Students' understandings of religious identities and relations: issues of social cohesion and citizenship

The focus in this article is on issues of social cohesion and citizenship as they relate to students' understandings of religion and religious identity. The article draws on data gathered from a study conducted at a highly diverse English comprehensive school and is set amid broader anxieties about religion, community disharmony and national identity in the United Kingdom. The high levels of religious diversity at the school were seen as supporting social cohesion - enabled in this context through students' understandings of religion and religious identities as socially contingent and supportive of a sense of agency. These understandings are aligned with a sophisticated and inclusive citizenship - one that is productive of democratic alliances and political agency and necessary in disrupting the narrow and problematic understandings of religion that can lead to social disharmony and conflict.

Engaging the ‘maximal’ intentions of the citizenship curriculum: one teacher’s story

Exploring how the transformative intentions within the mandated citizenship curriculum framework for English schools demand a particular kind of citizenship teacher – one who ‘acts against the grain’ of the inequities and injustices of the social world – this paper presents Mr C's story. Mr C is a secondary teacher at an Upper School located north of London. The paper considers the significance of his philosophies and knowledge in enabling practice aimed at developing students' socially inclusive but critical understandings of diversity and difference. Mr C's well‐defined personal philosophies about justice and the ‘common good’ and his capacity to translate these philosophies into practice are presented as central to mobilising the transformative or ‘maximal’ intentions of the citizenship curriculum. In highlighting the complexities and sophistication in Mr C's approach, however, the issues presented in this paper further strengthen the critique regarding the curriculum's depoliticised approach. While Mr C draws on the curriculum as a political device to support equity goals, it cannot be assumed that citizenship teachers more generally will have the requisite philosophies and knowledge necessary to do so.