Engaging with religious epistemologies in the classroom: Implications for civic education

Abstract

Our point of departure in this paper is the observation that in many secular societies—which may be so in variable degrees, especially in the West—as well as in societies emerging out of religious conflict, there may be the perception that educational systems ought to promote civic values while sidestepping religious or cultural values. This entanglement, in our view, presents a challenge that is deeply political, because effective participation in a society is directly relevant to ideals about equity, social justice, power relations, and the common good. We suggest that when religious and cultural affiliations are excluded from such ideals, this makes effective participation more possible or perhaps less so, especially for certain social groups such as minority and marginalized groups or groups that have been victimized in a conflict situations.

Amartya Sen (2006) warns us about the dangers of the miniaturization of human beings, when viewed solely from the narrow confines of a monolithic identity. As he writes:

In many contexts, such a classification can be rather helpful … but to take that to be the overarching basis for social, political, and cultural analysis in general would amount to overlooking all the other associations and loyalties any individual may have, and which could be significant in the person’s behavior, identity, and self-understanding. The crucial need to take note of the plural identities of people and their choice of priorities survives the replacement of civilizational classification with a directly religious categorization. (2006, p. 60)

Although Sen refers to the limitations of a religion-centered analysis, one can posit that the same applies for an analysis that rejects the value of religious epistemologies. This idea has important implications for peace and civic education, particularly in relation to two issues: a religious-centered approach to education, which often negates secular values, and a secular approach to education, which ignores the role of religion and culture. In this article, we focus on the latter approach, as practiced at various levels in the Western world, and argue that religious epistemologies are part and parcel of the development of students’ civic identities. Therefore, religious epistemologies should not form an optional element, but instead a structural and necessary element of all peace and civic education. In particular, we join Lynn Davies (2014) in arguing that what she calls ‘dynamic secularism’ can actually accommodate the growth of students’ civic identities, without sidestepping their religious and cultural affiliations.

Secularism in its simplest definition is the separation of state and church, so that a religion does not interfere in the workings and institutions of governance (Davies, 2014). As Davies explains, there are many versions of secularism ranging from the soft secularism of accommodating all religions into aspects of governance to the hard secularism of banning all religious expression in public life such as the headscarf or the Christian cross. In other words, secularism is not antithetical to religion but can actually act as an umbrella for all faiths and ensure that none is privileged. Davies uses the term ‘dynamic secularism’—with dynamic borrowed from complexity theory—to indicate a secularism that is not static but enables the accommodation of religion rather than banning it. There are many forms of secularism then, depending on the ways in which faith is accommodated in each different context. The basic principle though is that the separation of church and state is upheld, so that governance does not let religion get in the way.

Our point of departure in this paper is the observation that in many secular societies—which may be so in variable degrees, especially in the West—as well as in societies emerging out of religious conflict, there may be the perception that educational systems ought to promote civic values while sidestepping religious or cultural values (Banks, 1997; Derricott, 1998; Galston, 2001; Halperin & Bar-Tal, 2006; Rubin, 2007).This is done for a variety of reasons that range from ideological ones to pragmatic decisions that have to do with perceptions and judgments about diminishing any differences that could further exacerbate societal divisions. This ‘entanglement’ of the civic and the religious speaks to a much deeper question of how school discourses, policies, and practices define who has the capacity to govern themselves and who lacks such capacities, and how such capacities become effective elements in the formation of political subjects and their subjectivities (Isin, 2012). This entanglement, in our view, presents a challenge that is deeply political, because effective participation in a society is directly relevant to ideals about equity, social justice, power relations, and the common good. If religious and cultural affiliations are excluded from such ideals, does this make effective participation more possible or perhaps less so, especially for certain social groups such as minority and marginalized groups or groups that have been victimized in a conflict situation? In relation to education, the question can be reformulated as follows: How can schools and education help develop students’ civic identities, without putting aside their religious and cultural affiliations in the name of a myth about secularism that supposedly bans all religious expression?

A clarification on the purpose of this paper is needed before we begin. The premise on which this article rests—i.e. that the entanglement of the civic and the religious in education takes various manifestations in different settings—is not new; that premise is not the most important contribution of this essay. The more important contribution is the analysis of how religious epistemologies may play out in the everyday practices of schools and classrooms. This perspective suggests a regulative ideal which could combine more realistic and modest aspirations focused on the pragmatics of classroom activity inside, the only real place where educators might be able to influence education. We particularly discuss how this perspective has consequences in terms of the development of civic identities that do not ignore yet do not give central prominence to religious and cultural identities. In a sense, then, it could be suggested that our argument is an attempt to show the value of dynamic secularism for classroom activity in peace and civic education.

Engaging with religious epistemologies in peace and civic education

There is by now ample evidence that negotiations of civic identities in the classroom constitute, as well as are constituted by, the epistemological framings of the co-participants, namely, teachers and students(Hammer and Elby, 2003; Kienhues, Bromme and Stahl, 2008; Lising and Elby, 2005). Generally speaking, epistemologies include beliefs about the stability of knowledge (ranging from unchanging knowledge to tentative knowledge), the structure of knowledge (ranging from small bits to integrated concepts), and the source of knowledge (ranging from omniscient authority to empirical evidence) (Schommer-Aikins, 2004). Religious epistemologies, just like other epistemologies, have implications for all dimensions of life—including life in the classroom—as they speak to what counts as knowledge and how knowledge is constructed and evaluated (Hofer, 2004). Similarly, just like any other epistemological beliefs, religious epistemologies are characterized by affective components, limited adherence to logic, difficulty in changing, and powerful influence on thinking (Schommer-Aikins, 2004). Thus, the religious epistemologies of students and teachers in the classroom are influential in the process of what counts as legitimate knowledge within a particular context.

Religious epistemologies emerge in particular socio-historical and cultural contexts and are represented and interpreted within the epistemological framings made available. In these framings, it is not unlikely that the civic may masquerade the religious; namely, religious epistemologies might be rejected in the name of promoting a collective sense of ‘the civic’. France provides a good example where the wearing of the hijab is prohibited in government schools, significantly impacting on the life of minorities (e.g. religious Muslim women). It should come then as no surprise that minorities express distrust and/or a perceived sense of hostility and skepticism when their religious epistemologies are rejected. Particularly in conflict-affected societies in which conflict might be religiously-based (e.g. India-Pakistan), one could only imagine the lack of trust when religious epistemologies might be considered a hindrance rather than aid to a peaceful settlement. To understand the impact of religious epistemologies and their potential place in peace and civic education, we need though to delve deeper into the nature of these epistemologies.

First, one of the myths of secularism is that it rejects religious epistemologies (Davies, 2014). It is true that some religious epistemologies—when they are framed in absolutist frames—contradict secular epistemic traditions on what counts as authoritative knowledge, how competing knowledge claims may be resolved, and how theory and evidence can be coordinated. However, this does not necessarily imply that the two are always incompatible. And yet, when they are perceived as such, more often than not, the consequences for students can be disconcerting. Students who hold religious epistemologies might be judged as irrational, pre-modern, or anti-Western by their non-religious peers and teachers (Gottlieb, 2008). Particularly in relation to the contested role of religion in conflict-affected societies, those who subscribe to such epistemologies may be deemed extremist and dangerous or simply ignored as pre-modern and backward (Davies, 2004, 2008).

However, as research has shown, the developmental progression of epistemological reasoning from pre-reflective (including religious reasoning) to reflective thinking (seeing knowledge as constructed) is not as linear as it had been assumed (Kuhn, Cheney and Weinstock, 2000). Research shows that cognitively sophisticated and mature individuals subscribe to religious epistemological beliefs that would have been described as ‘immature’ or ‘naïve’ by early research (Gottlieb, 2008). There is a great variability of how people of different ages reason (King and Kitchener, 2004) and religious epistemologies are included in this variability, independent of intellectual ability or maturity. Hence, from a developmental perspective, there is no age norm and religious epistemologies cannot be simply ignored as pre-modern, backward, or even delayed. Religious epistemologies are important ways of making sense of the world and therefore they cannot be simply ignored or rejected, especially in light of the political dimension of religion and the struggles for power.

Needless to say, then, when embarking on a study of the religious, civic or any other communal epistemologies of groups, it is of utmost importance to differentiate between two ‘kinds’ of religious epistemologies: on the one hand, religious epistemologies as relatively stable belief systems as expressed by non-expert ‘novices’ (DiSessa, 1993; McCloskey, 1984; Smith, DiSessa, and Roschelle, 1993/1994); and, on the other hand, the many trends in contemporary religious interpretations which express diverse ideological tendencies within religious culture including, but not limited to, ‘traditional,’ ‘moderate,’ ‘liberal,’ and ‘progressive’ orientations. This distinction has important implications for peace and civic education. For example, minority or marginalized students and majority teachers may be assumed to come to the classroom with diverse interpretive frames which allow for quite different negotiations of what counts as knowledge. It is arguable that various religious positions are represented among these participants and that in fact many are “dwelling between labels”. This is where our claims might have an important contribution, namely, the fissure between ‘traditional’ religious epistemologies in the context of rather ‘hard’ secular classroom discourse may be the most urgent to address in contemporary educational practice. Although France might provide the general case par excellence for this contradiction, we suggest that the place of ‘traditional’ religious epistemologies might be more often than not ridiculed and rejected in different manifestations of secular education as well.

The incommensurability of ‘traditional’ religious epistemologies and secular discourse is situated in a historic construction of what counts as legitimate knowledge that has its roots in the era of Enlightenment (Mignolo, 2009). Because the overlap with secular ‘scientific’ knowledge systems appears to be higher, in public debates there is a tendency to engage more interlocutors who represent ‘progressive’ or ‘reform’ strands of religious hermeneutics (AlSayyad and Castells, 2002; Inglehart, 2007). The discursive erasure of ‘traditional’ religious epistemologies from the public sphere is philosophically and ethically contested, yet a social fact. We posit that, linked to the ongoing process of re-religionization and re-traditionalization (Hagan and Ebaugh, 2003; Peri, 2012), it is especially the incommensurable positions encountered in everyday classroom discourse and practice that are most important to explore and understand today. We hypothesize that in studying how incommensurable epistemologies encounter each other, several possibilities exist: erasure (as in the public sphere), cultural relativism—regarding these as autochthonous and insular entities in their own right—and, what Mignolo (2003) has called ‘plurotopic hermeneutics’, namely, to consider seriously the locus of our epistemologies (e.g. the privileges we enjoy or the exclusions others suffer) and their pragmatic consequences.

We therefore suggest that, as contemporary cultures and epistemologies begin to mingle and translation between them becomes inevitable (Isin, 2012), what is ideally required in classrooms is “an interactive concept of knowledge and understanding that reflects on the very process of constructing (e.g. putting in order) that portion of the world to be known” (Mignolo, 2003: p.15). The emphasis on the negotiation of what counts as legitimate knowledge is not new and has partially been the sphere of activity of several educational approaches suggested so far. In her discussion of secularism and religion in education, Davies (2014) suggests that a key task of a secular education is a critical exploration of different religions, thus the negotiation of different manifestations of religious epistemologies is important for promoting inclusion. Focusing on the civic and religious entanglement is just more inclusive for it allows for multiple memberships to intersect, memberships which belong at once to multiple sites and chronologies. The idea of how knowledge is negotiated or how one judges the quality of knowledge is affected by how one relates with other people, such as teachers, experts, and peers; the degree of perceived closeness between people (social relationships), as well as the degree of perceived status differentiation among people (class, minoritization). The settings in which identities, belonging, and dominant–non-dominant relations are being negotiated thus have implications for the voicing of epistemological positions and vice versa. Hence, in the classroom various religious and secular epistemologies and identities are in constant negotiation, and due to their very nature, it is not argumentative force that can decide the outcome of this epistemic conflict. How, then, do students and teachers negotiate this conflict in the classroom?

Negotiations between the civic and the religious in the classroom

Schools and classrooms are social and political spaces in which knowledge, meanings, and identities are discursively shaped and in which collective identities are continuously negotiated (Pinson, 2007). The negotiation of religious and cultural identities, in particular, is an important challenge, especially for students belonging in minority, marginalized or victimized communities. The association of religious and cultural identities only with dangerous and exclusivist stances, for example, raises questions whether this is fair and productive or whether it impoverishes education by excluding the rich material of religious and cultural ideas that are conducive to radical societal change (Papastephanou, 2008). Religious and cultural values are vital forces and resources, especially for minority, marginalized or victimized communities, because often these values are considered the ‘glue’ of the community in times in which its survival may be at stake. Rejecting these values and their particular identities in public participation threatens the group’s own self-determination and civic engagement.

Within the wider cultural context, the development of civic engagement (identity) among youths from non-dominant groups—in relation to their religious and cultural values—poses an ongoing challenge to societal institutions in many western societies(Banks, 2008; Grillo, 2007; Meer and Modood, 2009).This challenge is further exacerbated when the context concerns a conflict-affected society in which religion is deemed to play a major role in the conflict (e.g. Northern Ireland). This challenge is usually addressed in two ways. On the one hand, and in more encompassing terms, religion is believed to serve stability, but religious cultivation is usually allocated to the communal ethos; on the other hand, in more dismissive approaches, religion is considered a regime blocking multiculturalism and the prospects of peace and reconciliation (Papastephanou, 2008; Zembylas and Loukaidis, 2016). For example, it might be argued that Catholic and Protestant schools in Northern Ireland follow the first approach, while integrated schools are keener to follow the latter approach (McGlynn, Zembylas and Bekerman, 2013).

However, there is a growing recognition among scholars that religion is an important determinant of civic engagement (Gibson, 2008). The ongoing public debates in many Western societies about the resurgence of the religious in the public sphere indicates that, challenged with an increasingly heterogeneous citizenry, secular societies have to come to terms with the rights and claims for the public expression of beliefs and practices of religio-cultural minorities, and with the ongoing definition of citizenship and shared civic identities of diverse citizens in these countries. In conflict-affected societies, especially those in which religion is prominent in the public sphere, the issue is often set in more pragmatic terms: religion cannot be simply put aside, so there is constantly an urgency to find productive ways of engaging with religion to help promote peace.

Generally speaking, the (theoretical) ‘solution’ offered to this challenge by educators and scholars so far is a call for return to various forms of cosmopolitanism (Banks, 2008; Beck, 2009; Nussbaum, 2002). The return to cosmopolitanism could be interpreted as working if not against at least in parallel to culturally sensitive approaches offered in education such as culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and funds of knowledge approach (Moll et al., 1992). Davies’ (2014) notion of ‘dynamic secularism’ is positioned along similar lines in that it accepts that people need religion, yet religion is not elevated above any other ethical system, political movement or cultural grouping. Dynamic secularism for schooling, suggests Davies, means avoiding religious segregation, discouraging a narrow faith-based curriculum, and teaching young people skills of critique of all worldviews, including religious ones. Not accepting other faiths as legitimate constitutes a violation of human rights and freedoms. There is no discrimination on the grounds of religion in citizenship rights or duties, therefore the civic can actually be used to challenge any form of exclusion or exclusivism.

Although not fully satisfactory, the aforementioned ‘solutions’ highlight an important idea: to the apparent complexity of the issue, the challenge is deeply political, for it is the political more than the cultural that counts in all that relates to ideals about equity and social justice in societies. Thus, we concur with Papastephanou (2008) that the political dimension of citizenship demands more than just ‘learning more’ about equity and social justice. Rather the civic requires students to consider alternative visions of society that may not be catered for in some views of citizenship (e.g. liberal). The inclusion of the religious to the civic has the power to widen our educational considerations regarding the cultural and show a path towards alleviating the cultural essentialist perspectives which stand in the way of culturally sensitive educational approaches.

Throughout modern history, citizenship—an elusive, contested, and multifaceted concept (Pinson, 2007)—has been used to describe a variety of phenomena related to legal status, communal membership, and political identity. Civic identities are currently understood as important means towards social cohesion in ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse societies. As such, they are central to the democratic functioning of such societies (McLaughlin, 1992; Ong, 1996; Phillips, 2010). Of late, the formal conceptualization of citizenship as based on a rights model has been transformed to denote substantive active dimensions in the construction of identities oriented toward the state as a political unit and/or towards transnational or cosmopolitan collectivities (Delanty, 1997).

In contemporary western societies civic identities are contested and their definition and societal acceptance is tied to ongoing social and political struggles over equality and difference (Turner, 2007; Yuval-Davis, 1999). The boundaries of civic identities then serve as constant sites for social and political struggles between dominant and non-dominant groups in the public sphere and its institutions. Empirical studies from a range of countries indicate that in all that relates to the ongoing exclusion of some groups (e.g. minorities) from the public sphere and their alienation from embracing identities as citizens, it is the adoption of civic identities that present the central problem which needs to be addressed (Halperin and Bar-Tal, 2006).These studies generally show that the formation of civic identities of minority youths whose coexisting identities have been ‘rejected’ appear to be troubled (Heitmeyer and Anhut, 2008). Alternate and intertwining social identities include religious identity, ethnic background, nationality (Yuval-Davis, 1999), cultural-civilizational heritage, and political orientation. These intertwined identities may either align neatly, or may, in some combinations, appear to exclude each other.

The negotiations between the civic and the religious, then, at the micro-level of the classroom cannot be disassociated from the macro-level of the society and the treatment of religious identities in the societal level. For example, banning religious expression in schools (e.g. France) or promoting a dominant religious expression (e.g. Turkey) can create a backlash as a result of excluding particular minorities or groups who might be alienated from embracing civic identities. The challenge for education in general and for peace and civic education in particular is to find ways to bring young people who may embrace different epistemologies (including religious ones) together, without accentuating these differences or foreclosing certain manifestations of identities.

Political implications

The aforementioned challenges force us to re-focus our attention not just on the cultural but on the intersection of civic and religio-cultural identities and their political implications. This is why we find the concept of ‘hegemony’ helpful (Gramsci, 1971; Lears, 1985; Lemish, 2010; Mouffe, 1988; Sayer, 1994) in discussing how the master narratives of citizenship relate to the religious. Hegemonic formations represent ensembles of relatively stable social forms and relations; they are the socially articulated result of the reciprocal reaction of different social groups to each other (Mouffe, 1988). The master narratives in many societies today have been shown to be built on and synthesize accumulating hegemonic discourses about the civilizational, cultural, religious, ethnic, and political heritage of the dominant groups (Asad, 2003; Mignolo, 1995/2003). While hegemony is never conclusively established and is continually contested (Gramsci, 1971), analyses of discourse and institutional practices indicate that the hegemonic formations momentarily established in many Western societies erase the ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity of their citizens and subsume the heterogeneous citizenries and their various world views to the hegemonic narratives.

The hegemonic formation of citizenship and related concepts (democracy, rationality, liberalism, secularism) engenders a civilizational narrative, in which these concepts are portrayed in essentialist terms. For example, the vague notion of ‘Western values’ is a fictitious amalgam, a dominant hegemonic formation that entails an otherizing of ‘different’ cultures (Salvatore, 2006). Based on a view of the inherited historical conflicts with Islam, for example—especially in societies in which religion may contribute to a conflict (e.g. Israel–Palestine)— ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ and ‘Islamic civilization’ are presented as essentialized and opposed entities whose traits are conferred to their populations (Featherstone, 2009; Goody, 2006), and the impossibility of value consensus between these entities is one of its core claims (Huntington, 1996). By extension, it is arguable that this formation ascribes essentialized political values onto those entities: democratic values onto those categorized to be Western and Judeo-Christian, and fundamentalist values onto those categorized as Muslim (Bekerman and Neuman, 2001).

A form of secular narrative in which the ‘West’ is portrayed as heir of Enlightenment and, as such, rationalist and progressive (Asad, 2003) represents a major hegemonic formation of citizenship in many European countries today as opposed to ‘traditional’ religious values that might be considered pre-modern and backward. Media discourses and public debates struggle with a modern and secular self-understanding that needs to be guarded against the threat of a backlash into the religious. The hierarchical construction of the religious and the secular as linear progression in historical time (Mignolo, 1995/2003) is contrasted by both historical and philosophical views on secular societies, which cannot attest to a negation of the religious in contemporary society (Fischer et al., 2012). In contrast, the tacit endurance of religious ideas, and hence the intertwining of religion and democracy in Western societies, has been amply documented (Asad, 2003; Özyrürek, 2005). The transformation of former theological concepts into democratic social and political concepts are at the center of this political-theological intertwining ( Fischer et al., 2012; Schmidt, 1988). Accordingly, empirical studies show that in different national settings, the segregation of religion and state is executed to different degrees (e.g. French laïcité , Germany as ‘in-between-state’) (Amir-Moazami, 2005). This idea is ‘translated’ into different models of religious education in European countries, ranging from confessional religious instruction, no religious instruction, to non-confessional or neutral religious instruction (Grimmit, 1994, 2000).

Finally, though citizenship is seen as separate from nationality or ethnicity, in the master narrative of citizenship as ethnicity, citizenship is implicitly linked to a racializing discourse (jus sanguinis), which assigns people to memberships in different groups based on their discordance from the blood of their parents (Aktürk, 2011). The ethnic master narrative sees an ethnic nation sharing a common descent (blood ties, jus sanguinis), and it is the ethnic nation, not the citizenry, which shapes the symbols, laws and policies of the state. This narrative distinguishes strongly between members of the ethnic nation and non-members. Non-members of the ethnic nation are regarded as less desirable and as a serious threat to the survival and integrity of the ethnic nation. This threat is phrased in terms of “biological dilution, demographic swamping, cultural downgrading, security danger, subversion, and political instability” (Smooha, 2002: 478). This perceived threat may additionally be seen as stemming from the ethnic affiliation of the ‘other’ group with an external entity (a country, a homeland or a population) which is considered as enemy or ‘unfriendly agent’ (Smooha, 2002), such as the affiliation with ‘Islamic civilization/culture’.

All in all, contemporary narratives of citizenship are built on different variations of intersecting and accumulating discourses of religion, ethnicity, culture, civilization, and political orientation. It follows, then, that the religious may best be understood as a public contestation of hitherto implicit, yet manifest, religious guiding principles around which many societies and their institutions were organized. Following this logic, secular policies or policies that attempt to minimize or exclude the importance of religious and cultural affiliations most commonly end up discriminating against groups who wish to express their religious beliefs and ideals, and miss an important opportunity to enrich education with religious and cultural ideas that are conducive to radical societal change. As such, these ideas are rich spheres of ideational stuff which allow us to move across lines when considering the entanglement of peace, religious, citizenship and peace education. In the last part of our article, we engage with how religious ideas may be productively included in schools and educational systems in ways that counteract the prospects of conflict.

Educational implications

As the concern of peace and civic education is shifting away from either-or questions—that is, for example, whether it is religious minorities that have to change to ‘adapt’ to a secular society (e.g. France) or societal institutions; whether the process towards societal integration of a diverse population into one civic body works via assimilation of the minority or a perceived loss of ‘cultural identity’ of dominant society; whether religious ideas have a place in school curricula or not—we need to develop educational research, policies and practices that are attentive to the complexities that might enhance or constrain the transformation of students’ emerging civic/religious/cultural identities. Thus, we need research which explores the conditions provided for youths from dominant and non-dominant groups to navigate these identities, and how under these conditions students are able to construct ‘transversal’ (Yuval-Davis, 1999) identities as both minorities and as citizens of their countries. Attention needs to be paid to how the negotiation of civic identities and religio-cultural identities and epistemologies plays out in the everyday practices of schools and classrooms.

More specifically, in educational contexts in which diverse or conflicting cultural, religious, and secular paradigms compete for hegemony, we need to uncover how youths’ religious epistemologies are represented in the discursive space of the classroom. It is important that we explore the hegemonic formations of religious and secular civilizational paradigms and practices in the classroom, as well as the discursive construction of religious epistemologies by peers and teachers. When focusing on the prism of religious epistemologies, we need to explore how minority and majority students, and their teachers, negotiate what counts as knowledge in this contested space. How is authority of knowledge invoked, negotiated, and argued for? How do negotiation, construction, and contestation of knowledge happen? Is there space for the voice of minority youths whose views do not align with the hegemonic narrative? If yes, which conditions, understandings, and classroom practices characterize these classrooms? If not, what appears to hinder the development of a dialogic space and consequently endangers peace prospects at the micro- or the macro-societal level?

We also need to ask how do religious minority students interpret the negotiation of epistemological authority and how do they connect this to their identities as citizens of the countries they live in? Or how do they imagine their civic identities in a country that may presently be troubled by conflict and division? How do students perceive the construction of an equal and open dialogic space in their classrooms so that peace-building can be promoted? How do students relate their experiences about the (non-)validity of their religious epistemologies to their status as citizens of the country?

The above is a call to widen our present discussion on the need to sensitize teachers, curriculum, and educational practice to include an appreciation of the civic and the religious/cultural and the epistemologies that encompass them all in educational work, especially that aiming at supporting peace and reconciliation. The civic covers wide spectrums of knowledge and activity. It is in a sense trans-disciplinary and it is also fundamentally political, thus not allowing (hopefully) the denial of the political in education. The civic as analyzed above is intimately related to the religious, thus allowing for the drawing of new boundaries. ‘Modern’ and ‘traditional’ are now positioned in a common ground relaxing imagined hierarchies. And, if this is indeed so, the emphasis on the civic and the religious might help in some small way to prevent cultural essentialisation—culturally, we are all not only civic/communal but also religious. We all play on a common stage which needs to be critically approached. We need not just understand the cultural backyard of the ‘other’ but ours as well.

The acknowledgement of the entanglement between the civic and the religious, among other affiliations, subverts cultural essentialism and ‘us/them’ monological divides in education (Bekerman and Zembylas, 2012). Therefore, it seems to us that when approaches in education do not take seriously into consideration the reality of religious epistemologies, they are lacking. Billig (1995) has fittingly pointed to the flattened topography of identity theorizing shaped by the fact that nationalism is overlooked by identity theoreticians and made, by default, functionally equivalent to other types of identity. Similarly, one could argue that the oversight of religious epistemologies in the development of students’ civic identities is detrimental to educational theory and policy in general, and more so to that which is concerned with peace and civic educational interventions. The central question we ask following this analysis is: Can students’ civic identities be developed without fearing that religious epistemologies might get over- or under-exposure?

The great danger here is confusing ‘reality’ with that which points at the Other as its problem, thus usually failing to offer a solution because of remaining attached to a monological perspective. The question is clearly how to make us aware that we all partake in the constitution of the problem and thus become constitutive of its solution; that is to say, how to help us realize the dialogical nature of that which is presented as monological. From our perspective, a relevant path implies a radical change of the educators, and the educational activity. The individual mind can no longer be the goal of these activities, as is the case for an education aware of cultural context, namely the minds of the ‘other’ individuals that conform to these contexts (parents, teachers, etc.). Instead, we ought to consider and analyze the interactional practices and strategies through which all involved in the contextual activities allow the Other to make its appearance. This analysis, then, ought not to ignore who in our societal context are exploited. Who are powerful and who powerless? Which identities carry symbolic public power and which are rendered in the private realm—with what consequences?

In this sense, religious epistemologies are part and parcel of the development of civic identities and should not form an optional element, but instead a structural and necessary element of all peace and civic education. A politically self-reflective peace and civic education may undo many prejudices about religious epistemologies, usually presented as dangerous and extremist. As Papastephanou (2008) points out,

Visions can become learning material without being presented, necessarily or exclusively, as descriptive, propositional contents raising only validity claims, but rather as material of congruence or various belief systems. And they can be debated on grounds of the desirability of the ethical life they envision and can contribute to the formation of guiding, regulative ideals, both religious and secular. (p.135)

Acknowledging religious epistemologies would in fact respect the secularism of the state while enabling recognition about religions and critical thinking (Davies, 2014). Religious And civic education can work together well if an adequate pedagogical approach on the religious and the civic is combined with a political view in which critical questions about power relations and their consequences on everyday practices could be an integral part of the public realm. From a societal as well as a pedagogical point of view, this politicized view of the religious and the civic can be a step in the right direction as it gives the necessary weight to all cultures and beliefs, and it relieves the individual from the burden of being always imprisoned by essentialist identities.

Conclusion

This paper has attempted to grapple with the role of schools and educational systems in relation to the religious and the civic. As shown, the entanglement of the religious and the civic and its implications for education are less dependent upon essentialist ideals and norms, and more dependent upon those characteristics and features that emerge when students are viewed as individuals and citizens whose identities are plural, intersecting and in constant formations. Our concluding remarks, then, reiterate the argument for a more inclusive and political analysis of the civic and the religious in peace and civic education. The danger is not religious or other identities in themselves, but rather that certain identities in particular socio-political conflictual contexts are rendered either hegemonic or completely irrelevant and are eclipsed from public life.

We need to make our analysis more inclusive. We need to add to the traditional attempt to recognize and legitimate the others’ cultural practice the analysis of our own cultural milieu while focusing on the civic/political and its immediate outcomes as these shape our present lives (in the polis). Doing so will enable us to open a better dialogue in which we all become suspects but as well possible collaborators not in defending an inexistent fixed culture but instead in the work of creating a better present. It is our contention that by importing new forms of life, we can expand and multiply the perspectives from which a shared political imaginary can be formed and interpreted, beyond liberal treatments of religion. So, we argue the development of students’ civic identities is grounded in processes that require all of us to negotiate with the perspectives of ‘others’ and integrate such perspectives into our actions and reflections.