This study asks the question 'How does religion education racialise its subjects'. It examines discursive cultural practices, including pedagogical practices, through the lens of whiteness as a way of understanding how teaching and learning about a religious tradition other than white Christianity might act to reproduce white race dominance in secondary religious education curricula in the Australian context. The study draws on a number of key theoretical insights from the work of the French post structuralist Jacques Derrida including his critique of the metaphysics of presence, his reply in 'difference', and his general 'strategy' of deconstruction. The study argues that 'whiteness', as a racialised position of institutional power and privilege exists as an absent presence in religion education curricula and that its dominance and privilege is reproduced through its (regulated) invisibility. This argument is illustrated through an examination of some of the literature that informs the teaching and learning of religion education in schools, an examination of the history of public religion education in South Australia, and principally through an examination of the history of discursive cultural practices that occurred during the teaching of a unit of work on Buddhism under the SACE Stage 1 'Studies in Religion' Extended Subject Framework within four religion education classrooms in metropolitan Adelaide. The study is a multi-sited micro-ethnography in which some of the discursive cultural practices of white race dominance that circulate throughout broader white Australian society are examined across and within the specificities of four different religion education sites. A number of methodological considerations are involved in a study such as this. The problems of race identification between a researcher and participants, power differentials between a researcher and participants, particularly when many of those participants are school children, and the issue of representation is discussed. Written portraits of each of the class sites are given as a way of signalling the heterogeneity of the cultural field in which religion education occurs. A selection of narratives from teachers and students, and some of the storylines that circulated throughout each of the classrooms, is examined for the ways in which the invisibility of whiteness acts to limit and enable the ways in which teachers and students are able to engage with Buddhism and Buddhists as the object of their study. The study highlights that in spite of good intentions and good will, religion educators and students of religion are implicated in the maintenance of white race privilege through practices that are often re-articulations of a colonial past that continues to structure the world through strict binaries of opposition. The study argues that there is a need for religion educators to begin to 'see' the invisibility of whiteness in religion education. Following Miedema and Biesta I argue for the need for religion educators to ???take responsibility for an otherness that can never become fully present???, that can never be fully known and with whom dialogue can only ever be incomplete. I suggest that what is required for a more socially just religion education curriculum and more socially just religion practices is a willingness on the part of religion educators to open ourselves to the ???unforeseeable in-coming of the other??? (Miedema & Biesta). / Thesis (PhDEducation)--University of South Australia, 2005
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/284320 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Kameniar, Barbara |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | copyright under review |
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