teaching initiatives through involvement in the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. I piloted use of the ePortfolio last academic year and am completing a paper for the Subject Centre for PRS on supporting student skills. Work in these areas has brought me into close contact with colleagues in other parts of the university and my response to the need to share work in supporting students was to put on a conference Developing Skills for Study in Higher Education. This took place in June 2006, with a keynote speaker from the USA sharing experiences from running web-based study skill support for students. The call for papers has been successful and the programme will allow for a sharing of internal initiatives together with interesting work from Britain and Europe.
I had the opportunity to go on a technology retreat which introduced us to a range of electronic ways to present material interactively. I went with the idea of developing a website to support students in their study of local religions, and came back with a template for the website Religions in Wolverhampton. Within the website there are a range of learning objects, treasure hunts and WebQuests, which encourage student engagement. New students find this opens up new ways of understanding religion in society, and they are stimulated by the opportunity to contribute to the website by developing webquests from their research on local religious communities.
Are there any other mentors in your work and study that you would like to mention?
I have been fortunate to meet exceptional people who have acted as both role models and sources of inspiration. In religious studies I had an eccentric tutor who introduced us to the fascinating opportunities of opening up new worldviews for pupils. She also set down a basic principle in presentation, to imagine that a pupil who belonged to the faith under consideration was sitting in the front row of our class. Whilst today it is common practice to treat all faiths with consideration and respect, this has not always been the case, particularly in relation to New Religious Movements. I recall one session early in my career when exploring Jehovah's Witness beliefs, using materials from a mainstream Christian perspective which were very biased and subjected Witness beliefs to ridicule. At the end of the session one of the pupils asked, 'Did I know that Christine was a Witness?' I clearly didn't and I could hear Vida's advice in my head. I certainly had not taught the session imagining that a Jehovah's Witness pupil was sitting in the front row, and that experience has stayed with me to ensure that I maintain the integrity of the faith under consideration and the integrity of believers who hold that faith at all times.
In Holocaust and Genocide Studies my mentors have been survivors, from whom I have learnt so much. Perhaps the most important lesson being a reminder that teaching is a humanistic activity, and the importance of a human link in the encounter with an event. Reflecting on the willingness of survivors to face up to the horrors they experienced in order to help others learn about what happened poses a challenge. If they can do that to assist my learning journey, then I can surely accommodate some distress in exploring atrocity with students.
I can't finish this section without mentioning the Smith family, founders of the Holocaust Centre Beth Shalom, and The Aegis Genocide Prevention Trust. Whilst visiting a student who was on work experience at Yad Vashem, I met a young man from England who was setting up a Holocaust Education Centre. When I say young, I mean in his twenties, and he had no institutional support. Yet Stephen, his brother James and their family, set about setting up the first Centre for Holocaust Education in the UK. From Stephen, James and Marina I learnt to think big, and if you believe that an educational experience can benefit students, then pursue your vision. Check out their work at: http://www.bethshalom.com/ and http://www.aegistrust.org/
Thank you very much, it's been a very interesting afternoon.
If you would like more information about anything mentioned in the interview, particularly if you are interested in the current project on student use of tutor feedback, or if you would like copies of the 2007 Calendar of Religious Festivals produced by Wolverhampton Council or the Heritage DVD Our Faith Buildings, please contact Deirdre Burke:
Dr Deirdre Burke, HLSS, Millennium City Building, University of Wolverhampton, City Campus, Wolverhampton, WV1 1SB. Tel: 01902 322522, email: Deirdre.burke@wlv.ac.uk
Religions in Wolverhampton website: http://asp2.wlv.ac.uk/hlss/ Religion%20in%20Wolverhampton/index.html.
Endnotes
- The Shap Working Party for World Religions was influential in developing a phenomenological approach to religion in the classroom. It was named 'Shap' from the location of the meetings in Shap in the Lake District.
- Gilliat-Ray, Sophie, 'Breaking down the classroom walls: Innovative teaching and learning in Religious Studies and Theology', in Discourse, Vol.2, No.2, Winter 2003.
- Entrepreneurial Consultancies in Religious Studies, Discourse: Learning and Teaching in Philosophical and Religious Studies, Volume 4. No. 2, pp.151-172, Spring 2005.
- Hick, J. (1993) God and the Universe of Faiths, Oxford: Oneworld.
- University of Lancaster, Religious Studies Lecture, 1982-2.
- Entrepreneurial Consultancies in Religious Studies, Discourse: Learning and Teaching in Philosophical and Religious Studies, Volume 4. No. 2, pp.151-172, Spring 2005.
- Smart, N. (1995) Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
- 'I didn't believe it had happened until I met Paul': The role of Holocaust survivors in Holocaust education.' Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution—60 Years On. Second International Multidisciplinary Conference 2006. Conference proceedings to be published by Secolo Verlag (Osnabrueck, Germany) in a combined book/CD(2007).
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This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
