Teachers’ constructions of mutual respect and tolerance through the lens of religious education: fundamental British values – propaganda or longstanding aims of RE?

Abstract: This study stems from our interest in policy requirement from the Department for Education in England that instructs all teachers to promote a set of fundamental British values, including mutual respect and tolerance for people of different faiths and beliefs. Working from a social constructionist epistemological standpoint, the first author collected data to explore how seven Religious Education (RE) practitioners who work in three contrasting secondary schools in England construct mutual respect and tolerance. Data analysis used critical discursive psychology, a form of discourse analysis, to facilitate nuanced and critical insights. Analysis reveals that the teachers are not critical of mutual respect and tolerance in terms of their status as FBV. Instead, they re-located tolerance and mutual respect as part of the RE curriculum area and emphasised how these values cohered with their own personal values. Overall, teachers construct tolerance as a minimalistic form of acceptance, with mutual respect positioned as a preferable concept. This has implications firstly for teachers’ comfort with disagreement, secondly for children and young people’s responses to diversity and thirdly for limiting the educational potential of RE as a vehicle for exploring different faiths and beliefs. Plain Language Summary: This study focuses on mutual respect and tolerance, two of a set of fundamental British values (FBV), which all teachers in England are instructed to promote, as set out in the Teachers’ Standards and subsequent policy guidance. This research addresses a gap by critically exploring the meaning of two of the concepts within the statement of FBV in detail, building on and extending prior research which has tended to focus on either the nationalistic or securitising elements of the requirement. We focused on how RE teachers construct mutual respect and tolerance because we were interested in how practitioners, who may see the promotion of these values as coherent with the aims of RE, interpret and navigate their inclusion within educational policies which originate in counter-terrorism. The study shows how, by avoiding a reliance on formulaic definitions or narrow understandings of mutual respect and tolerance, educational policy makers and practitioners might be better able to support young people to engage with the complexity of encounters with diverse faiths and beliefs in contemporary society. The findings from the research also encourage RE practitioners to consider how they might re-claim mutual respect and tolerance as part of the longstanding aims of RE, rather than seeing their promotion as an obligatory political requirement.