Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Childhood: Experiences of Worship in School (Studies in Childhood and Youth) 3031398599, 9783031398599

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STUDIES IN CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Childhood Experiences of Worship in School Rachael Shillitoe

Studies in Childhood and Youth Series Editors

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh University of Bristol Bristol, UK Nigel Patrick Thomas University of Central Lancashire Preston, UK Spyros Spyrou European University Cyprus Nicosia, Cyprus Anandini Dar School of Liberal Studies BML Munjal University Sidhrawali, India

This well-established series embraces global and multi-disciplinary scholarship on childhood and youth as social, historical, cultural and material phenomena. With the rapid expansion of childhood and youth studies in recent decades, the series encourages diverse and emerging theoretical and methodological approaches. We welcome proposals which explore the diversities and complexities of children’s and young people’s lives and which address gaps in the current literature relating to childhoods and youth in space, place and time. We are particularly keen to encourage writing that advances theory or that engages with contemporary global challenges. Studies in Childhood and Youth will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of areas, including Childhood Studies, Youth Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Politics, Psychology, Education, Health, Social Work and Social Policy.

Rachael Shillitoe

Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Childhood Experiences of Worship in School

Rachael Shillitoe University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK

ISSN 2731-6467     ISSN 2731-6475 (electronic) Studies in Childhood and Youth ISBN 978-3-031-39859-9    ISBN 978-3-031-39860-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39860-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of a number of individuals. First and foremost, I would like to thank the teachers and children at all the schools participating in this study. Although I cannot mention by name, I would like to thank all of them for making this research possible and for being so welcoming and accommodating of my study. I would also like to thank my PhD supervisors, Stephen Parker, Anna Strhan and Richard Woolley, for all their guidance and support throughout my PhD and their generous feedback and detailed advice, which provided important insights to shape the direction of my research. Special thanks go to Anna Strhan for her ongoing mentorship and friendship throughout my PhD and as an early career academic. I am indebted to Anna for helping me to situate my research in the sociology of religion and her experience as an ethnographer proved to be a great source of influence and inspiration. I am also grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding both this study and a subsequent project, which allowed me the time to write this book. I would like to thank my colleagues and friends at the Universities of Worcester, Kent, York and Birmingham as well as those I have met through the British Sociological Association, Study of Religion Group (Socrel). In particular to Celine Benoit, Caroline Starkey, Josh Bullock, Dawn Llewelyn, Joanna Malone, Rob Barward-Symmonds, Abby Day, Lois Lee, Will Mason-Wilkes, Julian Stern, James Riley, Natalia Zarzeczna, Stephen Jones and Rebecca Catto. Their friendship, encouragement and reviews of my work have been incredibly helpful. Special thanks to Linda Braus and v

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all the team at Palgrave Macmillan for their ongoing support and help in preparing this manuscript. I am also grateful for the opportunity to present at a number of conferences both in the UK and overseas, and the valuable conversations and feedback I have received from such presentations. Parts of this book have been published in different forms elsewhere, although revised here. Sections of Chap. 3 appears as Shillitoe, R. and Strhan, A. (2020) ‘Just leave it blank’ non-religious children and their negotiation of prayer in school. Religion, 50 (4), pp.  615–635. An earlier version of Chap. 5 appears in ‘Doing Good: Cultivating Children’s Ethical Sensibilities in School Assemblies’, in Where is the Good in the World, ed. David Henig, Anna Strhan and Joel Robbins, 2022 (Oxford, Berghan Books), pp. 601–666. Portions of the introduction, Chaps. 3 and 6 appeared in ‘Rethinking Religion and Non-religion in Collective Worship’, in Nonreligion in Late Modern Societies: Institutional and Legal Perspectives, ed. Anne-Laure Zwilling and Helge Årsheim, 2022 (Springer, Cham.), pp. 93–108. My friends have also been incredibly supportive throughout: special thanks to Hollie McEvoy, Ruth Hubbard, Helen Stevens, Rachel Hope, Edith Richardson and Amy Newton. Their friendship and encouragement have been a great source of support and laughter. Finally, I would like to thank my family: Martin, Julia, Ben, Bob, Jen and Hannah Shillitoe and my wonderful nieces and nephews: Maddie, Martha, Josh, Edward and Emily. They have continually supported me over the years and I dedicate this book to each of you.

Contents

1 Introduction: The Contested Nature of Collective Worship  1 2 Adult  Anxieties and Generational Blind Spots: Re-centring Childhood in the Sociology of Religion 47 3 On  Concepts and Agency: Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Collective Worship 79 4 The  School Family: Rituals of Solidarity, Belonging and Cooperation111 5 ‘Doing  Good’: Children’s Ethical Formation Through the Everyday143 6 On  Silence, Candles, Jelly Timers and Enya: Creating Sacred Spaces in Collective Worship181 7 Conclusion221 Bibliography229 Index259

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Contested Nature of Collective Worship

In July 2019, two parents from Oxford took a Church of England multi-­ academy trust to court and launched a High Court Case over the way in which collective worship was carried out in their children’s school (BBC, 2019). Unhappy with the assemblies currently provided, which were said to focus on biblical teaching, and re-enactments of the Bible with children being forced to pray, the parents withdrew their children from school assemblies but argued that children who were withdrawn should be provided with a prayer free, secular and meaningful alternative to the school assembly (Guardian, 2019). However, the case never reached the High Court as the multi-academy trust conceded and agreed to meet all the parents’ requests to provide children who are withdrawn with an inclusive alternative assembly and to notify all parents of this provision (Humanists UK, 2019). This case and the commentary that surrounded it exemplify the heated and contested debate about collective worship in schools with many organisations, educationalists, teaching bodies, religious groups and politicians all weighing in with differing positions on the matter. Describing collective worship as an infringement on children’s rights, the National Secular Society (NSS) argues that enforcing this requirement in schools ‘causes division and discrimination, as well as opening the door to evangelism and proselytization’ (National Secular Society, not dated). As part of their education campaign, the NSS calls for inclusive secular

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Shillitoe, Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Childhood, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39860-5_1

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assemblies and provides parents and visitors to the site with an abundance of material on the matter, including template campaign letters to their local Member of Parliament. Humanists UK also calls for the withdrawal of collective worship in schools and supports parents who are opposed to this provision through their campaigns and online resources (Humanists UK, not dated). In an article for The Guardian, Andrew Copson, the Chief Executive for Humanists UK, argued that collective worship should be replaced with assemblies that promote children’s moral and social development. Copson drew on provocative and dramatic stories of children being left traumatised after collective worship, with some being told that their participation in collective worship meant that they were Christian ‘whether they liked it or not’ (Guardian, 2011). On Humanists UK’s website, the organisation provides guidance for parents whose children have been ‘victims of the existing law’ (Humanists UK, not dated). Such language and stories are not unique or challenging to find when researching public opinion on collective worship. Concerns about the divisive nature of worship in schools, fears over indoctrination and questions about the appropriateness of such a legal requirement in an increasingly plural and diverse society can be easily seen throughout such commentary (see, e.g. Huffington Post, 2014; BBC, 2015a; Independent, 2015). The discourses found within such debates are revealing about both the role of religion in public life and ideas of how children should encounter and engage with religion and belief. These are often regarded with ambivalence and, at times, a cause of heightened public concern. Such narratives often situate the child in a vulnerable, passive position, at constant risk of indoctrination, while also raising the question of what place religion does and should have in the public sphere, in institutions such as schools. This, however, is not a new concern. The relationship between religion and education has been a contentious issue as early as the nineteenth century, with the religious education clauses of the 1944 and 1988 Education Acts (EA), in particular, causing decades of controversy and debate (Cruickshank, 1963; Murphy, 1968; Hull, 1975; The Religious Education (RE) Council of England and Wales, 1996; Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), 2001, pp. 15–17; Charter & Erricker, 2012). The controversy regarding collective worship, which is a legal requirement in all state-funded schools in England and Wales, mostly stems from the implicitly Christian character of the clauses and the vague and ill-defined nature of the provision. As collective worship has never been formally defined in the Education Acts of 1944, 1988 and the School Standards and

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Framework Act 1998, it has never been clear as to what collective worship in schools is or is not.1 With declining church attendance and the rapid rise of the ‘nones’, ‘no religion’ has not only replaced Christianity as the new cultural majority,2 but as Woodhead (2016) claims, it has also become the new norm. Both the British Social Attitudes Surveys and the National Census have tracked the continued rise of nones in Britain with 37.2% of the population describing themselves as having ‘no religion’ in the 2021 Census.3 In this way, non-religious ways of making sense of life and rituals such as non-­ religious funerals and proms have become normal, whereas it is religious rituals which now have to be justified. Notwithstanding, research in the field of non-religion and secularity is also demonstrating that it is the growth of those growing up as non-religious and young people identifying as nones that is fuelling this trend with young people the least likely to identify as religious (Woodhead, 2016, 2017; Strhan & Shillitoe, 2019; Voas & Bruce, 2019; Shillitoe & Strhan, 2020). In this context, how should a legal mandate to worship in schools be approached and, quite simply, can such a requirement even be justified in light of the changing religious and non-religious landscape? What place does compulsory worship have in an increasingly diverse and plural society, and what does this mean for our understanding of the interrelations between religion, the secular and education more broadly? Although not new questions, the issues that they raise are central to the wider interrelations of childhood, religion and secularity in modernity. However, despite the prevalence and longstanding nature of the collective worship debate, children’s opinions and perspectives have very rarely been considered. Children’s experiences have long been marginalised in such debates, as well as in the study of religion more broadly. The knowledge we have about collective worship is 1  Although not policy, it should be noted that there has been a considerable amount of discourse among religious educationalists on the nature and form of collective worship, which can be found in Religion in Education (1934–1961), Learning for Living (1961–1978) and British Journal of Religious Education (1978–current). 2  YouGov surveys, design by Woodhead, also document the rise of no religion. 41% of the population described themselves as having no religion in 2013 and 46% describing themselves in this way in 2016. (see Woodhead, 2016). 3  The 2001 Census reported 15% of the population as having ‘no religion’, the 2011 Census reported an increase of 10%, with 25% of the population reported as having no religion and the 2021 Census reported a further rise with 37.2% of the population identifying as non-religious.

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mostly formed and generated by adults, and as such reflects adult’s concerns, questions and anxieties rather than those of children. In the same way that feminist writers such as Skeggs (1994), Aune (2015), Llewellyn (2015) and Starkey (2019) argue that a distorted representation of social reality emerges if the lives and voices of women are hidden, I foreground the perspectives and experience of children to enlarge our understanding of collective worship in schools and of religion and non-religion in social life more broadly. Accordingly, this book reveals the everyday lived reality of religion and non-religion in schools and demonstrates that adult-centric anxieties and assumptions do not always reflect the experiences of children. Attending to children’s agency, I uncover children’s meaning-making during collective worship and how they manage and negotiate the religious and non-religious in everyday school life. This book aims to provide a deeper understanding of the constructions and experiences of religion and spirituality in primary schools as mediated through the act of collective worship. Building on Conroy et al.’s (2013) focus on ‘the inscape of RE’, I focus on the ‘inscape’ of collective worship. I investigate the nature of collective worship in schools and how it is experienced and understood by children and focus centrally on the question: How are religion, non-religion and spirituality mediated by acts of collective worship in schools, and how is this experienced and understood by five to eleven-year-olds? Located primarily in the sociology of religion and childhood studies, in conversation with debates in education studies and anthropology, I analyse how the meanings of collective worship for adults shape particular understandings of religion and its practice amongst pupils. To gain insight into the everyday lived realities of collective worship, I adopted a multi-­ sited ethnographic approach across three primary schools in the South West of England and explored how children encounter and experience the worship constructed for them. I spent a term in each school during which I carried out participant observation, undertook interviews with children and staff and facilitated child-centred activities to learn more about children’s experiences of worship in schools and how schools interpret the associated legal requirements. In what follows, this introductory chapter considers both the continuities and discontinuities of collective worship in educational policy and practice from the nineteenth century to the present in order to situate collective worship in its current form against its broader historical context. I begin by covering the historical background of collective worship and

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trace the developments of this legal requirement and, more broadly, the place of religion in education while demonstrating how debates surrounding the place of collective worship in schools relate to the scholarly discussion of the changing religious and secular landscape in Britain. Following on from this, I discuss the ethnographic approach taken and the field sites featured in this study. Finally, I outline the book’s structure and discuss how the approach taken contributes to both the current literature on collective worship and broader debates on religion, education and childhood.

Collective Worship: A History Pre-1944 Education Act As mentioned earlier, the rise of the ‘nones’ and increasing levels of religious diversity provokes the question of the nature and justification of collective worship in contemporary society. However, to think that the criticisms and debates surrounding worship in schools, such as those raised by the NSS or Humanists UK, have only arisen in recent years would be misleading. These debates have longevity as worship in schools has never been uncontested (Cruickshank, 1963; Murphy, 1968). Although collective worship and religious instruction (RI) were only made legal requirements in schools since the 1944 Education Act, worship itself was a common feature of schools leading up to this point (Khan, 1995; Gates, 2007). Hull (1995), in his work on collective worship, highlights that the presence of religious observance, as it was known pre-1944, and was a regular feature in both Board and Church schools and took place in virtually every school across the country. Such occasions were seen as integral to the spiritual and religious ethos of the school community; however, Board Schools would typically restrict their acts of worship to readings from the Bible and the Lord’s Prayer (Hull, 1975, 1995). As such, to understand how collective worship is positioned within the history of education, it is necessary to explore the legislative developments within education prior to this point, as they reveal the context from which the 1944 Act arose. The concerns and anxieties of adults over the place and role of religion in schools have a long history, with religious observances and school worship pre-1944 being a bone of contention for well over a century. Education in England has a long and intertwined history with the churches. As early as the Middle Ages, churches were responsible for establishing

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and running schools across England, and by 1851, the National Society had set up 17,000 schools (Cruickshank, 1963; Gillard, 2002; Wright, 2003; Cheetham, 2004). Cruickshank (1963) and Murphy (1968), in their detailed accounts of religion, state and education, both observed that religion in schools faced problems as early as the nineteenth century, particularly in relation to denominational rivalry and questions over the place of religion in schools. Murphy traced this anxiety as early as the seventeenth century, as Parliament at the time demanded safeguards to be put in place after the ‘Gun Powder plot’ to ensure that Roman Catholic children would be educated as Protestants (1968, pp. 10–11). Murphy (1968) went on to detail denominational disputes between the Anglican, Nonconformist and Roman Catholic churches through to the nineteenth century regarding the state-funding of church schools and the relationship between denominational instruction and secular education. This is not only revealing of the tensions between church-state relations in matters of education but also shows the anxiety adults feel with regard to children’s religious socialisation. As Murphy explains, ‘rivalry between denominations or the simple desire to gain adherents or spread the Gospel were powerful motives for opening schools’ (1968, p. 16). With the 1870 Elementary Education Act, which resulted in the School Boards (later replaced by Local Education Authorities in the Education Act 1902) and publicly funded education, the relationship between the churches and state within education was formalised and began to be proportionately financed by taxation. In this way, the 1870 Elementary Education Act sought to bring church and state together. Through this legislation, ‘Board Schools’ were established to support the current provision of voluntary schools run by the Church of England. As Parker et al. (2016) discuss, it was this legislative development that created a system of denominational (church schools) and non-denominational schools, which in effect continues until today. Although permitted, there was no legal requirement in this act for schools to teach religious instruction (RI) but clauses were included to ensure both the non-denominational nature of RI (the Cowper-Temple clause4) and to uphold the rights of parents to withdraw their child from participation in RI and worship on

4  The Cowper-Temple clause requires that ‘no religious catechism or religious formulary which is distinctive of any particular denomination’ should be taught in board schools (1870 Education Act, section 14).

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denominational grounds (the conscience clause), usually a difficulty in areas where a denominational school was the only one available (Louden, 2004). As Parker, Freathy and Doney describe, the Cowper-Temple clause emerged out of denominational rivalry, which forms ‘the backdrop to … [at this time] some of the urgency to develop secular and ecumenical philosophies of education which would respectively by-pass religious and denominational issues’ (2016, p. 8). Cruickshank notes how the ‘religious wrangling in parliament’ had given the government a taste of what was to come under a ‘state of permissive sectarianism’ (1963, p. 29). The state did not want to interfere with the different denominational approaches to RI and as such, the Cowper-Temple clause was seen as a way of avoiding both interdenominational rivalry and privileging one denomination over another. However, the non-denominational nature of RI in schools was not always seen favourably. Cruikshank notes that the government’s proposal received much criticism and The Guardian referred to the clause as ‘an irrational concession to an irrational prejudice’ (as cited in Cruickshank, 1963, p.  30). Nevertheless, the clause was instated despite the strongly held opinions of denominationalists and both the Cowper-Temple clause and the conscience clause remain in place to this day. 1944 Education Act The 1944 Education Act replaced all other pieces of education legislation and retained the dual system, whereby the state-funded both comprehensive and faith-based schools (Jivraj, 2013). In this piece of legislation, we have two school types: county schools, which are those schools who are solely funded by the state, and voluntary schools, which were previously funded by the church but were now also in receipt of government funding. The 1944 Education Act was the result of negotiations between RA Butler and the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, and aimed at bringing church schools under the state’s control, albeit depending on the level of financial support the church continued to provide (Jivraj, 2013; Gillard, 2002, p. 15). Voluntary controlled schools received all their funding from the state, whereas the churches paid for the majority of maintenance costs in voluntary aided schools and therefore kept control of these schools (Jivraj, 2013). As a result, voluntary aided schools were still able to exercise control over the religious character of their school, particularly

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in relation to RI and teacher recruitment and pupil selection. Although the 1870 Act had initiated the relationship between church and state in relation to educational provision, it was the 1944 Act which formalised this and established the existence of state-funded faith schools. The process leading up to this Act and the establishment of collective worship as a legal requirement is revealing of the motivations and concerns of policy makers in post-war Britain. From the early 1940s and particularly towards the end of the Second World War, there were deep anxieties among politicians and clerics surrounding the spiritual and moral fabric of the country (Freathy & Parker, 2013). They were of the view that the war had damaged the religious and spiritual core of the country, weakening its moral framework. According to Freathy and Parker (2013), the upheaval of the war threatened ‘the Christian foundations of civilisation, freedom and democracy’, and there was grave concern that society could only ‘endure the threat of idolatrous totalitarianism abroad and pre-war trends towards faithlessness at home if the nation’s Christian identity was reinforced and reinvigorated’ (223). As the effects of war were seen as such a threat to the nation’s religious and spiritual sensibilities, policy makers did not want to take any chances when it came to safeguarding the spiritual development of children. Seeing schools as a primary source of religious transmission and socialisation, it was crucial that opportunities for children’s development and nurture were protected. Consequently, despite religious observances already being a customary part of the school day in the majority of schools in the country by this point, the decision was taken to make such an act a legal requirement. Henry Armstrong (1948), a head teacher during this period, noted that the changes in the legal status were important, not in terms of changing practices in schools, rather, protecting schools and children from so-called ‘pagan practices’. Armstrong argued that ‘in view of certain pagan trends which, with increasing insistence, are moulding our culture pattern, it [the Act] remains significant, and must be regarded as an important landmark in the history of religious education in this country’ (1948, p. 47). Thus, collective worship was conceived as a moral project prior to the 1944 Education Act. This sense of collective worship being a part of children’s moral formation is explored in further detail in subsequent chapters, but it is worth noting from the outset the moral orientations that undergird collective

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worship and the motivations of policy makers to form children as moral subjects in particular ways. It is in Section 25 of the 1944 Education Act that we see the first legal provision for collective worship to be part of the school day. Here it states that ‘the school day in every county school and in every voluntary school shall begin with collective worship on the part of all pupils in attendance’ (Education Act, 1944). Although collective worship was now legally enshrined in law, questions over the nature and content of worship and what worship would mean in such contexts were raised (e.g. Loukes, 1965; Hull, 1975). It was clear on the part of the legislators that such a law could not assume that all pupils in England and Wales would share the same Christian faith. For example, during the drafting process, Archbishop William Temple preferred the word ‘religious’ rather than the vaguer term ‘spiritual’ in section 7, which states that schools should contribute to ‘the spiritual, moral, mental and physical development of the community’. However, the word ‘religious’ was not adopted and the word ‘spiritual’ was retained, which, as Cheetham observes, might suggest a recognition that the ‘country was not simply homogenously Christian’ (2004, p. 23). The legislators did not want to do anything to cause further division and accordingly retained the Cowper-Temple clause and provided for the non-­ denominational character of worship in section 27 which would thereby avoid the denominational rivalries of the past (Education Act, 1944; Parker et al., 2016). The act also retained the conscience clause and the parent’s right to withdraw their child from acts of worship. However, other than providing for the right of withdrawal and asserting its non-­ denominational nature, the legislation did not define worship or state what the content of collective worship should be in schools, making the requirement permissive in nature rather than definitive. The terminology within the legislation is also revealing of the nature of worship that was intended in schools. During the drafting process, the term ‘corporate worship’ was used, with the White Paper stating that ‘provision will be made for the school day in all primary and secondary schools, to begin with a corporate act of worship’ (White Paper Educational Reconstruction, 1943, p. 9). It was later decided that worship in schools should not mirror what occurs in a church, and therefore should not take on any characteristics of ‘corporate worship’ (Cheetham, 2004; Jivraj, 2013). As a result, the term ‘collective worship’ was used in all legislation subsequently. However, the content and nature of worship was still not

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described in detail. This did not mean, however, that there was no concern over the nature and character of worship at the time. Earl Stanhope, for example, considered collective worship to be in a vulnerable position. Anxious over the potential secularisation of worship in schools, Earl Stanhope5 proposed two amendments regarding the 1944 provision for worship. These amendments stated that ‘religious’ should be inserted after ‘collective’ and that worship in schools should only be administered by a ‘teacher professing that religion’ (House of Lords (HL) Deb 21 June 1944, vol 132, cc346–347). Earl Stanhope argued that worship was already a common feature of daily school life and claimed that the few schools that did not start the day with worship had a ‘headmaster who was either an atheist or an agnostic’ (HL Deb 21 June 1944, vol 132, cc346–347) Earl Stanhope went on to state it would be better if there be no legal requirement for worship ‘rather than one which is done in the wrong way’ (HL Deb 21 June 1944, vol 132, cc346–347). In response to these concerns, the Earl of Selborne sought to clarify the terms and language used in the Act and affirm that worship can only ever be religious worship, irrespective of who administers it. Worship is religious and can only be religious. An act of worship is an act of religion. Therefore, in this context, if you use the word “worship” you do not want the word “religious”: what you do want is “collective” because you want a collective act of the whole school, except such members of the school as are obliged to avail themselves of the conscience clause. (HL Deb 21 June 1944, vol 132, cc346–347)

Although the legislation never uses the phrase ‘religious worship’, it can be seen from such discussions that ‘worship’ and ‘religious’ were viewed as inextricably linked, which, from a pre-1944 perspective, is unsurprising since schools were regularly participating in religious observances. Both Cheetham (2004) and Jivraj (2013) echoed this and claim it was ‘obvious’ that the legislation implied Christian worship, with both worship and RI being ‘part of the Christian education of the nation’s children’ (Jivraj, 2013, p. 107; Cheetham, 2004, p. 22). However, it was this implicit idea that collective worship is religious worship, or more specifically, Christian worship that has added to the decades of controversy to follow. 5

 James Stanhope, 7th Earl Stanhope

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The Changing Religious Landscape: The 1960s and 1970s Although the law was ‘making compulsory what is already universal’, the legal requirement of collective worship stimulated much discussion around the nature of worship and how worship should be conducted in schools (HL Deb 21 June 1944, vol 132, cc348; Powell, 1947; Armstrong, 1948). During the 1960s and 1970s, Britain witnessed increasing levels of immigration and secularisation, which changed a previously predominantly Christian society to an increasingly religiously plural society with levels of church attendance and institutionalised forms of religiosity declining (Brown, 2001; McLeod, 2007; Freathy & Parker, 2012; Davie, 2013, 2015). Such changes within the religious and social landscape further amplified debate and discussion among teachers, educationalists, politicians and clergy with regard to the role and appropriateness of collective worship in schools (Bull, 1964; Luckman, 1968; Cole, 1974; Holm, 1975; Tompkins, 1976). The Plowden Report6 argued that the legal requirement should be retained as it had ‘great value as a unifying force’ while also providing children with the opportunity to find ‘a religious expression of their life in school’ (1967, p. 206). However, the report did note the need for greater freedom and flexibility in the enactment of worship in schools. Anticipating some of the changes that were to come, the report stated that worship should be allowed to take place in smaller groups and at different points of the day to make the act of worship easier to accommodate within schools. In light of the increasing religious and non-religious diversity in society, the report recommended that In a school of mixed religious or non-religious backgrounds, it is essential that the assembly should be conducted in such a way that as large a part of the school community as possible, both teachers and children, can take part in it without offence being given to anyone’s conscientious scruples. (Plowden Report, 1967, p. 206)

The report also called for a broader range of sources to be used that went beyond Christianity. More specifically, the report asked for schools to be ‘sensitive to the needs of minority groups’, especially when ‘numbers of immigrant children of other than Christian religions are educated in 6  The Plowden Report entitled, Children and their Primary Schools, is a report of the Central Advisory Council For Education into Primary schools in England.

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schools which were hitherto largely Christian7’. There was much commentary and debate around this period from teachers, policy makers and religious leaders, all reflecting on the role and place of worship in schools. Bishop F.A.  Cockin (1968) questioned whether it was reasonable to expect children to participate in worship more than the normal practice of an average adult Christian. Cockin went on to recommend that schools need to have a ‘frank and positive recognition of the differences of conviction and interpretation’ among students and called for the ‘maximum involvement’ of both Christians and Humanists in the planning of worship in schools (1968, p. 11). Jones (1969) argued that the climate in which the legislation was developed had changed, and schools should rethink their approach, with a trend towards assemblies allowing for individual thought and reflection. Brimer (1972) acknowledged there was little known about the everyday practice of worship in schools and so examined the attitudes of teachers and junior school pupils through a questionnaire. Brimer (1972) found that, overall, head teachers held a more positive view of collective worship than children did, with 22.6% of child respondents stating that worship was not very important. The Schools Council Working Paper No. 36 on secondary religious education had little to say on collective worship specifically, other than that ‘this aspect of the curriculum really requires a curriculum development of its own’ (1971, p. 100). Freathy and Parker observe that by the 1960s there was less appetite within society for the ‘state-sponsored Christianisation envisaged’ by those who had a part to play in the drafting and passing of the 1944 Education Act (2013, p. 224). The authors discuss the often-underplayed contributions of the National Secular Society and the British Humanists Association (now Humanists UK) within the religious education campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s. Although these groups were not persuasive enough to change the legislation, they did contribute to the growing criticism and scrutiny of RI and collective worship in schools (Freathy & Parker, 2013).8 Attempts were made between Humanists and Christians to work together 7  The report details an example of how to accommodate minority religions, stating they had ‘heard of a school with a large Mohammedan intake where pupils have been encouraged to bring their prayer mats to school and go into a room provided for prayer, rather than go out of school and travel some distance for religious observances in the town’ (Plowden Report, 1967, p. 206). 8  So much the case that the authors note that in 1969, the then Secretary of State, Edward Short, began to make plans to safeguard both RI ad worship in schools from the ongoing criticism from Secularist and Humanist (Freathy & Parker, 2013, p. 241).

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and revise the provision for collective worship in schools. For example, a group comprising of Christian Educators and British Humanist Association (BHA) members worked together to publish the book Religious and Moral Education in County Schools (1965 as cited in Freathy and Parker, 2013, p.  244), which rather than calling for the abolition of worship, made several recommendations including easier ways for both students and teachers to opt-out, that worship should focus on shared values and for worship to alternate between Christian worship and non-religious content (Freathy & Parker, 2013). One of the most prominent and cited publications specifically addressing collective worship during this time was John Hull’s, School Worship: An Obituary (1975). This book outlined the problems and issues with worship in its then current form but also provided suggestions for improvement so that pupils could engage with such acts in ways that were meaningful and genuine to them. Hull (1975) considered collective worship, in its current provision, to be an anomalous part of education and that a tension exists between the purpose of worship and the aims of education. Hull (1975) observed six key features of worship, those being: affirmation, celebration, the expression of ultimate concern, an occasion for self-orientation, a form of communion and finally a form of adoration, before going on to describe the differences between religious and secular worship. Hull (1975) argued that belief and the concept of a deity are necessary for worship and without them, worship would be superficial. As such, for Hull (1975), collective worship was at odds with the aims of education, as it assumed that all pupils held the same beliefs and practices and did not invite critical reflection or independent reasoning. As a result, Hull (1975) asserted that worship in school was the epitome of hypocrisy—‘the most objectionable example of compulsion which the school offers its pupils’ (1975, p.  120). However, rather than arguing for the removal of worship from schools, Hull (1975) called for collective worship to be an opportunity for pupils to encounter a ‘threshold for worship’ and for schools to focus on stories and themes that promoted universal values. Like the Shap working group on religious studies, the position Hull adopted did not assume truth in Christian teaching but rather recognised the existence of multiple truths and, as such, suggested that RI and collective worship should be deployed in ways that allowed pupils to encounter and experience various beliefs and practices. However, criticism towards collective worship was not uniform (Holley, 1979; Felderhof, 1999, 2000). Marius Felderhof (1999, 2000) provided

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a detailed response to Hull’s (1975) concerns, arguing that such objections could only be maintained under Hull’s particular approach to worship. Rather, Felderhof (1999), in defence of worship in schools, considered it to be part of the overall responsibility of schooling with the aim of education being to provide young people with awareness of the ‘complexity of human life’ and as such, this should include religious life too (1999, p. 226). Felderhof (2000), in his later criticism of Hull (1975), goes on to question Hull’s literal definition of worship, claiming it to be ‘religiously unacceptable and philosophically confused’ (2000, p. 18). In response to such concerns and confusion as to the nature of worship in schools, the Church of England’s Board of Education and the National Society sponsored a report, The Fourth R,9 which examined the changes taking place in Britain at the time. This report was more sympathetic to the legal requirement of collective worship and was not convinced that England was becoming a ‘post-Christian, religiously neutral society’ (1970, p. 139). Rather, the report argued that society was better described as ‘post ecclesiastical’, where individuals were expressing different degrees and variations of commitment but were nevertheless in the main Christian. The report argued that collective worship should continue for two reasons. Firstly, the opportunity for pupils to experience worship in school formed a necessary part of religious education, and secondly, such worship expressed ‘society’s positive disposition towards religion’ while preserving the ‘spiritual, personal and moral values’ within the school community ‘which derive from the Christian tradition’ (1970, p. 139). The Fourth R saw collective worship as an integral part of RE. Although it did not favour a confessional approach to such acts, it positioned worship as the experiential component of RE, and as such a necessary part of the school day so that pupils could pursue their ‘religious quest’ in their search for ‘meaning, purpose and value’ (1970, pp. 60–61). The 1988 Education Reform Act The 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA) amended the legal requirement so that collective worship must now be ‘wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character’ and reflect ‘the broad traditions of Christian belief’ 9  The Fourth R, more formally known as the Durham Report, was a major review of religious education, commissioned by the Church of England and the National Society. (see Durham Report, 1970).

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(section 7). When the Bill was being passed and debated, the Bishop of London, acting as an intermediary between the two sides of the debate, responded to concerns raised about the exclusively Christian nature of the act by saying that ‘the intention behind the new amendment is the avoidance of damaging divisions within a school and its surrounding community’ (HL Deb 7 July 1988, cc432). The explicit requirement of collective worship being wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character owed a great deal to the negotiations and arguments put forward by Baroness Cox. Calling the amendment, a ‘historic achievement’, Baroness Cox went on to state There is now explicit recognition on the face of the Bill of the expectations that religious education and worship should, in the main, be Christian, thus enshrining Christianity as the main spiritual tradition of this country and providing young people with opportunities to learn about Christianity and to experience Christian worship, opportunities which have too often been denied to many of them in recent years. There is also enshrined respect for the other major faiths and opportunities for those of other faith communities to teach and to worship according to those faiths if parents request that and teachers find it feasible. (HL Deb 7 July 1988, cc432)

In contrast to the earlier provision which did not specify the nature or content of collective worship, these legislators made what was implicitly assumed in the 1944 Act, explicitly clear in the 1988 Reform Act. Section 7 subsection 2 attempts to clarify what is intended by a ‘broadly Christian character’ by stating that collective worship is of a broadly Christian character ‘if it reflects the broad traditions of Christian belief without being distinctive of any particular Christian denomination’. It is interesting to note the choice of words here. Although the legislation clearly affirmed the Christian nature of acts of worship, the specific wording allowed for a wide variety of interpretations. Policy makers did not state that collective worship is in fact ‘Christian worship’, but rather should be ‘broadly of a Christian character’ that ‘reflects the broad traditions of Christian belief’ (ERA, 1988, s. 7(2) italics my emphasis). What counts as the ‘broad traditions of Christian belief’ would be down to individual schools. Section 7 subsection 3 goes on to elaborate on the wording found in subsection 1, which states that daily acts of collective worship should be ‘wholly or mainly’ of a Christian character: ‘Every act of collective worship required by … this Act …need not comply with subsection (1) … provided that,

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taking any school term as a whole, most such acts which take place in the school do comply with that subsection’ (ERA, 1988, S .7 (3) italics my emphasis). The ERA 1988 thus allowed some flexibility by giving schools the freedom to choose whether they would have all acts of collective worship reflecting the broadest traditions of Christian belief or only the majority. In reality, this would mean that collective worship would only need to reflect the broadest traditions of Christian belief in just over half of all assemblies in any one term in order to comply with the requirement. Other areas of the ERA 1988 also suggested a sense of greater freedom, such as Section 6 (1) which allows collective worship to take place at any point of the school day, rather than at the start, as had been prescribed in the 1944 EA, and section 6 subsection (2) which now allows collective worship to take place in smaller groupings of pupils rather than whole school worship which again, was previously required by the 1944 Education Act. This meant that schools were not required to gather the whole school together, since this could be problematic for large schools lacking the physical space for such events. In practice, this resulted in such schools holding Key Stage or class acts of worship, and on occasion gathering together as a whole school if and when possible. However, as Copley observes, this amendment can also be viewed as a way of making collective worship ‘less avoidable’ (2008, p. 150). Very few schools would have been able to observe the original requirement of collective worship which required it taking place at the start of the school day and with the whole school in attendance. As such, without the amendments in the ERA 1988, it is likely that collective worship would have become even more ill-­ observed. By providing schools with the freedom to choose when to conduct collective worship and to perform this in smaller groups, the Act, in effect, tightened the requirement of collective worship, making it less easy to avoid. The 1988 Act did, however, provide opportunities for schools to exempt themselves from the requirement of having acts of worship which are ‘wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character’. Schools could apply to the Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education (SACRE) for a determination, in cases where the section 7(2) requirement would not suit the backgrounds of the pupils in attendance at the school (McCreery, 1993). In addition to the changes made within the collective

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worship clauses, several amendments were also made concerning religious education. The 1988 ERA formally and legally made the transition from Religious Instruction to Religious Education and agreed syllabuses must now ‘reflect that the religious traditions in the country are in the main Christian, whilst taking account of the teaching and practices in other principle religions’ (Section 8(3)).10 The overtly Christian character of these clauses generated much controversy and confusion,11 with many questioning the legitimacy of such a requirement in an increasingly religiously diverse society (Parsons, 1994). Copley observes that decades of work to make collective worship a community event that transcends religious difference ‘had been challenged by attempts to legally enforce Christian observance on children’ (2008, p. 150). It was widely felt that the Act did not support teachers and their pupils but rather added further difficulty when it came to compliance due to the ‘embarrassing prominence’ accorded to Christianity and the incompatibility with educational principles (Alves, 1991; Cox and Cairns, 1989; Editorial, 1989, p.  119; Cole & Evans-Lowndes, 1991; Copley, 1997; Davies, 2000). The amendment minimised the subjective interpretation of collective worship that had been permissible since the 1944 Education Act (Hull, 1995). This tightening of the Act resulted in more questions and confusion. What exactly are the ‘broadest traditions of Christian belief’? What counts as ‘belief’ and what do we mean by ‘traditions’? Commenting on the 10  Although RE was to be non-denominational, different denominations could be taught, Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education (SACREs) were made compulsory and grant maintained schools were required to adopt the locally agreed syllabus and RE was placed within the basic curriculum as oppose to the national curriculum. 11  Cheetham describes the act as a ‘political compromise’ between those who advocated for a multicultural and inclusive approach to religion in schools and those who wished to assert and maintain Christian hegemony (2004, p.  32) due to the flexibility within the Act and providing schools with the option of a determination if they saw fit. In addition to this, the Act now states that collective worship needs to consider the ‘family backgrounds’ and the ‘ages and aptitudes’ of pupils, which Cheetham (2004) argues further demonstrates the concession made by those lobbying for Christian heritage. Copley (2008) notes there were ‘mixed feelings’ regarding the amendments within the 1988 ERA. On the one hand, there was a feeling of relief that ‘the Act had not been hijacked by the Christian right’, and on the other hand, there were deep concerns over the ‘Cinderella’ status afforded to RE, concerns over local control and the privileged position afforded to Christianity within the clauses (Copley, 2008, pp. 147–149).

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‘most obscure and complicated piece of religious education legislation in the history of this country’, Hull and others generated an increasing amount of debate on what was meant by the 1988 Education Reform Act (1989, p. 119). In response, the Department for Education issued a circular in January 1994 that sought to answer and clarify some of the confusion caused by Act. However, circular 1/94 had exactly the opposite result. In dealing with the issue of definitions, the circular stated that ‘worship is not defined in the legislation and in the absence of any such definition it should be taken to have its natural and ordinary meaning … It should be concerned with reverence or veneration paid to a divine being or power’ (Circular 1/94, paragraph 57) (italics my emphasis). In clarifying what is meant by ‘traditions’ and ‘Christian belief’, paragraph 63 of the circular stated that worship must ‘contain some elements which relate specifically to the traditions of Christian belief and which accord a special status to Jesus Christ’. Some critics considered the circular as an attempt by the Christian heritage lobbyists to further assert Christian hegemony by re-including elements which were removed during the drafting process of the 1988 Act (Copley, 2008). This insistence on the overtly Christian character of worship was widely criticised by the National Association of Head Teachers, religious groups, Local Educational Authorities and leading thinkers in the field (Hemming, 2009). The circular was not, however, legally binding and only served as guidance to schools and was therefore widely resisted and ignored by schools (Cheetham, 2004). Reflecting on the debates that have ensued since the 1988 Education Reform Act, Webster contemplates that ‘if Rabbi Lionel Blue is right and prayer is like a cigarette because it gives time to reflect, then a good deal of symbolic chain smoking is taking place as schools decide how to implement the legislation on worship in the 1988 Education Reform Act’ (1990, p. 151). Although now found in section 70 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, the legal requirement of collective worship has remained unchanged since the 1988 amendment. Despite a multitude of reports, commentaries and papers on the subject, many teachers have historically found great difficulty in meeting the legal requirement, with reports and studies revealing considerable noncompliance when it comes to collective worship (Hull, 1989; Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (OFSTED), 1994).

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Collective Worship and Religious Observance in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland Although the focus of this book is on collective worship in schools in England, it is important to contextualise the provision with regard to practices in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Education Act in Scotland 1872 provided schools with the freedom to practice the ongoing custom of religious observance in schools. The provision can be found today in the Education (Scotland) Act 1980, ss 8–9 and as with the 1944 Education Act, the definition of the provision is not explicit. The Provision of Religious Education and Religious Observance in Primary and Secondary Schools, Circular 6/91, stated that all primary school pupils should ‘take part in religious observance not less than once a week’, with religious observances being a ‘valid and important educational experience’ that could support the school’s ethos ‘by bringing pupils together and creating a feeling of corporate identity’ (as cited in Pirrie, 2005, p. 73). The Curriculum for Excellence: Provision of Religious Observance in Schools (2011) defines religious observance as ‘community acts which aim to promote the spiritual development of all members of the school’s community and express and celebrate the shared values of the school community’ (as cited in Crumper and Mawhinney, 2015, p. 4). In Northern Ireland, the provision can be found in The Education and Libraries (Northern Ireland) Order 1986, Articles 21–22, which states that ‘the school day in every such school shall also include collective worship whether in one or more than one assembly on the part of the pupils at the school’. Again, worship is not defined but the Christian character might be implied when read within the wider context of the religious education clauses of the legislation (Crumper & Mawhinney, 2018). As with the provision in England, the legal requirement for collective worship in Wales can be found in the School Standards Framework 1988 ss.70–71. Recent Recommendations and Reports Several recommendations have been made by leading bodies and thinkers as to how both RE and collective worship should be enacted in schools. Calls for more inclusive worship have been made, promoting the idea of shared morals and values while avoiding privileging one religion over another (RE Council of England and Wales, 1996). More recently, arguments have been made to repeal and reform the requirement of collective

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worship. Clarke and Woodhead’s (2015) first response to collective worship in schools, A New Settlement on Religious and Belief in Schools recommended that the legal requirement of collective worship is abolished. Speaking of the ‘nod and wink’ culture concerning worship in schools, Clarke and Woodhead argue that the original provision within the 1944 Act ‘reflected a different era (and) no longer serves its purpose’ stating that ‘the law is honoured more in the breach than the observance’ (2015, p. 7). They conclude by recommending the abolishment of collective worship, leaving decisions regarding assemblies with the governors of individual schools (Clarke & Woodhead, 2015). At the same time, Clarke and Woodhead (2015) acknowledged the importance assemblies can have on pupils’ Spiritual Moral Social and Cultural development and recommend that assemblies be planned to support this aspect of school life. However, their position was revised in 2018 when they published a new report which, upon reflection, considered that the abolition of the requirement might result in the disappearance of assemblies from school life altogether (Clarke & Woodhead, 2018). School assemblies can provide moments for reflection, celebration and an opportunity to build a sense of cohesion and solidarity. Instead, Clarke and Woodhead now advise not changing the law concerning collective worship but rather the guidance, Circular 1/94, which would recommend that: All pupils in attendance at maintained schools and academies shall take part in a regular assembly or act of collective worship in keeping with the values and ethos of the school and reflecting the diversity and character of the school community. (Clarke & Woodhead, 2018, p. 34)

The terminology of collective worship would still be maintained in order to safeguard the current requirement for schools to engage in some form of reflective practice but would amend the guidance so that it is clear that the diversity of the school community should be considered. However, it should be noted that the Circular 1/94 is only guidance, and schools are not required to follow it. Both the REforReal project at Goldsmiths, University of London (Dinham & Shaw, 2015) and the report of the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life (CORAB), Living with Difference: community, diversity and the common good (The Woolf Institute, 2015) put forward recommendations about the future of collective worship. CORAB

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argues that current legislation requiring schools to deliver a daily act of collective worship should be replaced with guidelines promoting inclusive assemblies and time for reflection. The REforReal report is less detailed on worship as its focus is on religious education, but suggests that as collective worship is a space where learning about religion and belief may take place, it should be reviewed in tandem with changes with RE. There is mounting pressure for a review of collective worship in schools and how or whether the legal requirement, as it currently stands, can be maintained in an increasingly diverse and plural society. As noted in the opening paragraphs of this book, groups such as the National Secular Society (NSS) and Humanists UK have repeatedly called for this legal requirement to be removed.12 Tensions surrounding collective worship are not solely due to the Christian character of the clause but are also due to the ways in which children’s rights are overlooked. Section 71 of the School Standards Framework Act provides parents with the right to withdraw their children from both worship and/or Religious Education. Originally, section 71 covered all pupils but was subsequently amended by section 55 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, which now provides the right for sixth form pupils or pupils over school leaving age to withdraw themselves from worship. In November 2015, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project evaluating the law and policy of collective worship in the UK was published (Crumper & Mawhinney, 2015). Comprising a network of academics from various disciplines across the UK, the evaluation outlined both the historical and contemporary legal context of collective worship in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. After reviewing the current law, policy and guidance in these countries, the network addressed six questions that they considered key to the collective worship debate. These questions focused on the rationale behind the requirements, whether such a provision derives from the needs of the pupils, school, and society and whether these needs can only be met through collective worship and religious observances or if other activities could be used to meet these needs (Crumper & Mawhinney, 2015, p. 6). 12  The National Secular Society have an ongoing campaign to abolish collective worship which includes letter templates for people to write to their MP as well as on online petition. See http://www.secularism.org.uk/petition-end-compulsory-worship.html (accessed 13 November 2016). For Humanists UK campaign, see https://humanism.org.uk/campaigns/schools-and-education/collective-worship/ (accessed 11 October 2016).

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After posing three options for the future (no change, abolishment and reform), the report went on to recommend that each government set up a working group to review the nature of its current provision and the rationale for this. Additionally, it was recommended that educational authorities inform schools about their rights to withdraw, that schools should have clear guidance about the nature and content of collective worship in their school and that schools should inform parents and pupils over their rights and in the event of withdrawal, appropriate activities be provided (Crumper & Mawhinney, 2015, p. 6). Specifically, in relation to collective worship in England,13 the report recommended for the status of Circular 1/94 to be assessed and for OFSTED to provide schools with detailed guidance in relation to inspections and worship (Crumper & Mawhinney, 2015, p. 6). In a report published by the United Nations Child’s Rights Committee (UN, 2016), recommended that the law requiring collective worship be repealed and that children should ultimately have the right to remove themselves from religious worship without needing parental permission. Hemming (2017) discusses children’s participation in collective worship in relation to both article 12 of the United Nations Child Rights Convention and the Children’s Act 2012. Both pieces of legislation promote children’s rights and the duty of adults to ensure that children’s voices and opinions are heard and respected. This legislation has significant implications for schools when considering the compulsory nature of collective worship and the inability of children to exercise their rights in this context. Worship is that there is no consensus as to what collective worship is and what such daily acts should entail. Relying on political rhetoric and legislative guidelines, such reports and discussions often fail to address the everyday lived realities of collective worship and how children experience such events. The terminology itself is also muddled, with reports using various phrases such as, religious worship, Christian worship and assemblies. In the latest report published by the UN, both ‘religious worship’ and ‘collective worship’ are used to refer to the same act. Discussions and literature on collective worship frequently use these terms interchangeably, and often with very little interrogation. If there is a lack of clarity as to what collective worship is and how it is practiced in schools, then how 13  Further country-specific guidance for Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland was provided, please see Crumper and Mawhinney (2015, p. 14) and Crumper and Mawhinney (2018).

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can we be sure precisely what we are abolishing, repealing or reforming?14 It might be said that the varied terminology is reflective of the permissive nature of the legislation, allowing for diverse practice and therefore being flexible enough in its current state to cover any interpretation. However, this still does not escape the question as to what collective worship is and how children experience it.

The Schools My intention, as outlined above, was to explore the everyday lived reality of worship and assemblies in schools, how children articulate their encounters and experiences of religion in school and how the interrelation between religion and non-religion is negotiated in such contexts. As a former youth worker, I was keen to pursue research that enabled me to work directly with participants while allowing them to shape the nature and focus of the study. With the research centred on providing an account of children’s experiences of collective worship, I decided to conduct a multi-sited ethnographic study of collective worship among primary-aged school children in the South West of England. By undertaking an ethnography of collective worship in schools, I was able to gain an in-depth, immersive account of collective worship, while drawing on a range of resources for data. As noted by O’Reilly, ethnography uses a range of methods ‘involving direct and sustained contact with human agents within the context of their daily lives’ (2009, p.  3). Drawing on Malinowski (1922), Stringer (1999) observes that ethnography rests on ‘three assumptions’ which are considered necessary for the ‘ideal’ ethnographic study (1999, p. 43). These are: the time spent in the field, providing a ‘holistic’ account and trying to provide an understanding of that context from the perspective of the participants (Stringer, 1999, p. 43). Within this study, I spent as much time as possible in each field site, got involved in everyday activities from making classroom displays to going on school trips and crucially, I maintained a focus on understanding collective worship from the child’s perspective.

14  It may be argued that if the law as it stands is permissive enough to allow a wide range of interpretations, is a legal change necessary? Although the aim of this book is not to argue one way or the other, in the conclusion, I do offer some thoughts as to the future of collective worship.

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An ethnographic account also supported the child-centred approach by allowing the children to relay their voices within their own social context rather than those of the researcher (Nesbitt, 2000; James, 2001). Qvortrup (2000) notes an advantage of ethnography in terms of enabling children to put forward their own experiences and perspectives, which led to ethnography being perceived as the ‘new orthodoxy’ in research with children (see also: James & Prout 1997; James, 2001; McNamee, 2016). Importantly, ethnography allows for the ‘thick description’ of the field, perspectives, actions and interactions of its inhabitants therefore adding to the complex, nuanced and often messy nature of research and social reality (Geertz, 1973; Law, 2004). Previous studies on religion and childhood have mostly emerged from psychology, theology, sociology and subfields within religious studies (Strhan et al., 2017). However, historically speaking, such studies have not allowed children to be situated in their own social worlds and contexts and have not treated the child as a social actor in their own right (Ridgely, 2011a). I conducted this ethnography across three contrasting schools in the South West of England: A Voluntary Controlled Church of England Primary School (St Peter’s), a Roman Catholic Primary Academy (Sacred Heart) and a school without a religious character (Holly Oak).15 The region where the field work took place is highly diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, social class and religion.16 I spent a term in each school, between May 2015 to December 2015, during which I carried out participant observation, undertook interviews with children and staff and facilitated child-centred activities to learn more about children’s experience of worship in school. Although no generalisations to wider populations can be drawn from the research, the data collected is revealing of the significance of differences and similarities between how schools and teachers approach collective worship (see Shilling & Cousins, 1990).17 Gaining access to institutions, particularly schools, can be a complicated process (Flick, 2014). Berg (2004) reflects on the process of gaining access and how this has to be renegotiated at different times and with 15  All school names and participants have been anonymised and names replaced with pseudonyms. Ethical approval was granted by the University of Worcester’s Ethical Review Committee in February 2015. 16  According to the 2011 Census, 46.8% of the population identifies as Christian (lower than the national average) and 37.4% as having no religion (higher than the national average). 17  For example, it became clear throughout the data collection period, that most schools will arrange their collective worship on Fridays to be celebration assemblies.

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different groups and persons throughout the research. Valentine also comments on the complex process of gaining access to children and calls this a ‘chain of negotiation’, observing that access can have different stages or levels, with various persons required to authorise access at different points of the research (1999, p. 145). This is particularly true of working with schools. I first needed to establish the trust of a gatekeeper who could introduce me to a school, before trying to then gain access to the school itself. While undertaking this, I needed to negotiate and explain my research to various individuals and secure their support. To work with the children, I needed both the support of the child and of their parent or carer.18 To gain access to schools, I decided to approach key persons such as Statutory Inspection of Anglican and Methodist Schools (SIAMs) inspectors, Diocesan education advisors and SACREs as they would be in a good position to circulate my call for participants and potentially act as gatekeepers when approaching schools.19 I began to circulate my call for participants with Dioceses, SACREs, networks such as REToday and National Association of Teachers of Religious Education (NATRE), as well as head teacher associations. During this process, I came to know Caroline, an education officer for the local Diocese, who invited me to a training day she was organising for teachers on how to lead effective collective worship and offered me a ten-minute slot in the day to present my research project to the teachers there. While at the training day I met Lynn, the collective worship coordinator for St Peter’s. Lynn showed great interest and enthusiasm showed towards my project and suggested that St Peter’s might prove to be a good field site and was happy to put this proposal to her head teacher. Following the training day, I kept in touch with Lynn and visited St Peter’s on a couple of occasions in order to learn more about collective worship and life at the school more broadly. St Peter’s is a voluntary controlled Church of England primary school located in an urban area of the South West of England. A large school comprising of a nursery and dual form intake from reception to Year Six, this was to be my largest school 18  Gaining access to schools and children can be problematic. Smith and Smith (2013) spoke of a lack of interest from schools to participate in their study on collective worship and other projects concerning religion and education (e.g. Hemming, 2009; Cheetham, 2004) also spoke of the suspicion and difficulty researchers have when accessing schools. 19  See Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) for a detailed review of the role of gatekeepers and sponsors. Particularly in terms of how to manage these relationships and dealing with multiple gatekeepers.

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and most diverse in terms of both religion and ethnicity. According to the enrolment data collected by the school at the time of study, nearly half the pupils at St Peter’s have no religion, (48%) with a further 29% identifying as Christian and a fifth of pupils are Muslim. Over a quarter of the pupils at St Peter’s spoke English as a second language and 28% were in receipt of free school meals. St Peter’s is located a short walk from the city centre and is situated near several council estates and high-rise apartment blocks. Collective worship varied at St Peter’s depending on the day of the week. Mondays were whole school collective worship, Tuesdays were Key Stage collective worship, Wednesdays singing assemblies, Thursdays were team or class-based assemblies and Friday collective worship always took the form of a celebration assembly. Briskly walking around the school site, Lynn showed me the various displays and materials she had developed with children for collective worship. Standing by the ‘Values Champion’ board outside main reception, Lynn proudly said, ‘well, this is my doing really’. The school had a set of core values and throughout her time as collective worship coordinator, Lynn had developed this framework into collective worship by awarding pupils with ‘Value Champion’ certificates when they demonstrate one of the school’s core values. After returning to her office and going through the project information sheet, Lynn consented to St Peter’s participating in my study.20 Lynn then invited me to their Easter celebration assembly as a way to introduce me to the school and to get a taste of what collective worship is like at St Peter’s. When I attended St Peter’s for this Easter service, I met the vicar from St Peter’s Church while waiting in reception. Revd Lucy was there to lead the Easter assembly and expressed how she was a little nervous about this. As we waited, we talked about the assembly and my interest in collective worship and Lucy gave me her number so we could meet for a coffee to discuss my project in more depth. I met up with Lucy the following week and we sat in the church grounds eating lemon drizzle cake she had brought from the church café. After learning more about my project and my need for participants, she suggested that I met with Olivia, the part-time education worker at the church, as she might have links with schools. After finishing our coffee and cake, we wandered over to meet Olivia, who took me on a tour of the 20  Informed signed consent was gained February 2015 and it was subsequently decided that I would conduct my fieldwork from September 2015 during the first term of the school year as this was the best period for the school.

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church while she explained the work she does with visiting school groups. Olivia subsequently put me in touch with the RE coordinator at Holly Oak, Tina, and after initial email communication, I arranged to meet Tina later that month. Holly Oak is a special school without a religious character and is situated at a fifteen-minute drive from the main city centre.21 It is located in a predominately white working-class area, near a large council estate and has higher levels of deprivation than most areas in the region. The school site is expansive and is situated in a campus with an adjoining secondary school. Twenty-eight percent of the pupils are registered as Christian, 40% as having no religion and 8% as Muslim. As we discussed how the project would work, Tina talked about collective worship at her school and explained that she was not happy with the school’s current provision and was keen to participate in the project in order to gain more insight into this area. While making me a coffee, she explained her interest in my research derived from her own background in religious studies as an undergraduate and that collective worship now fell within her responsibilities as RE coordinator. As we walked along the corridor back towards her classroom she whispered, ‘no one really cares about religion here and so it doesn’t get done’. I nodded sympathetically and walked back into her classroom wondering what exactly ‘doesn’t get done’. Although aware of the legal requirement, Tina went on to explain that collective worship, or assemblies as they were more frequently referred to at this field site, usually took place on Mondays and Fridays with other reflective practices during the week. Tina said she was trying to improve this and the RE curriculum but often felt it was marginalised in light of other subjects and areas of school life. I gained access to my third school, Sacred Heart, through the local Roman Catholic diocese, where I met with their education officer, Lesley, who received my project positively. The decision to include children as part of the study was warmly received by all gatekeepers and teachers and upon reflection, I feel it was this element of the study that allowed such strong and effective relationships to be generated. After meeting with Lesley and securing her support as a gatekeeper, she was able to put me in touch with the head teacher from Sacred Heart Primary, Sarah, who was happy to participate. Sacred Heart is a Roman Catholic academy located 21  Although the school does not have a catchment area, the children did live close to the school and were predominantly from more deprived, working-class areas.

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in an urban area of the South West. Unlike my other field sites, Sacred Heart was not as diverse in terms of the religious identity of the pupils in attendance. Ninety-two percent of the pupils were registered as Roman Catholic, with 5% affiliated to other Christian denominations and only three children listed as Hindu, Muslim or having no religion.22 Sarah discussed the school’s admissions criteria and the autonomy they had as a Roman Catholic academy in terms of their selection procedure. She informed me that the school had a very good reputation in terms of its Catholic identity and that places at Sacred Heart were highly sought after from practicing and committed Roman Catholic families in the local area. Catholic identity had a strong and clear presence in the school. Walking around the school building, every wall and corridor in some way reflected the identity of the school. The children interviewed in all three schools were aged between six and ten. At Holly Oak, my informants were aged eight, nine and ten, at St Peter’s, nine and ten and at Sacred Heart, I interviewed eight, nine and ten-year-olds but was also able to interview several children aged six and seven who were interested in my project and wished to participate. As participation was voluntary, my sampling criteria for children was both self-selecting and convenience sampling (Flick, 2014). In total, I interviewed 78 children, comprising of 31 boys and 47 girls. I also interviewed 26 teachers (including class teachers, head teachers and teaching assistants).23 At Holly Oak, I interviewed 12 children, at St Peter’s 27 children, and at Sacred Heart 39 children.24 22  The ethnic diversity of Sacred Heart was quite varied with 72% of children coming from BME (black and minority ethnic) groups. Sarah explained to me that the local area had a particularly high migrant population as the local hospital recruits a large number of nurses and other hospital staff from South Asia and Indonesia. 23  This slight imbalance of girls to boys was also reflective of the children in each class where girls outnumbered boys. 24  The reason for the varying numbers is due to several reasons. My sample at Holly Oak was smaller due to the smaller class sizes and the restriction in terms of the children who had the capacity to understand and therefore participate in the project. I was able to interview more children at Sacred Heart as I was able to work with more classes across the Key Stage and the children’s parents were more responsive in terms of returning signed parental consent. While at St Peter’s I was restricted to Year’s Four and one Year Six child from the collective worship team. As with many studies that work with institutions and with schools in particular, the researcher has to be flexible when trying to undertake their research and therefore cannot always expect to mirror data collection at each site (Flick, 2014; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007).

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As noted earlier, I allocated one term per school, which ranged between six and seven weeks depending on the school term in question. During this time, I acted as teaching assistant at each school and typically spent most days at the school, sometimes leaving at lunchtime or arriving later in the day.25 Informed signed consent to undertake the project at the school was gained from the school’s head teacher prior to commencing the fieldwork. Although the head teachers at each school provided signed consent, I always asked the teacher leading each collective worship whether I could observe and take notes. After my pilot study which I undertook before the field work at St Peter’s, Holly Oak and Sacred Heart, I was aware that some teachers might be wary or uneasy about visitors observing and taking notes of their lessons or activities with children and as such securing their informed signed consent and support was also a crucial part of the research process. In either the first or second week at each school, I delivered a short presentation detailing my project for the children, which I supplemented with child-friendly information sheets. Children were then offered the opportunity to ask questions and afterwards I provided them with child consent forms for them to sign and give back to me if they would like to participate in the project.26 Asking for children’s consent is not without its methodological or ethical issues. David, Edwards and Alldred observed that the process of gaining consent could unwittingly reproduce unequal power relations between child and researcher due to the teacher like methods used to gain consent and the ‘quasi teacher’ status researchers can assume during this process (2001, p. 359). I attempted to avoid this by making it clear to the children that it was their choice whether to participate, that they could go away and think about it and they did not have to sign the forms immediately.27 For children who did provide their signed consent, their verbal consent was also asked for before the start of each research conversation as well as reminding them of their right to withdraw.

25  My schedules varied in schools, depending on what was convenient for them and the teachers I was working with. 26  When considering how to inform children about the project and ask for their consent, I followed the strategies and guidance as provided by Alderson and Morrow (2004), which includes ensuring information and project briefing is accessible and put in child friendly language and how to overcome issues when parents do not provide consent. 27  It also gave them time to ask questions prior to the interview and allowed me time to check comprehension.

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Although the methodology adopts a child-centred approach, I still found it important that parents and carers were not only aware of the project being undertaken at their school but that they also had the right to say whether their child could participate or not in order to avoid issues around uninformed parents withdrawing their child. Ayala Fader, in her research on Hasidic girls, had to leave one of her field sites due to parents complaining about the ‘strange woman’ children had reported seeing in their class (2009, p. 20). Although children, their rights and agency are at the forefront of my research, I could not ignore the interests of parents and schools. As such, I decided it was important for everyone’s consent to be sought and everyone to be consulted during this research process. As Holly Oak was a special school, I discussed the practicalities of the research with Tina prior to starting fieldwork and how children at this school could participate.28 This is a conversation I had with all teachers at schools as all schools had children with special educational needs. The question of capacity for any child who has a learning difficulty or disability was assessed at numerous levels. Initially, this was decided by the researcher in collaboration with the class teacher or in consultation with other staff in the school with expertise in this area (e.g. Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO)29 leader). Parents and carers also had the opportunity to raise any concerns over their child’s participation. All class teachers were briefed on this prior to the research in order to ensure the terms and the language used in presentations, information sheets and consent forms were appropriate and accessible for the children, and to assess whether anything needed to be adapted in light of any particular learning needs or disability some children may have had.30 This follows the National Children’s Bureau Guidelines for Research with Children and Young People which states: When disabled CYP are research participants, it is important that creative, multi-method, flexible approaches are adopted, which can be tailored to the needs of those involved. It is particularly important to note that within any group of disabled CYP, there is likely to be a range of needs and abilities, 28  I had previously worked in special schools and coordinated programmes for children and young people with disabilities and special needs and so was familiar and experienced when working with children with a variety of needs. 29  Special Educational Needs Coordinator. 30  For discussion on the methodological/ethical issues and collaborative research when working with people learning difficulties, see Stalker (1998), Boxall and Ralph (2009), Knox et al. (2000) and Walmsley (2001).

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therefore tools may need to be adapted to suit the individuals not the group as a whole. Again, such decisions will be informed by consulting relevant experts (for example, parents, practitioners and support workers) and it may well be necessary to work alongside support staff or interpreters when undertaking data collection. (Shaw et al., 2011, p. 18)

Finally, before participating in each interview, I briefed all children about the study, their involvement and took such opportunities to check children’s comprehension by asking questions such as, ‘In your own words, can you tell me about this research project and why I am here?’ or ‘In your own words, can you tell me about how I would like to involve you in my project?’ The benefit of an ethnographic approach means that access and therefore comprehension and knowledge about the project is assessed at various stages, allowing the participant to ask questions and clarify their involvement throughout, thereby providing the researcher with the opportunity to continually check comprehension and consent and address any issues related to knowledge and understanding. After discussing the project and methods with Tina and considering which children would be able to make an informed decision when consenting to the project, it was decided that I would work with two classes from Key Stage Two, Squirrel and Dolphin class. As some of the children in this class had physical and/or learning disabilities, I adapted my methods to ensure they were both accessible and appropriate for the children I was working with. This meant working closely with teachers, sharing ideas and plans I had developed for activities and adjusting them as per their suggestions. Practically this involved having a teaching assistant sitting with children who required Makaton during interviews and adjusting the class activity where children designed their own act of collective worship. The class activity was altered so that children could use pictures and objects rather than writing. I also facilitated the activity in smaller groups at Holly Oak, rather than taking whole classes at a time. Participant-observation was conducted throughout the course of fieldwork in each school, which involved observing registration, assemblies/ acts of worship, lessons, playtimes, lunchtimes and spending time in the staffroom during breaks, in order to capture the whole experience of collective worship and wider school life, noting the behaviours, practices, discourses, and spatial dynamics of the performance that positions both teachers and pupils as informants (Lundie, 2010; Anderson, 2011). I also observed occasions such as reflection time, meditation, yoga or other

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contemplative practices, as some teachers considered these as part of their wider provision of collective worship or at least complementing more formal instances of collective worship. Although such occasions would not, officially speaking, be considered acts of collective worship in and of themselves, I wanted to attend to them within my ethnography in order to fully explore the everyday lived reality of collective worship in schools. As Orsi argues, we must continually attend to various aspects of religious lives and experiences, even those which are not ‘officially sanctioned’ (2005, p. 167). As this was an ethnographic account of collective worship, I wanted to immerse myself within each field site, in order to build relationships, observe aspects of wider school life and gain an insight into the place and role collective worship had in the school day. Research on collective worship tends to separate collective worship from the rest of school life and treat in isolation to wider events in school life (e.g. Cheetham, 2004). Such accounts, with the exception of Hemming (2015), do not consider collective worship within the ebbs and flows of wider school life and therefore, to some extent, present a somewhat artificial representation of collective worship and more broadly, religion in schools. To paraphrase Orsi, non-religion, religion and spirituality ‘cannot be understood apart from its place in everyday lives, preoccupations, and common-sense orientations of men and women’ and children (2005, p. 167). In addition to participant observation, semi-structured interviews with children and teachers were conducted with collective worship forming the ‘backbone’ of the discussion. However, participants were free to construct the conversation in their own terms and formulate new questions/ responses (Flewitt, 2014, p.  140). Mayall (2000) adopted this method when interviewing participants as it gave the children more autonomy over the nature and direction of the conversation and therefore reduced some of the power differentials. Participants were sought through voluntary involvement as opposed to teacher selection and following Mayall’s (2000) approach, my participants also chose their own partners in order to make them feel more at ease and to generate insights from discussions between the children.31 This was also revealing of how children understand and reflect on their experience of collective worship both as individuals and in relation to each other. 31  It also helped to overcome any potential child protection issues where the school’s policy was that, where possible no child should be alone with an adult.

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I conducted semi-structured interviews32 with the children towards the third week of my fieldwork.33 This was in order to allow for time to develop a rapport between myself and the children and also to develop a common language. As Harcourt and Sargeant (2012) note, developing a common language is essential in order to ensure that research conversations are meaningful and appropriate. It also helps to empower and enable the child to participate in the research project as they are doing so on their own terms and not those determined by the researcher. Oakley observes that an interview is not a conversation, it is a ‘pseudo conversation’ and drawing on Goode and Hatt (1952), must have ‘warmth and personality’ all within the ‘guidelines of scientific researching’ (as cited in Oakley, 1981, p. 33). However, this is not always easy and researchers must walk a ‘tightrope’ when interviewing and not lose herself in being friendly (Denzin, 1989; Oakley, 1981). Accordingly, I was flexible with my approach and struck a balance by not appearing to be in a teacher position and ask them to sit quietly or on the other hand, not being too over-friendly and loosing focus on the interview itself. Teachers were also invited to participate in semi-structured interviews, and this provided an important point of comparison in terms of the motivations adults had for children in collective worship and the experiences of the children themselves. During the final week of fieldwork at each field site, I facilitated a workshop with one class in each school. The children were asked to design, plan and deliver their own act of collective worship/assembly in small groups. The aim of this exercise was to gain an insight into how children would undertake their own act of collective worship if given the opportunity and how they would negotiate and plan this within the context of a group. The children were divided into small groups and the workshop was conducted in the space of an extended lesson. This activity drew on insights from Souza et al.’s (2013) research on creative methods with children and young people. Such activities were based on ‘creative methods and on imaginative processes to help the pupils describe and give meaning to their experiences’ (Souza et al., 2013, p. 387). 32  The interviews with children varied. Some lasted twenty minutes, others over an hour. This depended on how long the class teacher could give me to conduct the interviews and how long the children were willing to stay for. 33  I intended to allow the children themselves choose the interview space, but as I soon learnt, quiet, private spaces within primary schools are hard to come by and I quite often found myself hunting for spare rooms and spaces before interviews would take place.

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The child-centred approach advocates placing the child as the expert and the researcher as the novice, thereby allowing the research to be shaped and informed by the children rather than the perceptions and motivations of the researcher34 (Ridgely, 2011b). When conducting research with children and young people, Lewis and Lindsay (2000) argues such research should be conducted in ‘the best interests of the child’. This ‘interest’ relates to ethical issues, planning, dissemination but also how to conduct and carry out research with children. Ridgely (2012) and Pattman and Kehily (2004) suggest that it is the children who are the experts in research and it is the duty and responsibility of the researcher to ensure the research design is empowering, engaging and enabling; ultimately a design that allows children to share their experiences on their own terms. It is vital that the research undertaken positions the child as a competent social actor, who actively shapes and constructs the world around them through their everyday activities (Souza et al., 2013). The children both appreciated and relished the opportunities to shape the research process and share their opinions and perspectives on collective worship. Throughout the fieldwork I did not struggle for child participants and there was a great deal of excitement and interest when children were invited to participate in interviews. Many children would often pass me in the corridor and excitedly tell me that they were bringing their parental consent slip in or would tell me how much they enjoyed sharing their thoughts and feelings with me.

Collective Worship or Assembly? Many participants, teachers and children alike were unfamiliar with the term ‘collective worship’ or frequently used it interchangeably with the term ‘assemblies’. The question then arose: are collective worship and assemblies the same thing? I entered the field without an a priori definition of what collective worship is or should be. My decision to not define collective worship in advance of fieldwork was also strengthened after examining the literature and historical developments of collective worship, through which I became aware of previous attempts to define collective worship and clarify the meaning of worship in the school context (Loukes,

34  The methodological issues and potential drawbacks associated with this approach are discussed in the following section on positionality and reflexivity.

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1965; Durham Report, 1970; Hull, 1975; Gent, 1989; Smart, 2001; Cheetham, 2004). However, one key aspect of the legal framework on collective worship which should be noted is that it is collective worship is not corporate worship, therefore distinguishing what happens in schools as different to what would happen in a church. Cheetham notes that many teachers opted to use a far-reaching definition of worship and extend it to mean ‘worth-ship’ and to celebrate and reflect ‘upon that which as considered to be of ultimate worth and concern’ (2004, pp. 27–28). This was thought to create more ‘common ground’ and accommodate ‘the multiplicity of beliefs’ found in schools while avoiding the difficulties posed by Circular 1/94 which suggested that collective worship should in some sense reflect something special or separate from ordinary school activities and it should be concerned with reverence or veneration paid to a divine being or power. (Department for Education, 1994, p.  21; Cheetham, 2004, p.  28).35 According to Cheetham, in practice this involved acts of worship which focused on ‘universal ethical truths’, ‘moral education’, songbooks that included ‘religiously neutral songs’ (2004, p. 28). In this sense, that which is given worth does not have to be a transcendent or other worldly being but could instead focus on humanitarian and more immanent concerns (Cheetham, 2004). This, however, does not necessarily avoid the problems posed by Circular 1/94 as such an approach still rests on the premise of their being shared universal, non-negotiable values, which as McLaughlin (1992, 1995) observes, comes with its own difficulties. As this research adopts an approach that centralises the perspectives of the marginalised, it was important that I did not apply pre-existing definitions constructed by those in elite or official positions. As a result, I entered each field site not disputing the perceptions of my informants and accepted their understandings of collective worship as genuine expressions worthy of analysis in their own right. As such I found it unhelpful to distinguish between collective worship and assemblies as I found that this binary only exists within the literature and not within the schools sampled 35  As discussed in this opening chapter, worship itself has not been defined in the legislation and although attempts have been made to define what collective worship is, these definitions have not been given a legal status. Discussions in parliament when the legislation and subsequent amendments were drafted and debated also demonstrate the varied use of term collective worship and more recent reports also serve to reproduce the muddled and messy nature of this requirement (Cheetham, 2004; Clarke & Woodhead, 2015; Dinham & Shaw, 2015; UN, 2016).

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in my research. When asked during interviews whether there are any differences between these two terms, many participants were confused and unable to draw a clear distinction. Their usage in everyday school life was synonymous and this was not seen as problematic. Ultimately assemblies and collective worship were not treated as mutually exclusive phenomena in the school. In his work on worship within Christian congregations, Stringer (1999) explores the meaning(s) and history of worship. After explaining his rationale behind choosing worship over other terms such as rite or ritual, Stringer (1999) argues that the word worship can still prove problematic and limiting. As such he concludes by arguing that, ‘ultimately, however, it is not the word that matters. It is what is actually going on in churches Sunday by Sunday. Words are simply handles that allow us to discuss this activity in much more detail’ (Stringer, 1999, p. 40). In what follows, I predominantly use collective worship purely for the purposes of narrative consistency but will introduce ‘assemblies’ when this term was used or preferred by participants.

Book Overview The chapters in this book do not present one single overarching argument, but centre on the questions surrounding children’s engagement with religion in school and their agency in relation to this. The chapters therefore explore the embodied, emotional, spatial, material and moral dimensions of children’s experiences of worship (and school life more broadly) across the different schools and consider the ways in which adults seek to cultivate and shape children in different ways and how children then respond to, negotiate and resist such strategies. My intention is to both contribute to the emerging literature on childhood and religion while also re-centring childhood in the sociology of religion, drawing out the importance of listening to and attending to children’s experiences of religion and non-religion in everyday life. In doing so, I demonstrate how this may disrupt and challenge the current ways we understand religion in social life more broadly. As such, the aim of this book is not to provide a comparative approach across three different school types in each of the chapters, but rather provide a detailed and rich ethnographic account of collective worship and religion in education. This book can therefore be read in the wider context of religion in public life, the issues, practicalities and realities of children’s rights and how we are to think about religion

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and secularity in childhood. This not only contributes to our understanding of the place of religion in schools but also deepens our understanding of the negotiation of religion and the secular in social life from the perspective of children which is sorely missing from both our public discourse and scholarly work. Throughout all the chapters that follow, I focus centrally on the question: How are religion, non-religion and secularity mediated by acts of collective worship in schools and how is this experienced and understood by six to eleven-year-olds? Chapter 2 sets out the theoretical approach the book develops for the study of childhood and religion. I begin by considering the constructions of childhood in relation to religion and secularity, noting how children serve as both sites of moral anxieties for the future and of wider concerns about religion in public life more broadly. I examine contemporary debates about the role and place of religion in society and demonstrate how they are often intensified and particularly heated when it comes to children. Chapter 3 re-centres the discussion on collective worship to include the non-religious and, in doing so, addresses the fuzzy and fluid nature of religion in collective worship. This chapter also challenges the simplistic use of adult-generated analytical categories such as religion and the secular, often resulting in caricatured representations of both religion and childhood. Arguing that collective worship is a space of negotiation where the category of religion is continually constructed and reconstructed, I demonstrate the creativity and meaning-making of children as they continually reimagine and redraw the boundaries of religion and non-religion. I show how children’s experiences of collective worship do not cohere with adult-generated dichotomies and why we need to reimagine both religion and non-religion within the lives of children. Chapter 4 explores collective worship as a community-building ritual used by schools to generate cohesion and solidarity amongst its pupils. I examine the strategies developed by schools to achieve this, how certain embodied practices inform the children’s experiences of this event, and ultimately, how such rituals may or may not foster social solidarity. Attentive to children’s agency, this chapter explores the tactics and strategies (de Certeau, 1984) developed by both teachers and children while considering the democratisation of collective worship through children’s actions. Chapter 5 examines the values that emerge in collective worship and how schools attempt to mediate their ethos through these acts. In exploring how schools can use collective worship as a time to cultivate children’s ethical

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subjectivities, it considers how the school organises, performs and instils their own ‘vision of the good’ during worship (Robbins, 2013). Chapter 6 attends to the spatial and material dynamics of collective worship in schools. In considering how the spatial temporalities and material dimensions of collective worship influence children’s experiences, this chapter pays attention to object orientated ontologies while considering the agency of nonhuman actors and how these are active agents within particular social processes and phenomena (Latour, 2005). This chapter focuses on the ‘acoustic architecture’ of collective worship and how sound and children’s voices are used to create sacred soundscapes during worship (Hirschkind, 2006, p.  8). Finally, the conclusion draws together and reflects on the chapters within this book while also provoking some further discussion about what this empirical study on worship in schools can tell us about the wider place of religion in society more broadly.

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Davie, G. (2015). Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox. Blackwell. Davies, G. (2000). Worship in the Primary School A Survey of Head Teachers’ Attitudes in Rural West Wales. Research in Education, 64, 20–35. Denzin, N. (1989). The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods. McGraw-Hill. Department for Education. (1994). Circular 1/94: Religious Education and Collective Worship, 2nd January 1994. Dinham, A., & Shaw, M. (2015). RE for Real: The Future of Teaching and Learning about Religion and Belief. University of London. [online]. Retrieved December 12, 2015, from https://www.gold.ac.uk/media/goldsmiths/169-­images/ departments/research-­units/faiths-­unit/REforREal-­web-­b.pdf Durham Report. (1970). The Fourth R: The Report of the Commission on Religious Education in Schools. National Society and SPCK. Editorial. (1989). School Worship and the 1988 Education Reform Act. British Journal of Religious Education, 11(3), 119–125. Education Act 1944. Education Reform Act 1988. Fader, A. (2009). Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Princeton University Press. Felderhof, M. C. (1999). On Understanding Worship in School. Part One: On Schooling and Education. Journal of Beliefs and Values, 20(2), 219–230. Felderhof, M.  C. (2000). On Understanding Worship in School. Part two: On Worship and Educating. Journal of Beliefs and Values, 21(1), 17–26. Flewitt, R. (2014). Interviews. In A.  Clark, R.  Flewitt, M.  Hammersley, & M.  Robb (Eds.), Understanding Research with Children and Young People (pp. 136–153). Sage. Flick, U. (2014). An Introduction to Qualitative Research: Edition 5. Sage. Freathy, R., & Parker, S.  G. (2013). Secularists, Humanists and Religious Education: Religious Crisis and Curriculum Change in England, 1963–1975. History of Education, 42(2), 222–256. Gates, B. (2007). Transforming Religious Education: Beliefs and Values Under Scrutiny. Continuum International Publishing Group. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Basic Books. Gent, B. (1989). School Worship: Perspectives, Principles and Practice. Christian Education Movement. Gillard, D. (2002). The Faith Schools Debate: Glass in Their Snowballs. Forum, 44(1), 15–22. Goode, W., & Hatt, P. (1952). Methods in Social Research, New York: McGrawHill Book Co. Guardian. (2011, September 11). It’s Time to Scrap the Law to Provide Daily Worship in Schools. Guardian, [online]. Retrieved March 27, 2015, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/sep/11/ daily-­worship-­schools-­law

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Guardian. (2019). Parents win right to prayer-free alternative to religious assemblies. Guardian, 20 November 2019, [online]. Retrieved November 26, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/nov/20/oxfordshireparents-win-right-toprayer-free-school-assembly Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (2007). Ethnography: Principles in Practice. Routledge. Harcourt, D., & Sargeant, J. (2012). Doing Ethical Research with Children. Open University Press. Hemming, P.  J. (2009). Religion and Spirituality in the Spaces of the Primary School: Social and Political Explorations, Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Leeds. Hemming, P. J. (2015). Religion in the Primary School: Ethos, Diversity, Citizenship. Routledge. Hemming, P.  J. (2017). ‘No Offence to God But I Don’t Believe in Him’: Religion, Schooling and Children’s Rights. Ethnography and Education, 13, 154–171. Hirschkind, C. (2006). The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. Columbia University Press. HL Deb. (1944, June 21). Vol 132, cc346348, [online]. Retrieved April 14, 2016, from http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1944/jun/21/ education-­bill HL Deb. (1988, July 7). cc432, [online]. Retrieved April 14, 2016, from http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1988/jul/07/education-­reform-­bill-­1 Holley, R. (1979). School Worship: A Resurrection? British Journal of Religious Education, 2(2), 65–68. Holm, J. (1975). Teaching Religion in Schools: A Practical Approach. Oxford University Press. Huffington Post. (2014, July 8). Christian Worship Should Be Axed From School Assemblies... Says Church Of England. Huffington Post, [online]. Retrieved October 20, 2015, from http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/07/08/ christian-­worship-­school-­assembly_n_5566275.html Hull, J. (1975). School Worship: An Obituary. SMC Press. Hull, J. (1989). The Act Unpacked: Meaning of the 1988 Education Reform Act for Religious Education. University of Birmingham and Christian Education Movement. Hull, J. (1995). Collective Worship: The Search for Spirituality. In Future Progress in Religious Education (pp. 27–38). Templeton London Lectures. Humanists UK. (2019). School concedes in collective worship legal case – will provide alternative assemblies. Humanists UK, November 20, 2019, (online). Retrieved November 21, 2019, from https://humanists.uk/2019/11/20/ school-concedes-in-collective-worship-legal-case-will-provide-alternativeassemblies/.

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Independent. (2015). Mandatory Christian Prayers in Schools ‘Should Be Axed. Independent, 6 December 2016, [online]. Retrieved April 17, 2016, from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-­n ews/ mandator y-­c hristian-­p rayers-­i n-­s chools-­s hould-­b e-­a xed-­a cademics-­ say-­a6762256.html James, A. (2001). Ethnography in the Study of Children and Childhood. In P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland, & L. Lofland (Eds.), Handbook of Ethnography (pp. 246–257). Sage. James, A., & Prout, A. (1997). Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (2nd ed.). Falmer. Jivraj, S. (2013). The Religion of Law: Race, Citizenship and Children’s Belonging. Palgrave Macmillan. Jones, C.  M. (1969). Worship in the Secondary School: An Investigation and Discussion. Religious Education Press. Khan, A. N. (1995). Daily Collective Worship and Religious Education in British Schools. Journal of Law and Education, 24, 601–612. Knox, M., Mok, M., & Parmenter, T. R. (2000). Working with the Experts: Collaborative research with people with an intellectual disability. Disability and Society, 15(1): 49–61. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-­ Theory. Oxford University Press. Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. Routledge. Lewis, A., & Lindsay, G. (2000). Researching Children’s Perspectives. Open University Press. Llewellyn, D. (2015). Reading, Feminism, and Spirituality: Troubling the Waves. Palgrave Macmillan. Louden, L. (2004). The Conscience Clause in Religious Education and Collective Worship: Conscientious Objection or Curriculum Choice? British Journal of Religious Education, 26(3), 273–284. Loukes, H. (1965). New Ground in Christian Education. SCM Press. Luckman, J. (1968). Worship in the Primary School. Learning for Living, 8(2), 17–20. Lundie, D. (2010). ‘Does RE Work?’ An Analysis of the Aims, Practices and Models of Effectiveness of Religious Education in the UK. British Journal of Religious Education, 32(2), 163–170. Malinowski, B. (1922). Agronauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mayall, B. (2000). Conversations with Children: Working with Generational Issues. In P. Christensen & A. James (Eds.), Research with Children: Perspectives and Practices (pp. 120–135). Routledge Falmer. McCreery, E. (1993). Worship in the Primary School. David Fulton Publishers.

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McLaughlin, T. (1992). Citizenship, Diversity and Education: A Philosophical Perspective. Journal of Moral Education, 21(3), 235–251. McLaughlin, T. (1995). Liberalism, Education and the Common School. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 29(2), 239–255. McLeod, H. (2007). The Religious Crisis of the 1960s. Oxford University Press. McNamee, S. (2016). The Study of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan. Murphy, J. (1968). Religion, the State, and Education in England. History of Education Quarterly, 8(1), 3–34. Nesbitt, E. (2000). Researching 8 to 13-Year-Olds’ Perspectives on Their Experience of Religion. In A. Lewis & G. Lindsay (Eds.), Researching Children’s Perspectives (pp. 135–149). Open University Press. O’Reilly, K. (2009). Key Concepts in Ethnography. Sage. Oakley, A. (1981). Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms. In H. Roberts (Ed.), Doing Feminist Research (pp. 30–61). Routledge and Kegan Paul. OFSTED. (1994). Religious Education and Collective Worship, 1992/1993. OFSTED. Orsi, R. (2005). Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton University Press. Parker, S. G., Freathy, R., & Doney, J. (2016). The Professionalisation of Non-­ Denominational Religious Education in England: Politics, Organisation and Knowledge. Journal of Beliefs and Values: Studies in Religion and Education, 37(2), 201–238. Parsons, G. (1994). There and Back Again? Religion and the 1944 and 1988 Education Acts. In G. Parsons (Ed.), The Growth of Religious Diversity: Britain from 1945. Routledge and The Open University. Pattman, R., & Kehily, M. (2004). Gender. In S.  Fraser, V.  Lewis, S.  Ding, M. Kellett, & C. Robinson (Eds.), Doing Research with Children and Young People (pp. 131–144). Sage. Pirrie, A. (2005). The Disenchanted Assembly’: The Consultation on Religious Observance in Scottish Schools. Scottish Affairs, 50(1): 71–85. Plowden Report. (1967). Children and Their Primary Schools: A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England). HMSO. Powell, M. K. (1947). Worship in School. Religion in Education, 14(2), 67. QCA. (2001). Religious Education and Collective Worship: An Analysis of 2000 SACRE Reports. QCA. Qvortrup, J. (2000). Macroanalysis of Childhood. In P. Christensen & A. James (Eds.), Research with Children (pp. 77–98). Falmer. Ridgely, S. (2011a). Introduction. In S. Ridgely (Ed.), A Methods Handbook: The Study of Children in Religions (pp. 1–18). New York University Press. Ridgely, S. (2011b). “Maybe the Picture Will Tell You”: Methods for Hearing Children’s Perspectives on Religion. In S. Ridgely (Ed.), A Methods Handbook: The Study of Children in Religions (pp. 80–94). New York University Press.

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Ridgely, S. (2012). Children and Religion. Religion Compass, 6(4), 236–248. Robbins, J. (2013). Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19, 447–462. School’s Council. (1971). Religious Education in Secondary Schools. Working Paper Number 36. Evans/Methuen Educational. Shaw, C., Brady, L., & Davey, C. (2011). Guidelines for Research with Children and Young People. National Children’s Bureau Research Centre. Shilling, C., & Cousins, F. (1990). Social Use of the School Library: The Colonisation and Regulation of Educational Space. British Journal of Sociology of Edcuation, 11(4), 411–430. Shillitoe, R., & Strhan, A. (2020). ‘Just Leave It Blank’ Non-religious Children and Their Negotiation of Prayer in School. Religion, 50(4), 615–635. Skeggs, B. (1994). Situating the Production of Feminist Ethnography. In M.  Maynard & J.  Purvis (Eds.), Researching Women’s Lives from a Feminist Perspective (pp. 72–93). Taylor and Francis. Smart, D. (2001). Primary School Assembly Perspectives and Practices: Implications for Pupils’ Spiritual Development. Unpublished PhD thesis. Open University. Smith, G., & Smith, S. (2013). From Values to Virtues: An Investigation Into the Ethical Content of English Primary School Assemblies. British Journal of Religious Education, 35(1), 5–19. Souza, A., Downey, C., & Byrne, J. (2013). ‘Making Pies’—A Way of Exploring Pupils’ Views on Curriculum Innovation. Children and Society, 27, 385–396. Stalker, K. (1998). Some Ethical and Methodological Issues in Research with People with Learning Difficulties. Disability & Society, 13(1), 5–19. Starkey, C. (2019). Women in British Buddhism: Commitment, Connection Community. Routledge. Strhan, A., Parker, S., & Ridgely, S. (2017). Introduction. In A. Strhan, S. Parker, & S.  Ridgely (Eds.), The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood (pp. 1–14). Bloomsbury. Strhan, A., & Shillitoe, R. (2019). The Stickiness of Non-Religion? Intergenerational Transmission and the Formation of Non-Religious Identities in Childhood. Sociology, 53(6), 1094–1110. Stringer, M. (1999). On the Perception of Worship. The University of Birmingham Press. The RE Council of England and Wales. (1996). Collective Worship in Schools. Culham College Institute. The Woolf Institute. (2015). Report of the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life: ‘Living with Difference: Community, Diversity and the Common Good’, [online]. Retrieved December 2015, from https://corablivi n g w i t h d i f f e r e n c e . f i l e s . w o r d p r e s s . c o m / 2 0 1 5 / 1 2 / l i v i n g -­w i t h -­ difference-­online.pdf

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CHAPTER 2

Adult Anxieties and Generational Blind Spots: Re-centring Childhood in the Sociology of Religion

In this chapter, I consider the place of childhood in the study of religion and consider how the position, focus (or sometimes lack of it), on childhood can skew our perspective and view of both religion and childhood. In doing so, and throughout this book, I focus on the experiences of children and re-centre childhood as an important aspect and variable of our social worlds which is imperative to understanding experiences and interrelation of both religion and non-religion. Firstly, I focus on the theoretical landscape of the study of religion in relation to childhood, what is missing, what is emerging and what can be built on in terms of the scholarly context in this area. I draw attention to the theoretical tools and frameworks used in this book and why they are particularly helpful when attempting to re-centre and foreground the voices of children in the sociology of religion. I then move on to reflecting on my own position in the field as an adult and the importance of reflexivity for adult researchers when working with children. I draw on Robert Orsi (2005), Peter Hemming (2015), Anna Strhan (2015, 2019) and Susan Ridgely (2005) and their work on religion and childhood and how my fieldwork experiences across these different sites helped to shape my analytic focus on the question of agency, and the ethical implications of my position as a researcher in these fields. Finally, I build on some of the reflections and arguments considered in the earlier sections and focus on the unique position childhood occupies we think about religion. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Shillitoe, Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Childhood, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39860-5_2

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The Scholarly and Cultural Context As described in the opening chapter, the attention accorded to collective worship through public and scholarly debates (e.g. Hull, 1975; Clarke & Woodhead, 2018; Crumper & Mawhinney, 2018) have, in the main, related to the legality of this provision and the justification of this requirement in contemporary Britain. Although these debates are interesting and necessary, they address neither the everyday lived realities of collective worship nor the perspectives of those who experience collective worship on a daily basis. In the following section I discuss the theoretical context of this research, and what an approach that is attentive to childhood and the voices of children has to offer the sociology of religion and the study of religion more broadly.

Religion, Education and Society Religion in Britain has undergone significant changes and development and it is vital we think of these changes in relation to other spheres of public life, such as politics and education (Woodhead & Catto, 2012). While much of twentieth-century sociology of religion was dominated by theories of secularisation (Bruce, 1995, 2002; Berger, 1999; Brown, 2001), developments and changes within Europe, the global south and America have complicated this trajectory and undermined this prediction of inevitable secularisation (Casanova, 1994; Woodhead & Catto, 2012). The difficulty with these dichotomies of secularisation and desecularisation is that they are often seen as mutually exclusive, allowing neither religion nor the secular to exist in relation to one another. As other scholars have argued (Davie, 1994, 2015; Heelas et al., 2005; Taylor, 2007; Woodhead & Catto, 2012), in the case of Britain at least, the religious and the secular exist together, and it is inadequate to only talk in terms of secularisation or desecularisation. Children’s involvement or distance from religion indexes particular debates about the role and place of religion in contemporary society and adults’ and institutional roles in transmitting religious or non-religious beliefs and worldviews to children (Strhan et al., 2017). While we might often find discussions on religion in society articulated at the macro-level of politics and official institutions, micro-level analysis of practices of collective worship within primary schools illuminate ongoing negotiations of religion, non-religion and the secular as they are lived, constructed and

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contested in everyday life. As such, we can deepen our understanding of religion, non-religion and spirituality through attending to these mundane social phenomena while exploring both adult’s perceptions and orientations as well as children’s perspectives. As Cheetham (2004) observes, collective worship is the ‘tip of the iceberg’, in that what at first appears to be an inconsequential, taken for granted, practice actually reveals larger debates and issues found within the wider discourse of religion in society. What can these acts of collective worship tell us about the shape of religion in society and what might it tell us about children’s religious and non-­ religious outlooks? Much of the existing empirical research on the place and role of religion in schools focuses on religious education (RE) (Charter & Erricker, 2012; Conroy et al., 2013). RE has often been dubbed as the ‘Cinderella subject’ among teachers and educationalists alike, denoting its compulsory but marginalised status within the school curriculum due to the lack of time, resources, training and status afforded to the subject (Garforth, 1961; Copley, 2008). This neglect of RE has led to a wealth of literature on RE in schools ranging from the purpose and content of RE to how RE should be taught in a society that is both religious and non-religious (Goldman, 1964; Elkind, 1964; Jackson, 1997, 2014; Erricker & Erricker, 2000; Clarke & Woodhead, 2015, 2018; Dinham & Shaw, 2015; CoRE, 2018; Benoit, 2021). However, there has been little attention to the everyday practices and realities of children’s own perspectives and in particular, their experiences of collective worship in schools. Notwithstanding, literature on collective worship has, on occasion, overlooked non-religion, reporting on such events as if they were solely religious acts (Hull, 1975; Copley, 1997; Cheetham, 2000, 2001; Smart, 2001; Gill, 2000; Louden, 2004; Smith & Smith, 2013). Typically, this is due to a narrow definition of collective worship and religion from the outset which limits what can be researched. In contrast, by taking a social constructionist approach, (see Beckford, 2003, pp. 11–29) rather than defining what collective worship is or assuming what can or cannot be counted as worship, we can observe the ways in which ideas and practices of ‘collective worship’ are constructed through the words and actions of children, adults and curriculum and policy materials and practices (Stringer, 2008). Doing so opens the way for an exploration into the non-religious and secular dimensions of collective worship, as well as the religious. As Lois Lee argues, it is vital that we consider non-­ religious content in order to help ‘round out our understanding of

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“religion” in society, which is necessarily exclusive or incomplete if the secular is neglected’ (2015, p. 3). Despite the controversies outlined in the opening section of the introduction, there has been little research on children’s experiences of collective worship in school. Hull (1975) attended to the more philosophical arguments around the nature and justification of collective worship in schools. Cheetham (2000, 2001, 2004) provides an excellent account of teachers’ perspectives of collective worship, although by his own admission, notes that the child’s perspective is something that is sorely missing. Vayanos (2000) also attends to collective worship but from a legal perspective concerning human rights and the protection of religious freedom. In observing the missing perspectives of both children and teachers, Gill (2000, 2004) conducted research across both primary and secondary schools and concluded that collective worship is not justifiable in schools from a philosophical perspective since it is at odds with the liberal position, which privileges individualism as expressed by her participants. Although Gill’s (2004) study adds to our knowledge of collective worship, her discussion is still firmly focused the appropriateness and the justification of collective worship and starts with the position of problematising collective worship from an adult’s perspective rather than that of a child. Smith and Smith (2013), in their work on virtues in assemblies, comment that much of the debate is steeped in political rhetoric, failing to address the content and experience of collective worship. Mogra (2016) examined teachers’ perspectives on collective worship, arguing that the knowledge of the statutory requirement and teacher’s rights in relation to this needs to be strengthened. Mogra found that amongst trainee teachers, there was a desire to retain collective worship as ‘part of the provisions being made by contemporary schools to children living in a multi-faith and multicultural society’ (2016, p. 183). Mogra details the potential of collective worship for children, arguing that ‘inside a school, the creation of a strong sense of community can empower pupils so that their overall outlook is transformed. Based on the potential of CW to be transformative, educational, social and personal, these future teachers felt that, in general, CW has a place in primary schools’ (2017, p.  11). However, Mogra’s (2016, 2017) research did not consider children’s own perspectives and generated these findings on the perspectives of trainee teachers. This is not to criticise such research but to emphasise the point that children are often talked about rather than to and that research is being done on children rather than with them. Obviously, collective worship does

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involve adults and as such, their opinions and perspectives are of value. However, the literature concerning adults significantly outbalances that regarding children, and to deepen our understanding of the social realities of collective worship, their experiences and perspectives also need exploring. I should also add that this book is not a defence of collective worship but rather an account of worship in schools that attempts to explore and critically analyse some of the assumptions, anxieties and concepts we use when exploring religion with children. Rather than problematising worship from the outset, I was intrigued to find out what worship is in schools, how children perceive this and how religion, non-religion and spirituality are mediated in such acts. In her book on law and religion, Jivraj (2013) offers a socio-legal account of collective worship, highlighting the Christian, eurocentric representations of religion as reproduced in both the religious education and collective worship clauses of UK legislation. Although not based on empirical research on children’s or teachers’ perspectives, Jivraj (2013) does provide a nuanced account of childhood and religion in law, contextualising both religion and childhood within education legislation and beyond. One of the main limitations of contemporary debates on collective worship is that most of the focus is on the need or future of collective worship without first understanding what collective worship actually is in practice (Attfield, 1974; Cole, 1974; Hull, 1975, 1989; Alves, 1989; Gill, 2000; Cheetham, 2004). As there is no universally accepted understanding of what collective worship is in the first instance, the debates to abolish, reform or protect collective worship are built on rocky foundations and lack the empirical evidence necessary to take this discussion forward. As such, the approach in this book not only focuses on children’s experiences and their agency but also the lived experience of religion. Drawing on the work from childhood studies and the sociology of childhood, I present a framework to analyse children’s engagement with both religion and non-­ religion that attends to their agency and meaning-making. I argue that we can deepen our understanding of religion, non-religion and secularity by attending to these mundane social phenomena and explore both adult’s perceptions and orientations and children’s perspectives. Current debates on collective worship focus on the appropriateness and justification of collective worship in contemporary society but fail to address the everyday lived realities of collective worship in schools and disenfranchises the perspectives and experiences of those who are at the centre of this discussion:

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children. I argue that a micro-level analysis of practices such as collective worship within primary schools actually illuminate ongoing negotiations of religion, non-religion and the secular as they are lived, constructed and contested in everyday life. As such, adopting a lived religion approach can enable deeper and richer insights into the often overlooked and missed experiences of religion in everyday life. Consequently, the lived religion approach, as I shall argue, can be helpful in re-centring the child in the sociology of religion.

Lived Religion Through investigating the agency of children (and adults in relation to them) in constructing religion, non-religion and spirituality in spaces outside of formal religious institutions, this work contributes to the growing literature and interest in everyday lived religion (Ammerman, 2007). Woodhead (2013) notes that scholars of religion have tended to look for religion in traditional religious spaces and reflect the views and perspectives of the elite. With the notable exception of a few (Orsi, 2005; Ridgely, 2005; Scourfield et  al., 2013; Hemming, 2015, Strhan, 2019; Benoit, 2021), the everyday lives of children have not been a significant focus in the study of lived religion. The lack of attention to collective worship within scholarship on religion in education speaks to a wider discourse within the broader study of religion, where religion has often been observed in ‘official spaces’ rather than in secular spaces or implicit acts. By moving beyond the ‘officially sacred’ and attending to the ways both religion and non-religion emerge and recede in different spaces, we can understand how religion is lived, negotiated and contested in school spaces (Kong, 2001, 2005b). Benoit (2021) in her research on primary school RE observed the difficulties and tensions in RE when focused on the ‘World Religions’ paradigm. Benoit argues that failing to address the lived reality of religion in schools often led to constructions of religion as ‘universe monolithic wholes and religious communities as homogeneous … This results in children, of all faiths or none, finding it difficult to relate to the content taught in RE and therefore failing to situate themselves, or their peers, within debates and conversations pertaining to religion(s) and religious diversity’ (2021, p. 21). Situated in this turn to the study of everyday lived religion, I observed religion in the unofficial spaces of schools, in the school hall, the corridors

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and the staff rooms. This is where everyday religion is ‘lived’, and I spoke to those who are at best marginalised in such discussions, the children (Ammerman, 2007). David Hall’s (1997) edited collection, Lived Religion in America, rethinks American religious life and departs from previous studies in this area by focusing on religion as lived. Hall points us to ‘religion as it is shaped and experienced in the interplay among venues of everyday experience’ (1997, p.  9). Orsi’s (1997) work also draws our attention to the hidden and mundane practices of everyday religious life amongst Catholics in America. In her seminal work Lived Religion, Meredith McGuire focuses on the ‘actual experiences’ of religious people rather than focusing on the practices and beliefs that are ‘institutionally defined’ (2008a, p. 12). Moving beyond official and traditional spaces of religion, I often encountered individuals who were a little perplexed about the focus of my study and did not understand why I was researching ‘religion’ at their school. During my first week at Holly Oak,1 while in the staff room having my lunch, I began a conversation with one of the LSAs (Learning Support Assistants), Trish, about my research and why I was at their school. I described my field of research and explained that I was interested in how children encounter religion in schools, particularly during times of collective worship or assemblies. Trish laughed and responded, ‘well, good luck with that! You ain’t gonna find much religion here!’ I was already quite familiar with this type of response, and it did not surprise me. Courtney Bender’s (2003) study of religious talk and practice in a food kitchen in New York also noted people’s scepticism over her choice of field site and her focus on religion. These concerns reflect the changing nature of religion in society; how do we conceptualise and identify it? Such scepticism does not, however, mean that we should not attend to the religious. As Bender argues, we need to: look at daily interactions where religion becomes a possible or impossible topic of conversation. We need to extend our view to the ways individuals in public settings analyse and interpret how they speak about religion and what such talk and practice sound and look like. We need to pay particular attention, at this point, to those settings that are “outside” the obviously religious ones and those to which such great attention has been paid. (2003, p. 5) 1

 All participants and schools have been anonymised and names replaced with pseudonyms.

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Accordingly, my research places discourses and practices surrounding religion, education and childhood in more fluid contexts, considering how collective worship is embedded within everyday school life rather than treating it in isolation. By appropriating insights from the literature on everyday lived religion, I draw on de Certeau’s (1984) conceptualisation of strategies and tactics in a similar way that Jensen and Kühle (2013, p.  101) have when they coined the term ‘School Islam’. Such concepts draw attention to the interaction between the strategies of the schools and the tactics that are then developed by the pupils, which in turn may influence the development of such strategies. As Orsi argues: This is a call, then, for attention to religious messiness, to multiplicities, to seeing religious spaces as always, inevitably, and profoundly intersected by things brought into them from outside, things that bear their own histories, complexities, meanings different from those offered within a religious space. It is also a call to surrender dreams of religious order and singleness or of being able to organise descriptions and interpretations of religious worlds around sets of publicly shared and efficiently summarised meanings and practices. So much else is going on in these spaces. (2005, p. 167)

The use of such conceptual tools not only illuminates the potentially ‘messy’ and dynamic nature of religion and spirituality in schools but also opens up means of exploring whether a dialectic between the strategic and the tactical exists and the extent to which children are active meaning-­ makers of religion and spirituality, reconstructing and negotiating official forms of worship (Jensen & Kühle, 2013). Considering both religion and non-religion as lived allows us to see collective worship and its associated practices within the broader context of everyday school life. In exploring collective worship within the wider school day, including maths lessons, breakfast clubs and playtime, we can move beyond binaries of secular and sacred spaces and observe how collective worship intersects dimensions of the religious, the non-religious, and the spiritual. In this way, this research builds on and moves beyond some limitations posed by previous studies of collective worship, which have only explored this phenomenon in isolation from broader life (Cheetham, 2004; Gill, 2000; Smith & Smith, 2013).

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Adult Anxieties and Theoretical Blind Spots Children’s participation or engagement with religion, whether that be religious institutions, practices, or rituals, is not only revealing of debates about the role and place of religion in contemporary society but, more specifically, it is revealing of the anxieties adults have in terms of the interrelation between religion and non-religion in childhood. Whether that be the role of religion in education, children’s rights and freedoms in relation to religious identity and belief or the power and authority religious institutions have in the lives of children, it is the interrelation between both religion and childhood which serve to create and often intensify polarised political and public debate. This has recently been explored by Karl Kitching (2020) in his work on religion, education and school injustice in Irish schools. Kitching (2020) argues that the way in which schools and educational policy engage with issues of plurality and diversity in schools can be fraught with political tension. Imbedded within much of these debates is the relationship between secularity and religion in public schools and the position either of these takes in both everyday school life and school policy and law. However, what Kitching astutely observes is that although mainstream childhood studies and education studies have focused on diversity and pluralism in schools and childhood more broadly, such scholarship can often miss how ‘children’s lives are subject to nuanced religious and secular relations’ (2020, p. 16). Despite the unique position that religion takes in the lives of children, it is often an area that is underserved in both the study and sociology of religion and childhood studies. Interweaved within the chapters of this book, I examine the sociological narratives of religion in public life and childhood, and how changing constructions of childhood have shaped public understandings of children in relation to religion and secularity. Examining the scholarly omission of childhood from the study of religion reveals how the neglect of children from our analysis of the social world and its structures, including religion, misrepresents and distorts our understandings of social reality. Alderson (2016) observes that ‘biased sampling’ and omission of children’s voices in social sciences have ‘seriously skewed’ our social analyses, ultimately resulting in the exclusion of children from the mainstream world in favour of adults and their concerns. Alderson (2016) asserts that ‘childhood, like adulthood, is not a discrete specialist topic to be flattened, sliced and squeezed into a distinct sub-sociology. Instead, children and adults exist and interact across

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practically all social concerns and are understood through multidisciplinary research’. In the main, the study of religion has largely been the preserve of adults and predominantly focused on adults writing about religion within the lives of other adults, drawing on other adults’ experiences and using adult-generated analytical tools (Bunge, 2006). This gap can be seen in the social sciences more broadly as well as disciplines such as theology and psychology (Bunge, 2006; Ridgely, 2011a; Strhan et al., 2017). If and when children do feature in such work, they do so passively, and children are usually talked about rather than to. Although childhood has not been entirely invisible and children have always been a concern for adults, they have been, to appropriate Shilling’s thinking on the body (1993), an ‘absent presence’, whereby children’s lives and their presence in the world have been seen through adult-­ generated frameworks and analysed through adult-centric assumptions and agendas. As a result, much of the work on religion and childhood to date has focused on how to transmit and inculcate religious values, beliefs and practices from one generation to the next. Children have thus been viewed in terms of their becoming, and, at times, merely markers of generational change who can inform us about forthcoming trends in adults’ religiosity. Historically speaking, most of the research in relation to childhood and religion has originated from sociology, theology and psychology, and subfields within religious studies, such as the study of new religious movements (Strhan et al., 2017). While there is extensive literature on religion and education within Education Studies, much of the focus in this body of work has been on adults’ concerns and assumptions about the nature of religion in relation to education with little empirical work focusing on the experiences and opinions of children themselves. Within this literature, research on collective worship has predominantly focused on pedagogical issues, questions over the nature of justification of collective worship and the perspective of the teacher (Hull, 1975; McCreery, 1993; Cheetham, 2004). Within developmental psychology, a considerable proportion of research on religion and childhood has relied on a Piagetian approach of child development, such as Ronald Goldman’s (1964) work Religious Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence, which investigated children’s concepts of religion and religious stories using a developmental approach. Goldman (1964) considered how children understood stories from the Bible at different ages and developed a model which traces children’s

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cognitive development from early childhood to pre-adolescence. Goldman (1964) claimed that children move from intuitive thought during early childhood, to a concrete operational way of thinking during middle childhood, through to formal operational thought with Goldman asserting that by the age of 13, children think about religion in a more ‘adult way’. This predominantly Piagetian clinical approach influenced work within psychology in relation to religion, childhood and spirituality. As a result, this approach reproduced the scholarly position that ‘children’s interactions, language, behaviour, and thinking in relation to religion were taken as evidence marking progressive stages of development, with little account of the significance of these for children themselves or for their religious community as a whole’ (Strhan et al., 2017, p. 3). In addition to this, there has also been a considerable amount of quantitative research on children and young people’s attitudes towards religion using scale-based survey questions (e.g. Francis & Kay, 1995; Francis et al., 1996; Thanissaro, 2012). Although such research provides insight into wide-scale changes in children’s attitudes to religion, covering larger samples than qualitative research can cover, it is mostly unable to provide insight into everyday lived realities and practices, and leads children to explain their experiences through adult’s terms and frames of references. Such approaches miss out the ways in which children negotiate, reimagine and re-craft their encounters with religion through their everyday practices or allow us to locate the significance of these encounters within the context of their wider social lives. From the 1990s onwards, a growing interest in religion and childhood emerged within disciplines such as anthropology, with Palmer and Hardman’s (1999) Children in New Religion and within history, as a result of the 1993 Ecclesiastical History Conference, the edited volume The Church and Childhood (Wood, 1994) was published (Ridgely, 2011a). In theology, Bunge’s The Child in Christian Thought (2001) sought to re-centre the position of childhood in Christian theology, challenging the perceived marginal place it had assumed while calling for scholars to do more to engage more with childhood and religion. However, such contributions did not challenge the ‘prevailing adultist perspective in this field nor did it equip us with the tools so that we might move beyond such thinking’ (Ridgely, 2011a, p. 3). Within the study of religion, three dominant approaches emerge when it comes to considering religion and the lives of children. Drawing on Scourfield et al. (2013), Strhan (2019) outlines these as religious transmission, religious socialisation and religious

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nurture. These three approaches to the study of religion and childhood have, at times, fed into this paradigm of childhood which diminished children’s agency and privileged the thoughts and actions of adults over those of the child. Religious transmission is particularly focused on how religious belief and practice is passed on from one generation to the next (e.g. Bushnell, 1967). As Arweck and Nesbitt (2011) observe, the transmission of religion is something sociologists know little about and yet by focusing on children and young people’s experiences and encounters of religion, we can enlarge and enhance our understanding of religion in social life. The family has traditionally been seen as a principal site of religious transmission and Guest (2009, p.  661) notes the ‘persistent importance of the family’ in the transmission of and reproduction of religious values, ideas and religious capital (see also Jackson & Nesbitt, 1993; Tilley, 2003; Voas, 2003). Drawing on data from the British Household Panel Survey and the British Social Attitudes surveys, Voas and Crockett (2005) argue that both belief and belonging have declined and conclude that such declines are generational. Voas and Crockett (2005, p. 11) argue that ‘only about half of parental religiosity is successfully transmitted, while absence of religion is almost always passed on’. However, one of the limitations with this type of analysis is that it does not allow  for insight into the processes found in cultural settings, such as schools, which shape the lived realities of religious transmission (or non-transmission). As Guest also argues when critiquing Voas and Crockett’s (2005) analysis, while such studies may ‘illuminate general trends, they do not address the actual processes of value transmission’ and that in order to fully appreciate the complex nature of the transmission of religion we need more ethnographic research which attends to the everyday realities of such processes (2009, p. 661). Smith and Adamczyk (2021) attend to this through their research on how parents pass faith down to their children, noting the lack of research on the transmission of religion and in particular, parents’ beliefs, experiences and attitudes towards such processes. Although this research does not focus on children’s experiences, it does re-centre our attention to the importance of childhood as a site in which both religious and non-­religious sensibilities, attitudes and beliefs in the lives of adults is contested, rethought and remade. In other words, their research shows how the presence of children in the lives of adults can call into question previously held assumptions, beliefs and stances towards both religion and non-religion. Edgell (2006) also reflects on this in her research on religion and family

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life in America as does Manning (2015) in her research on the experiences of unaffiliated parents raising their children. Manning (2015) notes how before having children, ‘none’ can serve as a placeholder for those who are unaffiliated but not comfortable with committing to anything else. However, upon having children, these parents feel compelled to reevaluate their own beliefs, identities and worldviews in new ways, particularly in the case of non-religious parents who then begin to question their identity in more substantive terms (i.e. thinking about what they are rather than what they are not). Although this book is not about parenting, nor the transmission of religious or non-religious identities (see: Strhan and Shillitoe (2019) and Shillitoe and Strhan (2020) for this), what this scholarly work on religion and family life points to is the central position that children take in the determination and shaping of our religious and non-­ religious landscape. It is the presence of children in our families, our social institutions, our civic spaces, our political imaginaries and legal frameworks that affects our experiences, definitions and attitudes towards religion. That is to say that children, either directly or indirectly, play a key role in shaping the interrelation between religion and non-religion in both the private and public spheres. The second approach Strhan (2019) notes is religious socialization, which can also implicitly reduce children’s agency by viewing them as static beings which do not act themselves but rather are acted upon. Typically, existing research on the socialisation and transmission of religion is dominated by surveys largely based in North American and in the has main focused on Christian samples and teenagers. Notwithstanding, much research on religion and childhood typically focuses on the family as the site of socialisation but often does so uncritically and fails to observe the ‘bi-directional’ or ‘transactional’ processes socialisation can take, as well as the other spaces and ways socialisation can take place (i.e. through peers, at school, media, digital spaces and religious organisations) (Scourfield et al., 2013, p. 10). Smith and Adamczyk (2021) note this in their research on parenting and religious transmission with children being active agents in their own socialisation, indicating the dynamic and multi-­ layered process of religious and non-religious socialisation. Finally, religious nurture focuses on how religious belief, identity and practice is nurtured and inculcated in family and wider social life. The difficulty with this approach is that it relies on a somewhat standardised approach to religion and as with the previous approaches neglects the often complex and highly nuanced negotiations at work. However, this is

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not to argue that these three approaches should be ignored. Rather, as Scourfield et al. (2013) argues, it is about acknowledging the limitations of such approaches and drawing them together with a lens which positions the child as a social actor, capable of both shaping and being shaped by other social agents and structures. However, in neglecting children’s agency, much of the existing literature focuses on children’s development and how children progress from having ill-formed and immature concepts to more sophisticated and complex understandings. It treats childhood as a phase of becoming. Children in such work on religion are therefore seen as unfinished and lacking the skills necessary to be a competent social actor (James & Prout, 1997). As such, children were treated as passive receptacles and interest in their development was only in so far as it showed them as adults in becoming (Ridgely, 2005). Childhood as a part of everyday social life, worthy of analysis in its own right, was not recognised. Childhood was not treated as an area worthy of serious attention and as a result, understandings of children were restricted to adult-centric understandings and theories (Bunge, 2006). Within the study of religion this has led to ‘religious discourse (which) has often been dominated by simplistic and ambivalent views of children that diminish their complexity and integrity, fostering narrow understandings of adult-child relationships’ (Bunge, 2006, p.  552). Although there is a growing amount of research that concerns young people (e.g. Collins-Mayo & Dandelion, 2010; Wallis, 2015; Madge et al., 2014), there is still little specific attention to childhood. Hemming notes the ‘scarcity’ and ‘omission’ of children’s views within the scientific study of non-religion, stating there is ‘almost no research on non-religion that concerns itself with this age group, aside from studies that explore events or communities where children may be involved circumstantially’ (Hemming, 2017a, p.  125). The silencing of children’s voices extends beyond the study of religion and to the wider discipline of social sciences which have predominantly historically spoken about and to children, rather than with (James & Prout, 1997; Alderson, 2016). This silencing, however, has been challenged in the social sciences by the new social studies of childhood (e.g. James & Prout, 1997; James et al., 1998). This new paradigm within childhood studies focuses particular attention on children’s agency and the need to understand childhood as a social construction and variable in social life in the same we do with gender, class and race (James & Prout, 1997; Oswell, 2013; Strhan et al.,

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2017). Crucially, this approach compels researchers to study children in their own right and not solely in relation to the needs, wants and desires of adults in order to move beyond viewing the child as simply an adult in becoming2 (Qvortrup, 1987; Holloway & Valentine, 2000; Oswell, 2013; Strhan et al., 2017). This approach has recently been taken up by a growing body of literature in work on religion (e.g. Ridgely, 2005, 2012; Scourfield et  al., 2013; Hemming, 2015; Strhan et  al., 2017; Strhan, 2019; Kitching, 2020; Benoit, 2021). Rather than ignoring or seeing the child as an object of study, this research seeks to do research with children and positions the child as an active participant (Fraser et al., 2004). The methods employed in my research, emerging themes and lines of enquiry have all been shaped by the data provided by my informants and insights gathered from fieldwork observations. Cheetham (2004) noted that the child’s perspective is a missing and much-welcomed contribution to the material on collective worship, whilst Ridgely (2012) compels us to reposition the child as a valuable and necessary participant in the study of religion. Responding to this need to centre the child’s perspective, I consider the ways in which religion, non-religion and spirituality are constructed in collective worship and how children responded to such strategies. This book seeks to rectify this gap by focusing on collective worship as experienced by the child, privileging and foregrounding their experiences and perspectives. I now move onto reflecting on my position as an adult and the importance of positionality and reflexivity when conducting child-centred research.

Do You Do Collective Worship? On Positionality and Reflexivity The bell had just rung and children in class five at Sacred Heart began to gather their toys and snacks ready for break. Ashley, a nine-year-old girl, offered to help me gather up the resources used in the maths lesson as Eileen, the class teacher, grabbed her coat and thermos for playground 2  Just as we listen to the lives of adults for the purpose of understanding their experiences as they are, we should do the same with children. An eight-year old’s experiences of religion are just as genuine and legitimate and should not be viewed as being ill-formed, immature and only of use to researchers with regards to measuring religious growth/decline and generational transmission. Otherwise, much can be missed about the nature of social reality and specifically, religion in social life.

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duty. As we were collecting the laminated worksheets and counters, Ashley started to ask me a little bit about my research and what I write about in my notebook during collective worship. I explained that I write down lots of things really, what happens, what I see, what the teachers say, the songs that are sung, the prayers that are read. ‘But why?’ Ashley interjected. I began to explain that not many people know about or understand collective worship before Ashley jumped in again and clarified her initial question and said, ‘no but why are you interested in our collective worship? Don’t you do collective worship?’ Until this point, I never considered the idea that some children might have assumed collective worship was a shared universal experience, which everyone participated in. Placing the counters in the zip-locked bag, I explained that I did when I was a child but that I don’t as an adult and that collective worship is something that only happens in school. Ashley began smiling and I asked what she was thinking. She laughed and explained that she thought it was funny that I found this interesting. Not wanting to lose any more of her break and conscious that she should go out and join her friends, Ashley handed me the marker pens and small whiteboards and quickly headed outside leaving me to finish packing up and reflect on the very brief exchange that we just had. Although I did not ‘do collective worship’ as Ashley had asked, I had been a primary school pupil and did have my own experience of collective worship as a child. I had considered myself to be an ‘insider’ of sorts as I too had experienced this ‘school religion’ through daily acts of collective worship. I was not immersing myself in completely unfamiliar cultures with practices that I had never seen or encountered previously. However, my experiences of primary school life and collective worship were a long time ago and in a very different geographical area to that of large, highly diverse primary schools in urban areas in the South West. I grew up in a small northern seaside town and attended a Church of England primary school. Collective worship in my memory was painfully boring and I frequently got sent out for talking during prayers. It mirrored a typical church service with prayers, hymns sung with a piano accompanying and readings from the Bible. Since then, I have not really engaged in any form of worship and as such my memory of what it was like to participate in such practices had faded. Attending worship at my field sites both reminded me of my own experience but also highlighted the significant differences between them.

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This call for reflexivity and the need for ethnographers to cast a critical gaze on their subjective positions in the field has been well documented in the social sciences (Bourdieu, 1990; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Jackson, 1993; Skeggs, 1997). Stringer (2008, pp. 25–26) observes how ‘subjectivity dominates the ethnographic process’ and that this should not dissuade us from conducting such research, as long as we are aware of the presuppositions and assumptions the ethnographer brings with them to the field. In The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu (1990) asks us to focus our attention on these subjectivities and biases that inform and shape our thinking, rather than assuming some false objective reality. This need for reflexivity moves researchers to continually reflect on their position(s) within the field, their relationships with informants and how their own subjective positions, interactions and understanding shape and inform the knowledge and insights formed. As Strhan highlights in her work on an evangelical congregation in London, ‘reflexivity is broadly understood as enabling a more objective understanding of the “truths” under consideration through bringing to the reader’s attention the researcher’s subjective positions, to consider how these affect their interpretations’ (2012, p. 34). It is about reflecting on how, as a researcher your position in the field, your own personal histories affect the development of the research process and how the research is then presented. Bourdieu does, however, call for such reflexivity to be subjected to scientific and academic rigour, rather than to allow it to fall foul of self-indulgence and ‘narcissistic tendencies’ (1990, p. 136). Reflexivity is not only concerned with the researcher considering their own positionality, it also, crucially, needs to attend to the culturally and historically contingent nature of our knowledge and how such understandings are implicated within the research process (Webster, 2008). Skeggs (1997) argues that as researchers we should acknowledge the origins of our knowledge and treat this as an object of inquiry itself by critically reflecting on how such pre-formed understandings and orientations affect the construction of our research. In reflecting on how my subjective positions and status within each school affect the data collected and insights generated, I draw on the insights of Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) and their reflections on the meanings of reflexivity. I involve subjecting myself and my role in the field to the same level of analysis as I would do to the participants and their actions rather than viewing myself as some detached ‘other’. Accordingly, it is important to attend to these different approaches to reflexivity and in doing so concern myself with

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both my position in the field and how the academic knowledge produced in this research is historically, socially and culturally contingent (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Lynch, 2012a; Strhan, 2012; Sheldon, 2013). When reviewing my field notes, I was then able to see how my position, interactions, and observations in the field, along with my theoretical thinking, progressed over time and informed my approach to the research. In particular, this process highlighted the tensions between my various positions as a researcher, adult and non-teaching adult and the occasional ‘awkwardness’ when revealing my own non-religious identity while in the field. When reflecting on my position, however, I wanted to avoid playing simple lip-service to the principles of reflexivity and to avoid what Skeggs highlights as a tendency to insert ‘oneself into the account’ and proclaim ‘that reflexivity has occurred in practice’ (1997, p. 360). To avoid this, I wanted to draw attention to the messy reality of social research and highlight that my positions and actions within the field were not always simple and straightforward, but often the result of constant negotiation and re-­ thinking (Law, 2004). Throughout my time in the field, I was continually aware of and concerned about my position as an adult and the distance that can occur between adult researchers and child informants. Orsi (2005) in his ethnographic research on Catholicism in America also reflected on the distance between himself and his participants. As I too was finding, Orsi (2005) felt that he could not rely on his experiences as a child to provide or broker any sort of link between himself and the individuals he studied. Orsi (2005) had to realise there had been a break and consequently, the initial confidence he once took in studying a culture and community similar to his own had been shaken. I had assumed that because I belong more or else to the same culture as the people I study, I had special access to the ways they looked at the world and could count on an intuitive grasp of the point of their practices … now it seemed to me that of all the traditions I might study, I was least equipped, emotionally, existentially and intellectually, to study my own. (Orsi, 2005, pp. 149–150)

Although I recognised this ‘break’ early on in my fieldwork, in many ways, this distance or separation between myself and my participants proved to be invaluable for my research. As this study adopts a child-­ centred approach and seeks to position the child as the expert and

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researcher as the novice, I was keen to follow this through and not to pay lip-service to this principle. I did not want to enter the field and reflect on my time there privileging my adult-focused sensibilities.3 Irrespective of what my informants said, I did not want to challenge or treat their experiences as anything other than genuine. Whether or not their thinking followed my knowledge or understanding did not matter. I wanted to focus on their lives, their understandings and their experiences rather than relying on my own adult-centric preconceptions (Ridgely, 2011b). This most certainly would be a challenge but one that, in some ways, was easier to overcome when I recognised the distance between myself and the children I was studying. My own hazy childhood memories, non-religious identity and lack of recent experience in primary schools or of collective worship all helped by allowing the children to provide me with their own expert knowledge and understanding of such events. I could not claim I knew what collective worship was and the lack of agreement between scholars also meant that having any firm idea about this practice was not possible. I had to rely on my informants. They had to show me how everyday life in primary school worked. I did not know the specific languages or terms that are now commonplace in schools and crucially, I did not have any recent prior experience of collective worship. I truly was the novice, and this is a position I ended up embracing wholeheartedly. However, being an adult studying children inevitably results in issues related to power and although certain strategies can be employed to reduce power relations between the child and researcher, there are always going to be unavoidable power imbalances. My overall intention was to reduce as far as possible the imbalance of these adult—child power relations by adopting a reflexive approach and appearing as least adult like as possible. In relation to educational research, Swain (2006) describes this approach as adopting the ‘least teacher role’ possible. For example, I insisted the children call me Rachael, sat with the children during lessons, engaged in everyday conversation with them in mornings and break times and dressed somewhat informally. Learning about the latest crazes such as 3  This is one of the issues with Smith with Denton’s (2005) research on American teenage religiosity which measures and evaluates young people’s experiences against the researcher’s own understandings. This, at times, resulted in the authors deeming some of the young people’s reflections, beliefs and opinions as ill-informed or lacking in understanding and knowledge.

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Pokémon cards or Minecraft while also listening to them as they told me about their families, hobbies and friends encouraged a dialogical and friendly relationship. Utilising qualitative, ethnographic methods in this way helped to build rapport with my participants while allowing for ongoing reflection on these relationships and the power dynamics and hierarchies within them (see Oakley, 1981). However, despite my attempts to appear as least adult like as possible, this was limited, if not impossible at times. Ridgely (2005), in her research on children’s experiences of first communion, argued that it is impossible to rid yourself of your adult status when working with children. This was also something that I discovered throughout the course of my fieldwork. There were various institutional barriers and structures which limited the extent to which I could reduce my adult status. For example, collective worship was one time where my ‘adultness’ really came to the fore. During collective worship, children sat on the floor and teachers were able to sit on seats. There were a few occasions, due to lack of chairs, where I decided to sit on the floor with the children. However, this was incredibly uncomfortable, especially when trying to take notes which also proved distracting for the children. In order to try and increase my insider status at the school, this did necessitate taking on some of the more conventional roles. My role in the classroom became similar to that of a teaching assistant, helping the teacher hand out resources and supporting some children with lesson time activities. This did not prove problematic in terms of establishing and generating field relations. It supported the relationship with respective class teachers and in terms of the children, this is an adult role they were used to and familiar with. There were also occasions where having power was necessary in terms of the best interests of the children I was working with. For example, this might be when arguments between children began to escalate and I was the only adult present or during interviews when I encouraged some of the quieter children to speak a little louder so it could be picked up on the recorder. Throughout this research, I found feminist literature from scholars such as Skeggs (1997), Reay (1998, 2004a), Walkerdine et  al. (2001), McKenzie (2010), Aune (2015) and Llewellyn (2015) particularly useful, especially in terms of reflexivity and the issues that are raised within such studies. Power, voice, representation, agency, production of knowledge and the close proximity of the researcher to the informant are all critical areas of reflection within feminist work and equally so in studies with children. After all, we have all been children and are therefore permanently in

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a position of some form of close proximity due to our own histories and experiences of childhood. This is something inescapable, something we cannot detach ourselves from and therefore something that needs to be considered throughout. It was not only necessary to be reflexive of my position in relation to my child informants but also that of my adult informants too. There were several occasions where both my own personal and professional background affected my role and position within the field and how informants perceived me. For example, on several occasions I was treated as an ‘expert’ on collective worship. Although I would always ask permission to take notes before collective worship, on many occasions the teacher leading this would approach me after and jokily apologise for the collective worship that had taken place and say it ’wasn’t a good one’. I would always explain that I was not here to judge or evaluate, however my professional standing as a PhD student, coupled with my actions (i.e. note-taking) sometimes resulted in some teachers viewing my role in an inspector like way. As this study was focused on how religion, spirituality and non-religion are mediated during acts of worship, my own religious or non-religious identity also became an area of interest at each field site. At Holly Oak School, for example, while photocopying some resources for my class, a teacher who I had not had the chance of speaking with properly walked past me and stopped, asking if I ‘was the worship girl who needed an interview’. While finding my new title as ‘worship girl’ somewhat humorous, I could not help but reflect on how my personal and professional background was being judged and perceived by others. There were occasions at other field sites where my religious or non-religious identity was assumed or commented on by my participants. When collecting teachers from the PPA (Planning, Preparation and Assessment) room for their interviews, Helen at St Peter’s asked if I was able to ‘do them a favour’. Being keen to help, I immediately said yes without asking what they needed. Helen then asked if I wouldn’t mind letting the children interview me as part of the RE lesson as their objective for that lesson was to ‘interview a local Christian about how the Bible affects their life.’ I felt an immediate sense of awkwardness and guilt, not because I had any problem with disclosing my non-religious identity, but because I thought I had deceived them in some way over the past six weeks and perhaps should have told them this sooner. As I awkwardly replied that I probably was not in a position to do this, Helen, a little surprised said, ‘oh I just presumed

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because you’re doing work on religion. That’s OK’ and turned back to her computer to finish lesson planning. Not only was I assumed to be religious due to my area of study, but it was also clear that my religion would be Christian. While at Sacred Heart my religious or non-religious identity also became the subject of conversation with some staff. My first day in this field site was an INSET day and although children were not in during this time, Mrs Allen, the head teacher, invited me to attend as a way to meet the staff and also so that I could observe and participate in their own staff collective worship. I came along just for the morning as this is when staff worship was due to take place. After signing in and introducing myself to the school receptionist, Gina, I was guided to Year Two’s classroom. I walked in and saw the room set up for worship. Chairs arranged in a semi-­ circle, a booklet with the order of service on each chair and seven candles in the centre, all different sizes to represent each year group in the school. A couple of members of staff were already in there and I somewhat nervously went up and introduced myself. Although I had already completed fieldwork at two schools, I always felt a slight pang of anxiety when starting at a new school both in terms of being concerned about being treated like an outsider while also being worried about teachers being suspicious of my researcher status. Jennifer and Lorraine had already heard about a PhD student coming to spend time in their school and so were excited to meet me. I put my bag to one side and offered to help with the final arrangements for worship. Pushing the class tables to the back of the room to create space for worship, I talked about my research and my interest in collective worship. Smiling and nodding, Jennifer asked, ‘so are you Catholic then or Anglican?’. As Sacred Heart was my last school, I felt a little more confident and less awkward about revealing my non-religious identity. I explained that I did not identify as religious, and they both looked a little surprised but smiled and nodded before changing the subject. The religious or non-religious identity of researchers when researching religion in schools can often affect the researcher’s experience of fieldwork as well as their ability to gain access and build trust with institutions and informants (Schweber, 2007; Hemming, 2015). Hemming (2009) also found this in his research and in taking a lead from Hopkins (2009) decided to modify his answers on his religious or non-religious identity depending on the audience in question. While at his community school, Hemming drew on his ‘agnostic or not particularly religious’

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identity whereas at his Catholic field site, he focused more on his ‘Anglican upbringing’ (2009). Hemming considered neither of these positions untrue as they did, in some way, reflect the various aspects of his non-­ religious or religious identity and background. Although tempted to adopt this approach, I opted to be consistent about my nonreligious identity across all field sites and this did not pose an issue with any of my informants. Throughout my time at all three schools, my interactions with children and staff became important parts of the data collection process, allowing me not only to reflect on my non-religious identity but also my position as an adult when working with children. In the forthcoming chapters, this reflexivity of my ‘adultness’ also extends to being reflexive about the theoretical frameworks and conceptual tools we use as adults when conducting research with children, revealing how the inclusion of children in our research agendas and projects often disrupts or challenges previously held paradigms due to their adult-centric nature. In sum, re-­centring children within such work does not simply mean including them within research projects. It means continually critically reflecting on your own position and assumptions, not only when planning your research and gathering your data but also when drawing on the theoretical and conceptual tools to understand such data, which are often adult generated.

Infantilisation of Religion It is often argued that the construction of a secular public sphere depends upon particular constructions of gender difference, whereby the secular public sphere is the realm of masculine rationality and autonomy, and religion becomes associated with the private realm of women and the home (see e.g. Scott, 2018). Drawing on the work of Malkki (2015) who examines the infantilisation of peace, we can observe similar tensions and contradictions in the discourse of secularity and religion in relation to childhood and question if there exists also exists similar fetishisation of children and religion (and non-religion). Malkki argues that the relationship between humanitarian logics and the figure of the child form a ‘transnational ritual sphere’, with the children becoming a ‘principle of hope on which many futuristic utopias depend’ (2015, p. 98). Orsi contends that ‘children signal the vulnerability and contingency of a particular religious world and of religion itself’ (2005, p. 77) and Strhan in her work on evangelical childhood notes that:

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We are living in times marked by both a heightened concern for children— in which the care of children has come to take on a sacred status (Lynch 2012b)—and a sense of childhood as under threat, with children seen as increasingly ‘confined, trapped indoors, cocooned by anxieties … and by increased pressures, demands and expectations’ (Thomson 2013: 1). These processes also affect religion, and as control over what happens to children has moved away from religious bodies and become concentrated in structures of state education, the media, or commercial interests, childhood is often a site of particular struggle, anxiety, and controversy in relation to religion. (Strhan, 2019, p. 3)

The anxieties that emerge from the collective worship debates and more broadly on religion in schools can be viewed in this light. Some of the contestation that surrounds the collective worship debate often stems from concern and anxiety that to amend the legislation and change the provision of collective worship could result in a loss of Christian heritage. As Orsi (2005), Malkki (2015) and Strhan (2019) describe above, children represent the many and multiple possibilities for our futures and in relation to the collective worship debate, their involvement in such practices may also signal what is possible to preserve and maintain in terms of our religious and non-religious futures. Throughout my fieldwork, I noted how children occupied this contentious space within such debates. On the one hand, representing vulnerability and being at risk of indoctrination and on the other hand, their participation in activities such as collective worship was also seen as something to protect and nurture. There were several occasions during fieldwork where I noted this latter position, particularly in relation to younger children. For example, collective worship is more frequently observed in primary schools than in secondary and many teachers I spoke to across all three schools spoke of the sense of tradition being an important part of collective worship. One of the teaching assistants, Sandra at Holly Oak, reflected on this when we discussed assemblies over coffee and cake in the staff room. Speaking fondly of seeing her own children in assemblies and her previous experience of other primary schools she said Well it’s just lovely isn’t it? You know, seeing them all come together, sing the hymns that we use to sing, celebrate the special times like Ash Wednesday. Not that I’m a strict believer, but you know it’s just special and it’s nice to keep things like that.

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This sense of school assemblies being a tradition to carry on and teachers remembering their own experiences of assemblies was a theme that emerged across all schools. In this sense we can turn to Hervieu-Léger (2000) and observe how, for some, collective worship acts as ‘a chain of memory’. Greg, a Year Five teacher at St Peter’s summed this position up when reflecting on his memories of school and his current position as a teacher Yeah I mean sometimes they [collective worship] falls flat … you know what I mean But more often than not there’s something that works, something that connects with them [the children] and you know I remember doing it when I was a kid and it’s just something we do isn’t it? It’s part of school life and something that happens in every school. So yeah, I know what you mean about them and I think there’s a lot we do to make it inclusive but you know I think they’re important to keep.

School assemblies acted as moments where particular traditions, memories and rituals can be maintained and shared across generations. This coupled with the rapid rise of those identifying as non-religious, collective worship in this sense becomes a chance to create a religious chain of memory within a growing non-religious population. However, this particular chain of memory often assumes a shared ‘imagined community’ and shared Christian heritage, often failing address how non-religious children and children from minority religions engage with and experience such events (Anderson, 1983). Often missed in the analyses of the ever changing religious and non-­ religious landscape in Britain is the unique and central position children occupy in sustaining this chain of memory. The collective memory Hervieu-Léger (2000) speaks of and arguments we can observe which support retaining collective worship in schools, ultimately focus on the important role children play in maintaining, sustaining and carrying traditions from one generation to the next. We often reflect on adults as being the main transmitters of traditions and knowledge about particular beliefs and worldviews, however, I argue that it is children themselves, particularly younger children that play an important role in this. For example, in my schools, nativities were more frequently observed by infant years (Reception—Year Two), than in junior years (Year Three-Year Six) with children in the junior years either not performing any form of play or instead performing secular plays concerned with Father Christmas.

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As I argue throughout this book, a striking aspect of this study is the agency and meaning-making demonstrated by my participants as they seek to navigate and weave themselves around the adult-generated obstacles, strategies and boundaries of religion, non-religion and secularism they encounter in everyday school life. Not only do we learn that they do indeed have agency, we also observe an adeptness and mastery in their ability to navigate the tricky and contentious terrain of religion in everyday life. However, the question that still remains is why in an increasingly plural and diverse society, where non-religious ways of making sense of life are the new norm, do we still have a mandate to worship and that this worship is of a wholly or mainly Christian character. We can look to the arguments for national heritage, to the debates about the paradoxical nature of religion in Britain (and beyond) and the dynamic relationship of religion and the secular in contemporary life. However, I argue that there’s something more than this, something unique when it comes to religion in childhood and something that can be observed when thinking about the 20-minute assemblies a significant proportion of primary schools hold on a daily basis. This being the infantilisation of religion, where religion becomes evacuated from the bodies of those seen as having agency (i.e. men) and instead becomes located in the bodies and actions of those who are seen as having limited agency: children. We can observe this infantilisation in the actions and anxieties of adults and the significant investment adults have for children’s religious (or non-religious) identities and beliefs. In sum, we can deepen our understanding of religion, non-religion and secularity through attending to these mundane social phenomena of everyday school life while exploring both adult’s perceptions and orientations and children’s perspectives. It is intended that the theories and literature discussed in this chapter provide a backdrop for the following chapters which explore the embodied, emotional, spatial, material and moral dimensions of children’s experiences of worship (and school life more broadly).

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CHAPTER 3

On Concepts and Agency: Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Collective Worship

On my first day of fieldwork at St Peter’s Primary School, I was spending the day with the Year Five class,1 who were undertaking an activity in which they had been asked to write about themselves, entitled ‘Where are we from?’ Jane, the class teacher, asked the children to write down on sheets of A5 paper the name of the country they had been born in, the countries their parents or grandparents had been born in, the languages they spoke and the religion they belonged to. While Jane was introducing the activity to the children, one pupil, Caleb, put up his hand and asked ‘what do you do if you don’t have a religion?’ Jane quickly responded, ‘For those who don’t have a religion, don’t put anything. Just leave it blank’. I had not met the class before and had only introduced myself to the class teacher earlier that morning. While the class were busy writing their statements, Jane came over to the back of the classroom where I was standing and asked if I could create a wall display showing where all the children were from. Jane gave her passport-sized photos of each child, a large laminated world map, some string and drawing pins and told her to link each child’s photo and statement to the country of their birth with the string. For the remainder of the lesson, children either individually or in 1

 These children were aged 9–10 years old.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Shillitoe, Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Childhood, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39860-5_3

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small groups came up to me with their completed sheets. Although Jane had briefly introduced me to the class, the children only knew that my name was Rachael and that I was here to ‘do a special project’ with them that term. While I was attaching the sheets and pictures to the wall, I read through the forms and talked to the children about what they had written. One girl, Maisie, aged nine, handed hers over. It read: ‘My name is Masie, I come from England and we speak eglish But my Grandad is from Irland so I am a quarter Irish. I don’t realy have a religon but I join in with the prays at school most of the time2’. Maisie explained that she ‘wasn’t sure’ if she was religious. She said that she did not think her parents were religious and she did not go to church, but that she liked to join in with the prayers at school and so felt it was important to put that down. Shrugging her shoulders and smiling, Maisie said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think I do have a religion’ before walking to the sink to get herself a cup of water. This chapter explores how children experience and negotiate forms of religion and non-religion, arguing that much can be learnt of the nature of collective worship when such analytical categories are not taken for granted. Throughout my fieldwork, I found that collective worship is a space of negotiation where both religion and non-religion are constructed and reconstructed, resulting in the boundaries between religion and non-­ religion being redrawn and reimagined by children. Through avoiding simplistic moralising lines and binaries, I demonstrate how children’s experiences and their meaning-making during collective worship do not always cohere with such adult-generated dichotomies. Religion and non-­ religion were negotiated in a variety of ways during collective worship and I draw attention to children’s reflections on prayer during such times as this was particularly revealing of this ambiguity and perpetual recrafting of such adult-generated categories. I explore the tactics children develop during such moments and reveal how children’s experiences of prayer are highly individualised and subjective (de Certeau, 1984). By doing so, I argue that a child-centred approach to religion and non-religion advances our understanding of such phenomena and improves our usage of such conceptual tools (Prout, 2005). To conclude this chapter, I suggest one way of moving beyond these boundaries is by drawing on Lee’s (2015) thinking on non-religion as a way to understand the heterogeneity of children’s experiences of prayer in collective worship. Children’s reflections on collective worship often reveal 2

 All quotes are verbatim and in conversational English.

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deeply existential issues and questions such as concerns about life after death, relationships with God, what it means to be a good person and talking to deceased relatives and pets. While there has been a growing body of social research exploring forms of non-religion among teenagers and young people in recent years, very little is known about the nature and forms of children’s non-religion. This emerging literature (e.g. Catto & Eccles, 2013; Bengtson et al., 2013; Wallis, 2015; Madge & Hemming, 2017) has demonstrated the range of beliefs and practices of young people who identify as non-religious and/or ‘unbelieving’. At the same time, broader research on non-religious adults has demonstrated the importance of education in the process of becoming non-religious or unbelieving (e.g. LeDrew, 2013; Voas & McAndrew, 2012). However, we know little about the experiences of non-religious children themselves within and beyond educational settings, or about how children encounter, construct and reconstruct particular ideas of religion and non-religion. I draw on a relational conception of non-religion (Campbell, 2013; Quack, 2014; Lee, 2015) in order to understand the heterogeneity of children’s non-­ religiosity and to conceptualise how children’s non-religiosity is negotiated and sits in relation to religion. By considering the non-religious dimensions of collective worship, we can observe how such experiences sit in relation to and is negotiated with religion and in doing so, we have a new lens in which to analyse children’s experiences of collective worship. Ultimately, in this chapter I argue that by not taking into account the everyday lived reality of both religion and non-religion in schools and children’s agency, we risk essentialising and impoverishing our understandings of religion and childhood, thereby reducing them to caricatured generalisations.

Rethinking Collective Worship in Light of Non-Religion There has been a long history in the sociology of religion on secularisation (e.g. Casanova, 1994; Bruce, 2002, 2011; Dobbelaere, 2002; Asad, 2003; Norris & Inglehart, 2004; Taylor, 2007) and with the now rapidly expanding broader research literature on non-religion and secularity, a number of terms and concepts are commonly used to name the phenomena, beliefs, practices, and identities being studied, including ‘secularism’, ‘not-­ religious’, ‘nones’, ‘unbelief’, ‘non-religious’, ‘godlessness’, ‘post-­ religious’, ‘irreligious’ and ‘anti religious’. However, as Lee discusses (2014, 2015), these terms often elide our understanding of ‘secularity’,

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‘secularism’ and ‘the secular’ with these other concepts. At the same time, our usage of ‘non-religious’ and ‘nones’ risks being conceptually and methodologically muddled, with the result that research using such categories (e.g. survey questionnaires such as the UK Census) is often unable to indicate how these identifications relate to an individual’s religious non-­ affiliation, disaffiliation or alternative form of affiliation (Day & Lee, 2014). Such data cannot reveal much about the empirical realities of the non-religious and secular life more broadly, leading to a flattening of ‘distinctions between religious and non-religious categories as “positive” and “negative” respectively’ (Lee, 2014, p. 467). In response, Lee (2015) proposes a relational approach to non-religion whereby rather than seeing religion and non-religion as oppositional, non-religion becomes a concept in which religion is centrally relevant. Rather than understanding non-­ religion as the absence or opposite of religion, non-religion is understood as ‘any phenomena—position, perspective, or practice-that is primarily understood in relation to religion but which is not itself considered to be religious’ (Lee, 2015, p. 32). This approach encourages attention to the range of ways in which non-religion exists in relation to religion. The emphasis here is on difference and the forms of ‘meaningful differentiation’, which can include—but is not limited to—a rejection of religion itself (Lee, 2015, p. 32), disrupting simplistic understandings of religion and non-religion as an oppositional binary. Non-religion, in this sense, orientates our attention to difference rather than relying solely on an outright rejection of religion.3 Lee (2015) explores this approach to non-­ religion through data collected in Berns’ (2015) research on sacred objects in museums. In this research Berns was able to show how visitors to a museum explore and encounter religion not through a ‘lens of rejection’ but through a ‘lens of difference’ (as cited in Lee (2015, p. 34)). Therefore, when using the term non-religious, I do so in a way that speaks to differentiation and includes, but is not limited to, the rejection and denial of religion. Maisie’s reflection during the ‘All About Me’ activity reveals how children construct and articulate their non-religious identities in relation to aspects of everyday school life such as acts of collective worship. Despite 3  Lee (2015) explains the concept of non-religion by using the analogy of non-violence to describe how the prefix of ‘non-’ can be used to describe something meaningfully different than the phenomena in question, rather than only relying on an understanding which rejects that phenomena.

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Jane telling the children not to write anything down if they had no religion, Maisie and other children wrote down their non-religious identities during the class activity or at least contemplated what ‘religion’ or ‘no religion’ might mean to them. Sam, another child in Class Five also reflected on his beliefs in relation to his non-religious identity and did not simply ‘leave it blank’. His statement read: ‘I came from england. My parents come from poland but my dad comes from england. I speak English and I cant actually speak polish yet. I don’t have a religon but I believe in some things’. While the class teacher’s approach, telling the children to ‘not write anything’ if they did not have a religion, treated their non-religion as an absence, this did not equate with how some children perceived their own non-religious identity: they wanted to elaborate on aspects of their practice or belief that they perceived as somehow in relation to religion. Their desire demonstrates how children experienced the limitation of insubstantial, negative classifications of non-religious identity, and they wanted to articular their identities in relation to religion in more substantive, positive or affirming ways (Lee, 2012, 2014, 2015). Maisie considered her engagement with the school prayer during collective worship to blur the distinction between the religious and non-religious and as such it made identification a little more complex. Although she was not completely sure about how to identify, Maisie felt it was important to write something that reflected her uncertainty and this conceptual ambiguity while affirming something substantial about her practice and identity. In what follows, I explore children’s experiences of prayer in school and how they understand and negotiate such occasions. I consider how teachers attempt to reframe prayer during acts of collective worship and how children tactically reconfigure such attempts in order to resist or create their own meanings. Subsequently, I demonstrate how children subvert our conceptual categories of religion and non-religion, adding further complexity to them and revealing the importance of attending to such experiences during childhood.

Prayer at St Peter’s Although there was no prescribed curriculum for collective worship, prayer commonly featured during such parts of the school day (Collins-­ Mayo, 2008). As outlined in the introduction, religious observances have been a feature of school life prior to the 1944 Education Act (Cruickshank,

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1963). Hull (1975) observes that religious observances were varied and often mixed depending on the type of school, but that in Board and County schools, would have typically consisted of a prayer, a Bible reading, hymns and religious instruction. The Religious Education (RE) Council of England and Wales in 1996 led a consultation on collective worship following the confusion that emerged after the 1/94 circular. The report stated that assemblies ‘might draw upon prayers, readings from scriptures and other material with a spiritual and moral dimension, together with contributions from those taking assemblies’ (1996, n.p.). Prayer had become intricately bound up with collective worship, though its shape, content and usage varied dramatically. How to understand and conceptualise prayer has gained considerable interest of psychologists, sociologists and theologians.4 Marcel Mauss (2003), in his work On Prayer, argued that prayer was a social fact and while it can remain deeply subjective and individual, it is a practice that is highly contingent on the social and cultural contexts from which it is derived. However, as the religious landscape has changed and diversified, so has our need to understand how prayer manifests itself in contemporary life. Recent studies on prayer demonstrate how different societies, groups and social contexts shape and inform the practice of prayer (Giordan & Woodhead, 2015). Research on prayer has also focused on prayer as a ritual or form of piety rather than the perspectives and opinions of the social actors who participate in such acts (Cornelio, 2015). Recent research5 on prayer has generated insights into the embodied and material dimensions of prayer (see Luehrmann, 2013; Bielo, 2014), prayer’s spatial dynamics (see Bender, 2014), prayer in relation to nones (see Drescher, 2013) and the importance of agency and subjective dimensions of prayer and the broader social worlds they take place in Bandak (2017). At St Peter’s, the children were invited to pray during assemblies and these prayers varied from day to day. They were usually prayers of thanks, addressed God and ended with ‘Amen’. The teachers leading the assembly always explicitly reminded children that it was their choice whether they wanted to join in or not. They explained that this was a ‘time to pray, to  See James Nelson (2009) for an overview of the scientific studies of prayer.  The Social Science Research Council’s programme on ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’ led two projects on prayer with ‘New Directions in the Study of Prayer’ initiative launched in 2011 and ‘Reverberations’, a digital project which researched the practice of prayer from an interdisciplinary perspective. See http://forums.ssrc.org/ndsp/about/ (accessed 12 May 2016). 4 5

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put your hands together, talk to God, your God, or a time to think’. Some staff leading collective worship occasionally added, ‘bow your heads, close your eyes and put your hands together’ before reading the day’s prayer. Prayers always took place towards the end of collective worship and were usually read by a teacher. Occasionally, there were class prayers in which a small group of four of five children were selected to write and read a prayer to the rest of the school. During an interview, Carol, the head teacher, discussed prayer at St Peter’s and how prayer was being presented to the children. Carol explained how the idea of ‘choice’ was a significant part of collective worship, ensuring its inclusivity for all pupils. She stated: I’m just saying ‘Dear God’. I’m not saying ‘My God’, ‘Your God’ or ‘Our God’, it’s just ‘Dear God’ and actually, you talk to who you want to. You know, you pray to whatever being you want to. Or don’t pray (…) what I think is really special about our school is that no one leaves collective worship. It is really inclusive.

This sense of inclusion, openness and choice during prayer time was also picked up by some of the children. Sitting in the kitchen used for cooking lessons, I interviewed Fatima and her friend Sophie. Fatima, aged nine who identified as Muslim, considered this inclusivity particularly in relation to the role and position of Mrs. Larson (Carol) and the trust she placed in her, saying that ‘if it (prayers) wasn’t for everyone then Mrs. Larson wouldn’t do it’. Many of my informants viewed prayer as a time for everyone and although it could be interpreted in religious terms, it can also be an opportunity for those without a religion, to think about the words said and reflect on them. Sophie, who wasn’t sure if she was religious and did not believe in God, reflected on this and explained that if praying was just for Christians, very few people would participate as the majority of children at the school are not Christian. Sophie explained that ‘she [Mrs Larson] just says God, not a Christian God, so it can be anyone’s God’. Fatima and Sophie both thought that participation in prayer was not dependent on any affiliation with any particular tradition and spoke of the openness and flexibility of prayer during collective worship. When interviewing Amy, the teacher with overall responsibility for coordinating collective worship at St Peter’s, she spoke about the prayers read during collective worship and said that ‘we’re probably doing it in a religious way but it at the same time we’re doing it in however you want take it like

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personally’. Amy considered moments of prayer and reflection to be inclusive by allowing the options for children to reflect rather than pray. Although she acknowledged that these acts were done in a ‘religious way’, she reflected that non-religious children were given suggestions of the different ways they might participate during these moments of prayer and reflection and were provided with space to create their own meanings. Carol and other staff did not specify which God children were to pray to and encouraged an individualised experience by suggesting that children could speak to ‘their God’ or sit and reflect on the words spoken. Although attempting to be inclusive and suitable for children of all faiths and none, as Amy reflected, these prayers were nevertheless performed in a ‘religious way’ through both the language used and the use of Christian embodied techniques of prayer, with Christianity here assuming the status of ‘default religion’ (Hemming, 2011a; Collins-Mayo, 2008). However, the experience of prayer at St Peter’s still encouraged an individualised and subjective experience amongst some children, which can be interpreted as bound up with wider processes of individualisation (Giddens, 1991, 1998; Beck, 2010). Yet we see at St Peter’s the emphasis on the individual inflected with a particular sense of liberal individualism, with the children free to participate in prayer as they liked, and a sense that everyone should be afforded this right (Madge et al., 2014; Hemming, 2015, 2017b). Many of the children interviewed spoke of their own authority when it came to participating in prayer during collective worship and did not see any conflict between having no religion while at the same time praying to God. Luke and Oliver, two boys from Year Five told me about their experiences of prayer and when asked what they think about during prayer time responded, Oliver: It sort of gives you a time to think and a time to say your own prayer in your head, because you know if you have someone that’s gone up to heaven or something like that then you can sort of prayer to them. Yeah cus my grandma she died a few years ago and I sort of, it gives me a chance to prayer to her and hope that she’s all right up there. Luke: It just feels like magical cus you can actually speak to them during that time so… Oliver: Yes, so it feels like a really precious part of your day.

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Taking a lead from Abby Day’s (2009b) research, I decided not to ask the children about their religious identification. Rather, I allowed such beliefs and ideas of belonging to emerge within interviews. Rather than asking specific questions about ‘religion’ in collective worship, I simply asked the children to ‘tell me about collective worship’ and from here the conversation and discussion around religion and belief would arise if the children themselves raised this. Most children did reflect on their religious or non-religious identity, but as this was not posed to them in the form of a question, they were not restricted in terms how they could frame their identity and beliefs. My decision not to ask children if they identified as religious or not was also supported by my initial encounter with Maisie, who highlighted the difficulty of identifying with these adult-generated concepts. Prior to Luke and Oliver telling me about their thoughts on prayer, Luke had described himself as non-religious and Oliver as a ‘sort of Christian’. Oliver was ‘a sort of Christian’ as he believed this was how his family identified but they did not regularly go to church. In this way, Oliver’s identification as Christian supported Day’s (2009a) research, as Oliver located his belonging in terms of kinship. However, there was still an uncertainty over those this category and Oliver was toying with the idea of ‘what counted’ as being Christian. As a result, Oliver felt it necessary to put ‘sort of’ before Christian as a way to make this uncertainty and unfinished nature of his identity clear. Luke, however, was quite clear he was not religious and did not believe in God. Oliver and Luke both participated in prayer and reflected on this moment as being ‘precious’ and ‘magical’. It took on an almost supernatural quality as both boys could speak to deceased relatives. As Luke describes ‘you can actually speak to them’ and for Oliver it was an opportunity to pray for his grandma’s wellbeing in the afterlife. However, despite this practice involving supernatural beliefs and being set apart from everyday life, prayer did not conflict with a non-religious identity. For Luke, the concept and practice of prayer did not contradict his non-religious identification, and participation in prayer did not rely on a Christianity identity or a belief in Christian doctrine. Drawing on Lee’s (2015) approach to non-religion, we can observe how the practice of prayer here is not experienced in a way that rejects religion, rather one that acts in relation to religion. Luke’s experience of prayer was not characterised by ‘irreligion’, the rejection and more hostile position towards

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religion (Campbell, 2013). Rather, it was a ‘magical’ time and one where he could consider existential questions and important matters in his life. Luke went on to tell me that some years ago his baby sister died and that prayer was an opportunity to talk with her and maintain a relationship with her. Many children within my field sites spoke of prayer as a time to speak to relatives, including those who had passed away or to pets, to sit and reflect on issues affecting them or their friends and family or as a time to speak to God. Prayer in such instances was highly relational and their constructions of belief were rooted in everyday life. It focused on the worlds that they live in and the people they know and encounter on an everyday basis. Holly, another child in Year Five at St Peter’s, also spoke about how she used moments of prayer to talk to and think about her dog, Buster, who had passed away. She described this time as ‘special’ and, although identifying as Christian, did not speak about prayer in relationship to communicating with God. Stringer (2015) found that prayers with God or deceased relatives sometimes took on a conversational or ‘chatty’ form suggesting a relationship that centred on intimacy. This experience of prayer was somewhat at odds with the ‘normative construction of the “other”’ that was stressed throughout his participants’ experience of formal liturgy, who found it difficult to engage with God in this way as it was ‘too “other” or … too “transcendent”’ (Stringer, 2015, p. 69). In examining the complex relationship with the other in prayer, Stringer explores ‘the apparent need … to engage in conversations with, or prayer to, an other that is constructed as being on the same scale and social level as the individual themselves’ and ‘that the relationship of prayer is essentially one of intimacy’ (2015, p. 72). Stringer’s (2015) participants used informal and everyday language when engaging in prayer and constructed a relationship with the other that was intimate rather than transcendent. This resonates with my findings in that, even when formal or ‘official’ prayers were read by teachers, children like Oliver, Luke and Holly were still able to exercise their own authority and reconstruct such prayers so that they focused on intimate relationships with deceased relatives and pets. Children often spoke of this need to negotiate such prayers in order for them to reflect and resonate with their own belief systems. The children at my schools also recognised this need and adapted the words read by teachers or selected the overarching theme of the prayer and created their own. Their experience of prayer was individual and

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subjective, while still remaining a social practice (Genova, 2015). Both Luke’s and Holly’s experiences also support Day’s (2009a) research on the importance of social relationships in our conceptualisations of belief. Day (2009a) found that her informants often sustained their beliefs through continuing relationships with deceased relatives and explored the performative element of such beliefs and how the repetitive performances through the act of telling reinforced and bolster such beliefs. Luke’s experience challenges the idea that belief in spirits is intrinsically linked to religious beliefs and reveals how practices of prayer may elude religious-secular binaries. This demonstrates how ‘thinking about “spirituality” and “spirits” both exposes the limitations of this binary conceptualisation and places emphasis on the ways that these terms work dynamically as part of processes of valuation’ (Bender & Taves, 2012, p. 3). Hemming also drew on spirituality as a dimension in which to explore children’s participation during prayer and discovered how children created ‘mental spiritual spaces’ in order to make the prayer their own (2013, p. 87). This resonates with the findings from St Peter’s in terms of the children’s ability to create their own meaning out of such events. The children prayed to various persons, beings, Gods or sometimes sat and thought about something important to them. However, such diversity in children’s experience of prayer was not seen as being in conflict with the practice of prayer at school. Several children said that they did nothing during prayers. However, they did not see their lack of active participation as a form of non-compliance with the schools’ strategies. Equally, children who prayed to deceased relatives or pets considered such acts as complicit with the wider social practice that was being enacted. Luke’s and Oliver’s reflections also reveal how children can use prayer as a coping mechanism in relation to experiences of loss or bereavement. Collins (2015) found this in his research on prayer requests in hospital chapels. Somewhat unsurprisingly, given the context of these prayers, most related to health concerns or for the care of a loved one. They could, as Collins (2015) discovers, reveal an individual’s deepest fears or anxieties and such prayer requests could act as a talking therapy. For Luke and Oliver, prayers in this sense also functioned as a wellbeing tool. They could continue relationships with loved ones who had passed away and ensure that they were ‘alright’ wherever they were. It is important to highlight this therapeutic dimension of prayer as something distinct from prayer as solely in relation to religiosity.

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However, not all children viewed prayer as inclusive, and some non-­ religious children did not feel able to participate in such moments. Callum discussed how he understood collective worship and reflected on the use and salience of prayer during such times. Callum: I like don’t do the prayers. I just like sit there. Cus I don’t believe in God. I don’t pray or anything. I’m just a boring kid Rachael: So what do you do during that prayer time? Callum: I just sit there and just, everybody else has their heads down like with their hands in front and I’m like (pulls a face) and I just sit there like that (pulls bored expression with head in hands) Rachael: and why do you do that Callum: cus I don’t get any of it. The only assembly that I like is … I don’t like any of them; no I don’t like any of them, unless I get a certificate. For Callum moments of prayer were intrinsically linked to belief in God and therefore participation would have been contradictory for him. Here, Callum’s experience would sit somewhere between ‘irreligion’ and ‘indifference to religion’. ‘Irreligion’ in Campbell’s (2013) work is used to denote a rejection of religion. This could take the form of a more disengagement and indifferent position or at times a hostile rejection. ‘Indifference’ on the other hand, as a separate analytical category, describes a position somewhere ‘between the state of being without a religion and of rejecting religion’ and ‘implies a knowledge of the religious other as well as a dismissive stance towards that other’ (Lee, 2015, p.  29). Callum’s reflections traverse these two categories. Although he rejects prayer, he does not do this in a hostile way: the act is meaningless for Callum and he is dismissive of the practice. Hemming (2013) examined how children negotiated acts such as prayer and argued that one of the easiest ways to do this was to decline to participate. He also observed that many children failed to sit still or keep their eyes closed for the duration of prayer and some of his informants were more interested in getting ready to leave assembly so they could be at the front of the dinner queue. I too made similar observations at my field site when, towards the end of collective worship, I would observe children getting restless and fidgeting.

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Prayers at Sacred Heart By contrast, there was less of contestation and negotiation during prayers for children at Sacred Heart. Prayers at Sacred Heart were always focused on establishing a close relationship with God and Jesus, asking for forgiveness and giving thanks. All children I met at Sacred Heart identified with a particular religious tradition. The majority of children were Catholic and a small minority identified as Hindu or Muslim. Collective worship at Sacred Heart had more explicitly religious themes and content than St Peter’s and Holly Oak. The gospel was always read on Mondays and it was the same passage that was read at Mass on the previous Sunday. Many children I spoke with like Joshua, a pupil in Year Five, said that it was a good way to ‘catch up if you missed Mass on Sunday’. During collective worship, crucifixes and candles were displayed and one child always carried the Bible raised above their head down the middle of the school hall whilst all the children sang ‘halleluiah’. On a Monday morning in early November, I walked into collective worship with Year Three. As we walked in, the Beatitudes appeared on a PowerPoint with images of picturesque landscapes, whilst ‘Autumn’ from Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ played in the background. My class sat down in their assigned places and I took a seat at the side of the school hall. Mrs. Allen, the head teacher, began collective worship by welcoming everyone and saying ‘Peace be with you’ to which everyone responded ‘and also with you’. After briefly discussing the weather, Mrs. Allen said, ‘As we come together, let’s put our hands together and say good morning to Jesus. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen’. Everyone, except me, then joined in with the sign of the cross. Mrs. Allen continued and asked everyone to ‘close your eyes or focus on the candles and think about a person that has shown you kindness because it’s these things that make a difference in our lives’. After a few seconds of silence, Mrs. Allen went on and in a soft and calm voice said, ‘and knowing that Jesus loves us we say, Our Father …’. Everyone then began to join in with the Lord’s Prayer and following on from this Mrs. Allen switched the Power Point slide to show a slide with a prayer which was she explained was linked to the time of the year. It read: ‘Eternal rest, grant unto them O Lord and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen’. Mrs. Allen explained to everyone that during November, ‘we also remember those who died in the war and about those who have worked for peace in our world’.

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Whole school prayers read during collective worship at Sacred Heart always addressed God and unlike St Peter’s, the children were not given the choice of praying to ‘God, your God or to sit quietly and reflect’. It was also common for there to be multiple prayers featured at different points throughout the worship. At the end of collective worship, I waited in the hall for Laura and Amira, two girls from Year Three who were eager to participate in an interview for my project. We made our way to the music room, put the heating on and started to talk about collective worship. It did not take long before the girls spoke about prayers within collective worship and how they experienced such acts. Laura: When we’re praying, we have to think in our minds about God and feel like we’re praying to God and we can see God in our minds. Amira: You’re speaking to God in prayer In this school, all of my informants spoke of prayer as a time to establish and maintain a relationship with God, to think of others, give thanks and ask for forgiveness. This supports Mason’s (2015) study on youth and prayer, which found that amongst Catholic youths, prayer is a relationship. The study discovered that the frequency of prayer affected the type of relationship developed. Older youths and those who prayed more frequently had a more intimate and intense relationship with God than others (Mason, 2015). Amira and Laura’s experiences of prayer also resonate with Cornelio’s study on Catholic Filipino youth. In this research, Cornelio (2015) discovers that the way prayers are answered reveals how young people perceive God and suggested a highly individualised and subjective experience which gives rise to a personal image of God. Alice and Ruby, who were also from Year Three, discussed prayer in collective worship and highlighted both the individual and conversational nature of prayer. Rachael: So, can you tell me a bit more about prayer in collective worship then? Alice: Prayer is like … ummm… when you pray to God you’re saying something to God in your own way and when you’re singing you’re also doing it. And when you’re all singing it’s like you’re praising to God.

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Alice went on to tell me that during collective worship the whole school says a prayer collectively and this is usually followed ‘by a moment to do our own prayer’. Although collective worship was more structured and regulated at Sacred Heart, children still felt able to create their own meaning and understanding from such moments. When discussing the collective prayers, Ruby commented that she did not always understand what was being said as the words used can be complicated. However, Ruby did not find this a barrier to prayer and was still able to develop her own tactics and participate during such moments in order to communicate with God. Ruby: Alice:

Sometimes I don’t understand what is being said. So normally when we go back to class you can say what you didn’t understand. Rachael: right Alice: And then a teacher will say what you don’t understand to you Rachael: So sometimes you don’t always understand those prayers in assembly Alice: Yeah Rachael: So what do you do during those moments? Ruby: Well you are talking about God, so you do have an idea what you are talking about but sometimes you don’t understand some of the words so for that one word you can either say it or you don’t understand it. But if you can say it, you just say it and you think of what you think it means or if you don’t know what the word says, you can just be quiet for that one word and then keep going with the other people because some of the words we use are very difficult. My findings have both similarities and differences to those of Smith and Denton (2005) in their research on the religious beliefs and practices of American Youth. Smith and Denton (2005) found that their informants often established a detached relationship with God and that this was only invoked when needed. The children’s reflections from Sacred Heart complicate this picture, as they discuss prayer in deeply personal terms and emphasise the conversational and intimate quality of prayer (Stringer, 2015). For some children at St Peter’s, prayer (although this did not always involve God) was also a deeply personal experience and sometimes dealt with existential issues and concerns. However, in contrast, Amira, a nine-year-old girl from St Peter’s, who identified as Muslim, told me that

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she prays to God both at school and at home but only the purpose of gaining something in return. Amira explained, ‘my mum says it’s good to pray, you can ask for stuff … Basically, I only pray when I want something like, Dear God, I really want an X Box (Laughs)’. Amira demonstrated a more detached relationship with God while many other informants also expressed the highly individualised and subjective nature of prayer, both of which support Smith and Denton’s (2005) findings. However, in contrast to Smith and Denton’s (2005), children in my study still viewed the individualised experience of prayer as highly relational which did not conflict with the idea of prayer also being part of a wider social and collective act. Rather, my findings confirm Day’s (2010) work in that individualised belief does not have to preclude the social as it also can be highly bound up in relationships with friends and family. In the same way, I found that children were able to maintain this individualised and subjective experience of prayer while also being able to participate in wider social rituals. The children did not see their recrafting or individual experience of prayer as being non-complicit to the school’s wider practice, but rather as a legitimate and authentic experience which cohered with the social realm in which they belonged. Cornelio (2015) considers that a possible explanation for this highly communicative and personal approach to prayer for adolescents is that young people are at a stage of their life which compels them to create and seek meaning in life. Cornelio’s (2015) participants experienced prayer as deeply emotional and in entering into conversation with God they were able to orientate themselves both inwardly and upwardly, establishing a relationship with both a higher and transcendent being while also taking time for self-reflection and evaluation. Cornelio’s (2015) participants’ experience of prayer is also highly individualistic but not in the same way that Smith and Denton (2005) perceive individuality amongst their young people. Although collective worship at Sacred Heart was more explicitly religious than any of my other field sites, there was still a tension and a negotiation in terms of how religion was mediated during this part of the school day. Describing collective worship at Sacred Heart, Elaine, the head teacher, talked about the significance of individual faith and the importance of the school’s Catholic identity. Reflecting on this, Elaine discussed how different members of staff lead collective worship and that being too overt or too subtle when leading worship can prove to be barrier for others.

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They [the staff] are all really really good people but some err naturally find that ability to be more overt easier than others. So, I think that becomes a barrier in terms of collective worship cus that gets picked up by the people and by the same token being very overt with that and kind of verging on ‘God Squady’ can also put people off.

As with St Peter’s, Elaine at Sacred Heart also asked children to close their eyes, bow their heads and place their hands together. However, Elaine shared with me that she was concerned that prayer was ‘not really allowed in schools’. I asked her why she thought that and she recalled ‘reading something somewhere’ about prayer being banned in schools. Nevertheless, despite her concerns about the legality of prayers in school, Elaine felt compelled to overlook this due to the school’s intake and strong Catholic identity. She stated: Officially I’m not allowed to tell the children to put their hands together actually. The rule is, I shouldn’t really cus I’m putting my faith onto others. But I argue in a school with ninety-two percent Catholic families, why wouldn’t I say let’s come together and put our hands together?

For Elaine, the Catholic identity of the school was integral to how religion was mediated throughout school life and in collective worship. She differentiated between Sacred Heart and schools without a religious character and how schools like Sacred Heart need to ‘live’ this part of their identity. We are a school but we’re not any school. You can go to any school down the road. Any school can have collective worship but the parents choose to send their children to a faith-based school for a reason that is unlike any other … it (faith) has to be lived out …. I worked for a term in a Catholic school in another part of the city with about 20 – 25% Catholic families. They thought I was bloody bonkers. They really thought I was bonkers. I was so ‘Holy Joe’!

Prayer and Poems at Holly Oak Prayer at Holly Oak was considerably different to prayer at Sacred Heart and St Peter’s. Although this was a school without a religious character, the school had an official school prayer, which was read during each act of collective worship. However, the staff senior leadership team saw this as

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problematic since many pupils either did not identify with a religion or were not Christian. They therefore removed any references to ‘God’, ‘Amen’, and changed its name from the ‘school prayer’ to the ‘school poem’ in order to be more inclusive. Having previously addressed God, given thanks for education, learning and friends and closing in ‘Amen’, the ‘school poem’ now read: Thank-you for today For working hard and learning well Thank-you for friends, fun, for everyone Thank-you for today

The senior leadership’s renaming of the school prayer resonates with the assumption that the ‘public sphere is a secular sphere’ with the secular sphere being somehow a ‘neutral sphere’ (Dinham & Francis, 2016, p. 5). However, despite this rebranding, the terms ‘school prayer’ and ‘school poem’ were both still used throughout the school during my fieldwork, with some staff and children using them interchangeably and others preferring not to use the term ‘prayer’. Alex, one of the HLTAs (Higher Learning Teaching Assistants), explained that ‘well it’s not to do with God, it’s not religious and so it’s not a prayer’. However, such attempts to draw up boundaries between the secular and the religious were not always successful as many of the staff and children still used the term prayer. During an interview with Tina, the RE coordinator whose responsibilities also included collective worship, I asked about the school prayer and poem and explained that I had heard both terms used in school. Yeah, it used to be something like, ‘thank you for today’ … it was something like, ‘thank you for today God, for working hard’, or something like that. I know there was ‘God’ in there and at the end you say ‘Amen’. But because we’ve got children of different faiths in the school, we just took that out, so it was inclusive … basically, I don’t think they had an ‘appropriate’ prayer, so they came up with the poem, so then it was inclusive and then they were talking about puttin in the word ‘God’ or ‘Amen’ at the end but then they said because we have children of different faiths here, it wouldn’t be inclusive, so that was taken out, so that everyone can say the same prayer or poem.

Tina reflected on how tensions and uncertainties over prayer in assemblies and the use of the term ‘prayer’ itself resulted in teachers attempting to avoid it altogether. The effort on the part of some staff to change the

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school prayer into the school poem is revealing of the anxieties teachers have over whether assemblies can be accessible and inclusive for all pupils while including prayer. From this perspective, it would appear that the diverse nature of the school had a secularising effect. The reference to God and inclusion of ‘Amen’ in the prayer was seen as at odds with the plural and diverse nature of the school and maintaining this ‘sacred canopy’ became untenable (Berger, 1969). Strhan (2015) in her ethnography on the everyday lives of conservative Christian evangelicals in London explored dimensions of secularisation with specific reference to how the spatial dynamics of the city affect such processes. In exploring the relationship between religion and the city, Strhan (2015) considered the extent to which urbanisation makes a shared ‘sacred canopy’ over an increasingly diverse and plural metropolis difficult to maintain (Berger, 1969) or on the other hand, whether such spaces create a new a ‘religious marketplace’ in which different religious groups are forced to compete with each other for ‘customers’ (Strhan, 2015, p. 38). Although Strhan (2015) is reflecting on the city, we can draw on the question she raises when thinking of collective worship in the primary school. One of the principle arguments against the legal requirement for collective worship questions how such a provision can be maintained within an increasingly diverse and religiously plural society (Hull, 1975; Clarke & Woodhead, 2015). The legal requirement of collective worship creates a pseudo legally mandated ‘sacred canopy’; however, it is a canopy that attempts to covers spaces and communities with different conceptualisations (if not rejections) of the sacred. Both Beaman (2013) and Sullivan (2009), drawing on the American and Canadian contexts, reveal the challenges when presuming a universal religious or spirituality identity across populations. The insistence that we are all religious, or we all have spiritual needs, leaves no space for, those who are agnostic, atheist, for whom religion is simply not that important, or for those who would prefer to exclude the examination of their religious beliefs and practices from scrutiny and assessment. (Beaman, 2013, p. 153)

The way teachers dealt with the legal requirement of collective worship reveals how boundaries between the religious and the secular are contested within everyday school life. This official boundary established by the senior leadership team reflected the anxieties felt by adults in relation

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to the place of religion in schools. However, such secularising attempts were continuously disrupted by both children and staff at Holly Oak. Tina continued to explain the contradictory nature of this approach to the school poem. Basically, there’s no consistent thing because people are scared. So, when it started, they said it’s our school poem and then someone else said prayer and I said is it a prayer or a poem and basically it depends who’s asking, do you know what I mean? So, if a non-religious parent came in we would say it’s our poem, if Ofsted came in, we would say it’s our prayer … and so the staff will say prayer or poem cus at the end of the day it’s fear.

Tina’s words reveal not only the difficulty of maintaining a shared ‘sacred canopy’ and how prayer is negotiated and rebranded in school as a result but also comments on how such negotiations emerge out of anxieties or fear adults have over the category of religion. In discussing how the term ‘prayer’ would be used for Ofsted, the school inspectorate, but not for a non-religious parent, Tina demonstrated how the school attempted to uphold different boundaries of religion and non-religion at any one time. Aware that not all parents would be at ease with the legal requirement of collective worship, the school adjusted their language in order not to offend the non-religious. Smith (1998) speaks of ‘sacred umbrellas’ that have been created out of the pieces of fabric from the older sacred canopies which were no longer viable in modern culture. In this way, rather than having one ‘sacred canopy’ which covers all of society, we have smaller versions, umbrellas, which allow for smaller groups and individuals to maintain their own ‘sacred canopy’ while operating within diverse and highly differentiated societies (Smith, 1998). This analogy resonates to some extent with Tina’s reflections on religion at Holly Oak, in that it allows us to envisage a society where different ideas of the sacred and competing structures of meaning can exist in one space. Some of the children at Holly Oak also had their own understandings and interpretations of the school prayer. Tom, aged seven, discussed his experience of school assemblies and told me that during assemblies, he sings, dances and prays. When I asked him what he does during prayer, he reeled off the school prayer with great enthusiasm. I asked him if he prayed anywhere else and he said that he did so at church and Sunday School. We talked about what these prayers meant and whether they were similar.

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Tom informed me that, ‘well at church I pray to God but at school I pray to the school or Sarah [the head teacher], so it’s different … It’s not the same’. For Tom, the concept of prayer was not restrictive or problematic; it was an act that could feature in school or in church for different reasons. Prayer, as understood by Tom, was spatially contingent, generating different meanings depending on the location and context in which it was used. As with many of the children’s actions and reflections, Tom’s understanding and meaning-making during prayer could be understood in terms of de Certeau’s (1984) ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’. As set out by de Certeau (1984), strategies are the actions associated with institutions or those in governance, whereas tactics are the operations carried out by those who do not possess such power as a way to subvert or reconfigure the regimes of those in authority. Tom had resisted the strategies as laid out by the school and did not adopt the ‘official’ terminology of the ‘school poem’ but rather continued to refer to this act as a prayer and tactically reconstructed such moments by praying to the head teacher. The school may have tried to set its own boundaries of what is religious and what is secular by rebranding the school prayer, but children’s agency will also affect and shape how such practices are understood and lived out. Attending to children’s agency in this way we can observe how prayer in collective worship at Holly Oak was neither completely religious nor completely secular (Ford, 2011; Woodhead & Catto, 2012). It is in light of this thinking that we need to rethink collective worship in schools, its heterogeneity and children’s meaning-making within this.

Children’s Agency: Challenging Adult-Generated Categories When children express beliefs and practices that do not cohere with traditional or elite understandings of religion, these are often dismissed as ill-­ formed or lacking in maturity. Smith and Denton (2005)’s research on young people found that many of their teenage informants were unable to talk about their religious beliefs, practices and traditions and although ‘impressively articulate’ in other areas of their lives, ‘the vast majority simply could not express themselves on matters of God, faith, religion, or spiritual life’. This, Smith and Denton argue, was a result of young people not being ‘effectively educated’ or having the opportunities to talk about their faith (2005, p. 33).

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However, treating young people’s views in this way can result in their expressions of religion or spirituality being diminished in terms of their authenticity or relevance. As these teenagers’ understandings and practices do not cohere with Smith and Denton’s (adult) perception of what religious languages and knowledge should be, they conclude that this indicates teens’ inadequate socialisation within their respective religious traditions. They state that ‘the net result, in any case, is that most religious teenagers’ opinions and views—one can hardly call them worldviews—are vague, limited, and often quite at variance with the actual teachings of their own religion’ (Smith & Denton, 2005, p. 134) (italics my emphasis). Smith and Denton consider that their findings should not be taken to suggest that American youth are ‘dumb’ or ‘deplorable’ but that ‘understanding and embracing the right religious faith and belief according to their tradition does not appear to be a priority in the lives of most US adolescence’ (2005, p. 137). Smith and Denton’s (2005) emphasis on the ‘actual’ and ‘right’ understandings of religion creates an imagined idea of what counts as religion and resonates with the concerns of Asad (1993) when exploring the genealogies of religion. By thinking that we know what really counts as ‘religious’ ignores how this category has been constructed by those in positions of power and authority. Rather than dismissing children and young people’s views in this way, what would it mean to take their perspectives on religion and non-religion seriously as these are lived and articulated, rather than framing these as inadequate when measured by particular constructions of ‘actual’ or ‘right’ understandings of religion? Children and young people’s articulations may not necessarily cohere with what is written in text books or spoken from the seat of religious authority, but this does not mean it is any less an expression of the social reality of religion. Rather attending to children’s lived negotiations of religion, non-religion and spirituality invites us to consider how the boundaries within which ‘the religious’ and ‘the non-religious’ or ‘the secular’ are often demarcated by those in positions of authority are not experienced in the same way by children, whose understandings challenged these reified differences. Children’s experiences of and expressions of religion and non-religion invite us to consider how people live in ways that do not necessarily seek to amplify or demarcate differences between religion and non-religion, and to consider these expressions as real experiences of lived religion. Ridgely found this in her ethnography on children’s first communion and reflected that it would be easy to dismiss some of her informants

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worries and reflections as moments when ‘kids say the darndest things’ but doing so would also be to also dismiss a very real experience of lived religion (2005, p. 170). Equally, I argue that it is important to take children’s experiences of collective worship seriously, even if they evade or disrupt our adult sensibilities and conceptual categories. Children at all schools had different experiences and understandings of prayer and developed their own tactics of how to participate in such moments and create their own sense of coherence. Whether this was communicating with deceased relatives or pets or developing a personal relationship with God and making sense of complicated words used in prayers, children participated in prayer in their own way. Excluding children’s experiences impoverishes our understanding of both religion and non-religion in society. The reflections of children at St Peter’s, Sacred Heart and Holly Oak demonstrate the diverse ways children perceive and experience prayer during collective worship and how religion and non-religion are mediated through this act. As outlined earlier, the new paradigm within childhood studies promotes children’s agency and understands childhood as a social construction which encourages us to look at children’s lived experiences and resist basing our analyses on our adult-centric assumptions (James & Prout, 1997; James et al., 1998). This turn towards child-centred philosophies is intrinsically linked to the changing religious and spiritual landscape in society. Woodhead and Heelas et al. observe that the wider subjective turn in society which resulted in the emergence of new spiritualities also accompanied a wider cultural shift as we see ‘child-centred’ or ‘learner-centred’ turns in education, ‘consumer-centred’ in purchasing culture and ‘patent-­ centred’ in health care (2005, p. 5).6 However, in taking children’s agency seriously in the study of religion, we need to consider the different forms that children’s agency takes (Strhan, 2019) and the ways in which the formation of children as agents is morally, spatially, temporally and materially complex (Oswell, 2013) and takes on different modalities in relation to religion. In public debates surrounding collective worship, recommendations have been made for replacing such acts with moments of reflection or ‘collective spirituality’ (Hull, 1995; Cheetham, 2004; Clarke & Woodhead, 2015). Spirituality is here seen as a way to foster inclusivity, promote 6  For example, in 1989 the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) provided children with new rights including, the right to freedom of expression (article 13) and the right to thought, conscience and religion (article 14).

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children’s agency and encourage individual reflection (Cheetham, 2004; Hay & Nye, 2006), while religion can often be bound up with fears of indoctrination and divisiveness, implicitly predicated on an idea of the child as passive and vulnerable (Cheetham, 2004; Copley, 2005). However, while children are influenced by the social structures around them, they should also be acknowledged as actors in relation to religion in their own right (Hemming, 2017b). As Tisdall et al. (2009) and Ridgely (2011b) observe, children are not passive receptacles, simply at the will of adult’s desires and motivations. Research by Hemming and Madge exploring young people’s engagements with religion (2011) demonstrates how young people create their own meanings and values in relation to particular rituals and acts. Hemming argues that ‘recognising children as active agents opens up the possibility that pupils may resist or negotiate religious values and practices promoted and enacted in schools, through subtle or less subtle means’ (2017b, p. 4). Seeking to deepen our understanding of the complexities of the ways in which children have agency, Oswell argues that ‘it makes little sense to frame children’s agency in terms of a simple binary, having or not having agency, capacity or power’ (2013, p. 269). Oswell argues that we need to consider of agency in relation to the hierarchies under which children are placed and moves beyond more simplistic dichotomies towards instead understanding agency as ‘relational’. Through challenging ‘the myth of the individual child’ we can observe how children always exist in a network of relations to human and non-human objects and it is within such relations that their agency is shaped in particular ways (2013, p. 263). Oswell (2013) draws attention to how one way of approaching children’s agency is in relation to de Certeau’s (1984) thinking on ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’. He develops the notion of ‘tactical interstitial agency’ which draws our attention to how agency is enacted by those who are not in positions of authority and power and as such do not have the same access to resources to those that are (2013, p. 59). For example, at St Peter’s, collective worship was scheduled before the first playtime of the day. As a result, children would often come with their coats and toys ready for playtime. School staff saw this as problematic, as children would often play with the toys during worship. In order to avoid this, the teachers would ask the children to leave any toys on the bench by the door to the hall before taking their seat on the floor. This would occasionally frustrate some children and I would observe with great interest the lengths children would go to resist such strategies and sneak their contraband into worship. Sliding Pokémon

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cards up their sleeves, hiding conkers in cardigan pockets and then discreetly getting these out once worship had commenced. At the end of one collective worship, I asked Jenny, aged 9, why she took her cards into collective worship. She told her she found collective worship ‘boring’ and it was more useful for her to spend this time organising her Pokémon cards ready for when trading would commence at playtime. Here children’s agency was not only implicated by the adults around them but also by non-human actors. The presence of these objects and the strategies developed by the staff to stop them being used during worship shows the intricate interrelations of human and non-human actors in which children are located and how their agency is shaped by these networks. This agency is therefore defined through a ‘logic of the hybrid’ and the ‘borderland condition’ within which children are placed (Oswell, 2013). Tactical interstitial agency, then, has a more creative, experimental relation to structures and recourses to hand. Children and young people, who so often are denied access to resources and to the means of accumulation resources, find strength through their creative bricolage, through their makeshift mash-ups and their making do. (Oswell, 2013, p. 59)

Mapping this ‘generational division’ onto children’s agency allows us to observe the actions of children’s in light of the ‘borderland conditions’ under which they are placed (Honwana, 2005, p. 50) as cited in Oswell (2013, p.  59)). Feminist scholars have also found similar limitations in thinking of agency when studying women and religion. Poveda (2017) encountered this when conducting his research on Transgender Orthodox Jews, outlining the negative bias of some scholars against religion and the scrutiny and suspicion that particular gendered religious practices have been viewed with as a result. However, writers such as Butler (2008) and Mahmood (2005) sought to move beyond such thinking and revisit gender and agency in relation religion in order to create the opportunity ‘non-oppressive feminism(s)’ (Reilly, 2011, p. 6) as cited in Poveda (2017, p. 152)). In the same way, I approach children’s agency in relation to religion and non-religion to create the possibility for ‘non-oppressive’ constructions of childhood that are sensitive and attentive to children’s perceptions rather than the biases and anxieties of adults. Discussing the complexities of women’s agency in relation to a women’s piety movement in the Islamic revival in Cairo, Saba Mahmood (2005), for example, highlights how agency is often constructed in very narrow terms

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and is typically understood as a means to exercise resistance and subvert the dominant power structures at work. Drawing on the work of Butler (1990) and other feminist literature, Mahmood (2001a, 2005) suggests that as our understanding of agency only pays attention to acts of resistance or noncompliance, we deny the existence of women as compliant and docile agents. In developing a more nuanced account of agency which is not confined to liberal assumptions of resistance and non-­compliance, Mahmood (2005) deploys the notion of the ‘docile agent’. The docile agent demonstrates how agency can also be compliant, accepting of wider social structures and prevailing cultural norms and hierarchies. Mahmood’s (2001a, 2005) reconceptualisation of agency begs us to question the assumptions as researchers we bring to the field and consequently, the risk of our own subjectivities dominating those that we do research with. From the children’s reflections we can observe how children negotiated and reconstructed moments of prayer in collective worship. Many of the children were happy to participate in prayer and repeat the words and actions of adults. However, this should not be confused with these children having a lack of agency or autonomy. Although the children complied with adult’s strategies, they still created their own meaning and individual experience during such acts. For example, Callum was quite clear in his refusal to participate in prayer as he ‘didn’t get it’. Other children did participate in prayer but reconstructed such moments in order to create a sense of coherence with their own worldviews and beliefs. Initially, when Callum spoke of his experience during prayer, I noted in my fieldwork journal ‘Callum—non-compliant/resistance in prayer’. It was only a few weeks later when I was talking with Callum on the way down to lunch, that I had misunderstood this refusal to participate in prayer. Midway through our discussion I said ‘So yes, you have to either pray or think about…’ to which Callum quickly interrupted, ‘No you don’t. You don’t have to do anything. It’s up to you’. While on the first encounter, I assumed that Callum’s ‘irreligious’ or ‘indifferent’ position implied resistance, his own later explanation suggests that his refusal to participate was actually a form of compliance rather than noncompliance. Callum did not see refusing to pray as at odds with the teacher’s expectations. Children’s agency in relation to religion can be compliant with adult-determined activities and it can also be resistant. Understanding the different forms that children’s agency takes is essential to understanding both how they experience acts of collective worship and how they redraw the boundaries between concepts such as religion and non-religion.

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Conclusion Understanding the lived realities of both religion and non-religion and the relation between the two requires attending to the experiences of children, an often previously marginalised group in the study of religion, as they negotiate these categories in contexts such as everyday school life. As we have noted at the start of this chapter, there has been much written about the problematic category of religion and its application to everyday life (Asad, 1993; Fitzgerald, 2000; De Vries, 2008). Although this literature is crucial in terms of understanding or challenging the category of religion, there is still a dearth of research that presents how these adult-­ generated categories influence the worlds of children. Accordingly, a child-centred perspective towards religion and the secular in social life would enhance and improve our understanding of such phenomena. In addition to the concept of religion facing criticism for its predominately Protestant Christian, Eurocentric, colonial constructions, the binary opposition of religion and the secular has also come under increasing scrutiny as we observe phenomena and practices which fall outside this spectrum and disrupt our preconceived ideas of what counts as religious (Bender & Taves, 2012). With specific reference to prayer, Woodhead questions how to deal with practices which sit outside our definitions, reflecting that ‘it is possible to stick with the established definition and exclude these from consideration as prayer, and there would be gains— such as clarity and comparability—in doing so. But there would also be a loss’ (2015, p.  214). Prayer at my field sites was diverse and fluid. Conversations with my informants demonstrated how prayer in collective worship sometimes evaded what could be easily categorised as religious and revealed how both adults and children have to continuously manage and rethink the categories of religion and non-religion during such acts. The reflections from the children at my field sites demonstrate that it is insufficient to solely rely on categories that have been generated by adults as they miss out on the highly nuanced constructions and reconstructions of religion by children. The research we have on religion, especially everyday lived religion, is from the perspectives of adults and the data is typically from the lives of adults. Dawn Llewellyn (2015) notes this imbalance in the study of religion when exploring women’s religiosity and spirituality. Llewellyn (2015) argues that the disciplinary disconnections between feminist studies and religious studies impoverish both disciplines and can result in

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essentialising women’s experiences of religion. In the same light, I also argue that disconnections between childhood studies and religious studies can result in creating caricatured understandings of children’s encounters with religion. We need to ensure that such research on religion and non-religion includes children and their thoughts, feelings and experiences of such phenomena. Ridgely (2012) argues that researchers need to reposition the child as a central focus of study and view them as social actors in their own right with the ability to create meaning from the various networks and encounters they have. As we have seen throughout this chapter, some children found the category of religion problematic and desired to create a sense of coherence between their own experiences and how they resonated with the concepts of religion and non-religion. Some children tactically reconstructed certain acts in order to create a genuine sense of meaning from them, whereas others rejected them. It’s clear that for some children, for example Maisie and Oliver, neither the term ‘religious’ nor ‘non-religious’ will suffice. Voas (2009) also found this ambiguity when trying to explain the fall in religiosity in Europe coupled with the prevalence of Christian belief, practice and self-identification. In trying to explain populations who are neither regular churchgoers nor consciously non-religious, Voas uses the term ‘fuzzy fidelity’ or fuzzy religiosity in order to convey the ‘casual loyalty’ towards certain traditions alongside the gradual decline in overall religiosity (2009, p. 155). While this concept may be useful to draw attention to this group who fall in between or outside of religion and non-­religion, for the children in this study, although on the surface there appears uncertainty, ambiguity and indifference, closer attention also allows us to observe their senses of certainty, clarity and coherence. For Tom, there was little that was fuzzy about his experience of prayer. Quite simply, prayer at church was for God, whereas at school it was for the head teacher. Prayer, therefore, is religiously and non-religiously diverse and our analytic categories should reflect this heterogeneity accordingly. Listening to children’s experience of collective worship and, in particular, prayer enlarges and enhances our understanding of our conceptual tools and frameworks. We cannot do away with such terms and language, but we can apply them more sophisticatedly and with greater nuance when we observe children’s perspectives.

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CHAPTER 4

The School Family: Rituals of Solidarity, Belonging and Cooperation

I arrived at Sacred Heart late November on a wet and windy Thursday morning. After I hung up my coat to dry in the staff room and made myself a cup of tea, I made my way to reception. I had been invited by Mollie, the reception class teacher, to their first ‘class worship’ of the year. This class worship, or ‘reflection time’ as it is sometimes known, happened in most year groups once or twice each week, and I had previously observed Years Three, Four and Five’s class worship time at the beginning of the term. Mollie, a young, newly qualified teacher in her earlier twenties, was a little nervous about how this might go. I walked in just as the children were brought back inside from their free time. I quickly nodded to Mollie as she gathered the children ready for class worship. ‘Right reception, please start putting your toys away and make sure that all your wellie boots are lined up nicely by the coat pegs’. The children milled around busily tidying their various toys. I quickly reintroduced myself to the teaching assistant and explained why I was there. After I found myself a chair to sit on, the children were all called to the carpet area and asked to sit on the floor in a circle. Mollie joined the class, sat on a chair and placed a small whiteboard next to her. In a soft voice with a slow and steady pace, Mollie introduced reflection time to the children.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Shillitoe, Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Childhood, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39860-5_4

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I’ll just wait for those noisy children to come in and join us. So, we’ve had phonics, we’ve had choosing our learning and now we’re going to have some reflection. This is a time when we can talk to who? Who can we talk to? Who do we feel close to?

A few children shouted out without putting their hands up. Chloe, a four-year-old girl with pigtails, popped her hand up and replied, ‘Ummm, God?’ God. Yes, we talk to God. We are going to feel close to God. While we wait for those slow coaches, let’s have a think and remember what we said we were going to do. Can you remember what we said we were going to do when we gathered together? I’m going to give you a clue. We decided we were going to sit in a circle because that’s what we always do in reflections and we were going to put this in the middle of the circle.

Mollie held up a large colourful children’s Bible for all the class to see. By this point, all the children were gathered in the circle and focused on their class teacher. Mollie described the Bible as a ‘special book’ with stories about Jesus. Next, Mollie told the class that it was time to listen to the ‘word of God’ and ‘special story that came from the Bible’. Before she read the story, Mollie held up a large candle and asked the children what to do with this. The children spent a few seconds thinking and shouted ‘pass it’, which Mollie confirmed was the right answer. ‘Right, we pass it around the circle. What were we able to do, if you wanted to, when you held the candle?’ Samia responded, ‘you can tell things to Jesus’. Mollie agreed but stressed to the children that it was their choice whether they wanted to do this. Yes, you tell things to Jesus if you wanted to. When you have the candle, you can speak out loud to Jesus if you want to. You might want to say thank you. You might want to ask for some help with something. You might want to ask him to look after your friends or family. They might need a bit of extra help at the moment and then we have our mission! The thing that we are trying really hard to do. Not just at reflection time but all the time. What did we decide our mission was going to be?

All the children shouted ‘smiling’, and Mollie then asked if we could practice right now and give everyone in the room a big smile. Mollie then formally began the class worship and told the children they needed to start

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by ‘putting our hands together and make the sign of the cross’. Mollie placed the children’s Bible in the middle of the circle and asked the children to all hold hands before they sang ‘Alleluia’. This took a few minutes as some children were more reluctant than others to hold hands with the person sitting next to them. The whole class then sang Alleluia. One child opened the Bible in the middle and Mollie asked everyone to close their eyes and ‘get ready’ to listen to the word of God. Mollie then began to read John, chapter 14, verse 2. After reading the passage, Mollie asked the children what they should do next. Gabby put up her hand and suggested, ‘we’re going to pass that [pointing to the candle] and talk. You can talk with Jesus. Or help. Or do the sign of the cross’. Mollie nodded, agreed and reminded the children that it was their choice whether they wanted to do this. This part of the worship was accompanied by new age instrumental music. Craig was the first to hold the candle and after staring at the centre of the candle and a glance around the class, Craig puts his finger in the middle of the candle and passed it to the next child. Each child after this also put their finger into the middle of the candle where the wick is. Very few children spoke. The few that did said ‘thank you’, asked for help or asked for Jesus to look after their family. Mollie and the class teacher also participated and said a few words of thanks. After the candle had made its way round the children, Craig placed the candle in the middle of the circle. Mollie asked everyone for a big smile before she told the children to put their hands together to finish their reflection. All the children and teachers then made the sign of the cross. Mollie congratulated the children for participating in a ‘lovely class worship’ and asked the children to get ready for playtime. As the children lined up at the door, Mollie came up to me, laughed and said that she did not know why they dipped their finger in the middle of the candle but that it ‘was lovely and became an important ritual … it was important to them and once one had done it, well that was it!’. In this chapter, I explore collective worship as a community-building ritual and how such acts are used to generate solidarity. Through paying attention to such rituals and in particular, children’s embodied practices, we can understand how religion and non-religion are mediated during such events. I begin by exploring the Strong Programme in cultural sociology and what this approach has to offer when understanding collective worship in schools. Situating the debate in conversation with theoretical thinking on modernity and societal transformation (Durkheim, 1893; Giddens, 1991; Bauman, 2000), I consider the community-building

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mechanisms found within collective worship and how they function as cooperative rituals in order to create a sense of togetherness (Sennett, 2012). In the second half of the chapter, I turn my attention to the bodily dispositions that are cultivated during collective worship (Bourdieu, 1984, 1990; Mellor & Shilling, 2014; Shilling & Mellor, 2014). By appropriating Durkheimian thinking and taking a lead from neo-Durkheimian approaches (Alexander, 2006; Shilling & Mellor, 1998, 2011; Lynch, 2012b), I explore how children’s participation in these effervescent ritual assemblies reenergises children’s ‘social shaped embodied being(s)’ and their belonging to the school community (Shilling & Mellor, 2011, p. 18). In attending to children’s agency and meaning-making during such events and through the framework of embodiment and body pedagogics, I explore children’s reflexivity and agentic actions during such performances (Mellor & Shilling, 2010). I argue that attending to the body and the emotional states experienced during such performances shows how schools attempt to foster solidarity amongst pupils and create a sense of community and belonging. Subsequently, I go on to discuss how schools’ attempts to generate and regulate such cohesion through these ritual acts are also shaped and informed by the children’s own actions. By observing children as social actors with the ability to shape and influence the world around them, we can see how children create meaning out of acts of collective worship through re-ritualising, remaking or resisting the strategies of adults (de Certeau, 1984; Berry, 2009). I conclude that attention to these micropractices of community-making and cooperation reveals how schools attempt to create a sense of ‘embodied togetherness’ during acts of worship and the importance of the body as a site where such meaning is created, contested and reconstructed (Hemming, 2009).

On Belonging While observing collective worship in all three of my field sites, I often reflected on what was ‘collective’ about collective worship? Teachers at all schools always emphasised the individual experience of collective worship, the choice children had in terms of how they participated and the meaning they could to take from such events. This diversity and highly individualised experience also became apparent during the interviews with children, where many talked about their own authority and autonomy during acts

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of worship and the ability to create their own individual meaning.1 However, as I spent more time with my participants and observed collective worship at all three schools, I noticed numerous acts, behaviours and strategies used to foster a sense of belonging amongst the children. This was also picked up on by many children. During an interview with Asma, a nine-year-old fond of football and playing with her friends from Sacred Heart, we discussed what collective worship is and what it meant to her. Collective worship to me personally is when it’s just all of us together. A whole school family, just taking time together, cus normally we don’t …. Our school family, we’re only together for collective worship and er achievement assembly but normally that’s the only thing we actually do erm so I really think it means erm … basically just coming together and worshipping God.

My informants often spoke of collective worship as a time for the whole school community to come together and for teachers and pupils to be with each other. Cohesion and belonging in schools has generated a growing amount of attention from scholars and policy makers, with an overriding focus on community relations, inclusion, segregation, particularly in relation to race, ethnicity and religious identity (Kymlicka, 1999; Short, 2002; Jansen et  al., 2006). However, with the exception of Cheetham (2004) and Hemming (2015), collective worship has rarely been given any attention in terms of its community-making function. This is somewhat striking, as for my field sites, other than collective worship, children were never in the same space with everyone else in the school. Schools often have separate playgrounds for different year groups or alternative break times so that such spaces do not become overcrowded. Collective worship and school assemblies are therefore unique as it is often the only time the whole school comes together in one space. Recognising this special part of school life, many of the teachers and students reflected on collective worship as an opportunity to foster a sense of cohesion and belonging within what is otherwise a highly separated and differentiated school community. As Asma observed above, collective worship at Sacred Heart is about being together as a ‘school family’. Asma also considered such ‘togetherness’ in religious terms with worshipping 1  Speaking on congregations and worship, Stringer contends that congregations must have some sort of collective or ‘communal discourse … set within the collective’ and not simply group of individuals with ‘disparate and unrelated views on worship’ (1999, p. 67).

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God being a key component of this act. It is in this sense that we can see how collective worship can be viewed as a community-making ritual by both staff and pupils; a ritual geared towards fostering cohesion and solidarity amongst its members and solidifying that through various ritual acts and, as I shall argue later in this chapter, through children’s embodied dispositions. Vincent et al. (2018) reflect on the role of primary schools as spaces encouraging this sense of belonging and togetherness. They argue that ‘through their collective, habitual and sustained used, primary schools are disposed to, and productive of, sociality and encounter with known and unknown others’ (Vincent et  al., 2018, p.  3). Activities of singing, dancing, moments of reflection and prayer all served to create a ‘binding power’ amongst the children and help to reproduce this sense of belonging. However, as we shall also see, this did not always work with children sometimes resisting, rejecting and reimagining their participation in collective worship. In trying to understand the social function of collective worship and school assemblies, I turned to the Strong Programme in cultural sociology and its Durkheimian approach to social life. Jeffery C. Alexander (2008) initiated the Strong Programme and recognised the importance of Durkheim’s work and the significance of the sacred as a concept (Lynch & Sheldon, 2013). Revisiting Durkheim proved particularly helpful when trying to understand the meaning of collective worship and the sense of ‘togetherness’ that was experienced across my field sites. In terms of approaching collective worship as a ritual, I was faced with a variety of options. With regards to education, there has been a longstanding interest in ritual practices within schools, with foci stretching from teacher-student relationships, control within the classroom and teacher performance (Bernstein et  al., 1966; Kapferer, 1981; Quantz, 1999). I decided to appropriate thinking within the Strong Programme, due to the insights it afforded on cooperation and belonging. It is in Elementary Forms of Religious Life that Durkheim (1912/2001) sets out how ritual provides the mechanisms for social solidarity and integration. Durkheim (1912/2001) explores how solidarity, social norms and bonds are produced and reproduced through emotionally charged rituals creating effervescent states which act as a social cement to bind individuals together as one collective. Durkheim (1912/2001) proposes that such acts and processes can be found in all religions and are connected to a particular group’s idea or notion of the sacred. Consequently, it is a fundamental human experience and one that can be seen universally across social life.

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According to Durkheim’s famous definition, ‘religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them’ (1912/2001, p. 129). Durkheim’s (1912/2001) interest focused on the collective consciousness and the communal activities which generate and foster feelings of belonging and group membership. It was religious rites that provided the structure for such solidarity and cohesion to be generated. For Durkheim, religion and religious phenomena could emerge in any society where a separation between the sacred and profane occurs. As such, there is no universal idea of what is sacred and what is profane, and each community must construct these for themselves. According to Durkheim, it is only when a given object is bestowed with a sacred meaning by the community through ritual that a distinction between the sacred and the profane is made. Through these ritual acts, religion has a binding effect on members of a given society and as such religion acts as a source of solidarity, identity and belonging for individuals. Ritual in this way becomes the bridge between the individual and the community. In appraising Durkheim’s work, Bell reflects that ‘ritual is the means by which individual perception and behaviour are socially appropriated or conditioned’ and that through ritual action the necessary interaction between the collective and the individual can take place (1992, p.  20). Rituals are the means in which individuals are socially conditioned and these rituals rely on shared collective beliefs. Durkheim observed the changing nature of society and considered how cohesion and group membership is sustained in both traditional and more complex social groupings. For Durkheim, it was religion and the associated rituals which reinforced a community’s moral and social norms and helped to maintain and sustain group rules whilst providing a site where individuals could reaffirm such norms and their membership of the group: religion is eminently social. Religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities; rituals are ways of acting that are generated only within assembled groups and are meant to stimulate and sustain or recreate certain mental states in these groups. (1912/2001, p. 11)

As religion was integral for societies’ cohesion, Durkheim contended that no matter how society developed and changed, religion as a social phenomenon would never completely disappear due to this essential

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binding function it has for communities. Although both society and religion have changed and developed since the time Durkheim was writing, we can still apply his thinking when trying to understand the role religion plays within modern societies. Durkheim’s approach is still very influential in understanding the role of religion in modern societies and can be seen in Day’s (2011) neo-Durkheimian approach to belief which rests on a relational approach that stresses the social as an important dimension of belief, or Lynch’s (2012b) cultural sociological approach to the sacred. This approach, through its focus on the social and how ideas of belonging and solidarity are fostered, is therefore helpful for understanding the dynamics of rituals and social performances in primary schools. We can observe how rituals or social performances, such as collective worship, are enacted in communities such as schools to create symbolic distinctions between the sacred and the profane which reproduce shared social norms and values and bind individuals together (Alexander, 2006; Lynch, 2012b). Arguing against conflating religion and the sacred, Lynch (2012b) calls for sociologists to examine the various forms of the sacred in contemporary social life and how such forms might serve as a ‘constructive force’ for societies (2012b, p. 3). In this way, Lynch (2012b) seeks to move beyond an ontological understanding of the sacred, such as those put forward by Eliade (1959) and Otto (1923), to a cultural sociological conception. Situating his approach in conversation with Durkheim (1912/2001), Shils (1975), Bellah (2005) and Alexander (2006), Lynch (2012b) treats the sacred as culturally and historically contingent, drawing attention to the socially constructed nature of the sacred which therefore allows us to understand how the sacred can be spatially and temporally diverse and can exist across both religious and secular dimensions. In this way, Durkheim’s thinking can be more readily applied to modern societies, where the sacred is not limited to God or the transcendent other. Such insights proved helpful when understanding the sense of belonging and togetherness that was evoked during collective worship, as not all children spoke about collective worship as having a religious meaning or purpose. When asked why do we have assemblies one child, Ted from St Peter’s, said it’s so ‘we can celebrate what is going on around the world. So, we can all come together and we celebrate stuff like Easter, Christmas, the environment, black history month, people that change the world and chinse new year’. The wide-ranging nature of how children understood and experienced collective worship led me to reflect on how such rituals or social

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performances work in plural and diverse contexts and still evoke a sense of togetherness. In his earlier work, The Division of Labour in Society, Durkheim (1893) argued that there are two types of solidarity within society: mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity. Mechanical solidarity is found in traditional societies, where the cohesion of the group relies on the homogeneity of individuals. The individuals in question must share a common and collective moral consciousness. Organic solidarity, on the other hand, tends to be found in more diverse, heterogeneous modern societies. In such societies, solidarity does not rely on individuals sharing the same beliefs or values but is sustained by a division of labour where individuals rely on one another for the various tasks and exist as complementary to one another. Though independent, individuals recognise the importance of the wider collective unit and share a collective consciousness which helps to sustain this solidarity. Durkheim’s theorising on solidarity and societies has received criticism (e.g. Kemper, 1972; Pickering, 1994; Smelser, 2001) in relation to the primary position the social structure occupies in terms of determining and organising solidarity. However, this structuralist interpretation of Durkheim’s thinking, according to Thijssen, has overlooked the ‘subjectively-based emotions and cognitions’ related to solidarity within Durkheim’s later work (2012, p. 456). Durkheim’s thinking resonated with other scholarly thinking on societies and cohesion during this time, such as Tönnies’ (1988) conceptualisation of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Community and Association). However, Durkheim departed somewhat from such thinking in that he thought solidarity could still arise in modern societies with high levels of diversity and differentiation through organic forms of solidarity. Tönnies (1988) on the other hand, argued that such solidarity could only arise in communities of the past and not in modern societies, and this understanding also underscored Berger’s (1969) analysis of the process of fragmentation which he, like Max Weber, saw as occurring during processes of modernisation and that a shared ‘sacred canopy’ relies on a consensus between people. The insights of Durkheim and Strong Programme theorists on the role of ritual, performance, religion and how solidarity is created and sustained provides us with useful tools to understand collective worship in schools. It could be argued that collective worship, in its initial legislative formation, envisioned a form of solidarity more akin to mechanical solidarity. The debates found within the Hansard reports and commentary on them at the time, as discussed in the Introduction, reveal that although there

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was an awareness of interdenominational diversity, there was a desire to view society as broadly homogenous in terms of its predominantly Christian identity. The amendment found within the 1988 Education Reform Act, I argue, could therefore be read as a strategy on the part of the state to strengthen a form a mechanical solidarity in response to anxieties over the perceived divisions and fragmentation in society. But how is this sense of community created through ‘embodied togetherness’ during collective worship (Hemming, 2009)? And how does this relate to the mediation of forms of religion and non-religion?

On Techniques of the Body, Habitus and Body Pedagogics The body has become an increasing area of interest within sociology and the study of religion, with a burgeoning number of studies and collections dedicated to the positioning of the body as an area of academic interest in its own right (e.g. Turner, 1983; Shilling, 1993; Orsi, 2005, Strhan, 2015). However, this has not always been the case. Historically, greater attention has been paid to cognitive beliefs about religion, with the body often marginalised and hidden (Turner, 1983). As discussed earlier, this research considers the everyday lived reality of collective worship and follows the ‘lived religion’ approach, which has positioned the body and forms of embodied practices as key areas of analysis, where religion is mediated and meaning(s) constructed and reconstructed. Henri Lefebvre (1991) called for the repositioning of the body as a central area of analysis in his work, while Bryan Turner (1992), in Regulating Bodies, argues that to truly understand social action, we need an approach to the individual which specifically attends to the conception of the social actor as an embodied actor in order to ‘transcend the all-­ pervasive Cartesian division of mind-body’ (1992, pp.  7–8). Shilling (1993) has argued that the body has been marginalised within wider sociology but it has nevertheless been present, albeit an ‘absent presence’. Shilling (1993) states that although classic sociology has failed to treat the body as a site of analysis in its own right, ‘it’s concern with the structure and functioning of societies, and the nature of human action, has inevitably led it to deal with aspects of human embodiment’. As such, the body

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has always been present within sociology but never as an area of social life where meaning can be created.2 Social theory on embodiment stretches back to Mauss’ significant contribution (1973) with his work on ‘techniques of the body’, which he defined as ‘the ways in which, from society to society men know how to use their bodies’ (1973, p.  93). Mauss contends that such bodily techniques are culturally and historically contingent. Each society has their own set of habits and bodily dispositions, which vary over time and across space. Such techniques are acquired through training and serve particular functions, and for Mauss, these movements and ways of using the body are culturally ingrained and extremely deep-seated: In group life as a whole there is a kind of education of movements in close order. In every society, everyone knows and has to know and learn what he has to do in all conditions. … example and order, that is the principle. Hence there is a strong sociological causality in all these facts. … in general, they (movements) are governed by education, and at least by the circumstances of life in common, of contact … I think that the basic education in all these techniques consists of an adaption of the body to their use. (Mauss, 1973, pp. 85–86 [italics my emphasis])

For Mauss, these techniques are actively learnt through education and such training can be implicit or explicit. As we can see at the beginning of this chapter from the excerpt from my fieldwork journal, the children at Sacred Heart were provided with an extensive list of instructions and guided on how to use both their bodies and their minds during their class worship. Mollie was very clear with the children as to how they should be seated, when they should be closing and opening their eyes and what they could be reflecting on during this moment. This training of the body was explicit and the children were encouraged to remember the acceptable ways to sit during worship times. Mollie asked the children to gather in a circle because ‘that’s what we always do’ during collective worship.

2  Goffman (1971), Bourdieu (1984, 1990), Foucault (1977a) and Latour (1993) have all supported this turn towards the body within the social sciences through the attention their work pays to materiality and embodiment. See Shilling (1993) for a critique on Goffman’s approach to the body and the interaction order. See Crossley (1995) for a counter argument who argues that Goffman’s work relates and enhances Mauss’ ‘bodily techniques’ and Merleau-Ponty’s ‘incorporeality’.

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Bourdieu’s (1990) work on habitus has also been a significant influence on the sociology of the body. Bourdieu’s (1990) conceptualisation of habitus is borne out of a dissatisfaction with both Levi-Strauss’ focus on structuralism and Sartre’s preoccupation with existentialism. Bourdieu (1990) did not want to reduce our understanding of human action simply to subjectivist and structuralist understandings but rather wanted an approach that dealt with the complexity of both external constraints and individual choice (Swartz, 2002). Habitus, for Bourdieu (1990), refers to our embodied dispositions, tastes, inclinations and cultural capital. These precognitive dispositions encourage certain ways of acting, behaving and perceiving the world and as a concept, it is one that can be traced back to Aristotle and Aquinas. Such inclinations and ways of being in the world, as Bourdieu (1990) argued, are not actively acquired. The habitus is socially reproduced through particular societal structures and the individuals in question develop their habitus somewhat passively. The process of acquiring habitus relies on repeated social experiences, repetition and mimicking. For Bourdieu (1990), habitus is the intersection between society and the individual, in which the body is in the social world while the social world is in the body (Reay, 2004b; Shilling & Mellor, 2014). In this way, the habitus is: A socialised body. A structured body, a body which has incorporated the immanent structures of the world or of a particular sector of that world—a field—and which structures perceptions of that world as well as action in that world. (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 81)

At St Peter’s, many of the children spoke about the various ways they used their bodies during collective worship. Carl and Toby, two boys aged nine who identified as non-religious, discussed their experiences of prayer, what it meant to them and what they thought about. Toby:

Sometimes like sometimes I think about the words. Sometimes I make, sometimes I think about other things Carl: I don’t think about anything Rachael: so, do you make your own prayer? Toby: nah, usually I just do that (closes eyes and puts hands together) Rachael: Why do you do that? Toby: I go like that (closes eyes and puts hands together). I dunno. I’m not sure

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Toby’s reflection on prayer and his uncertainty of why he closes his eyes and puts his hands together resonate closely with Bourdieu’s (1990) thinking on habitus. When I asked Toby why he did that during prayer, he was unsure and repeated the actions he would mimic during worship. Bourdieu (1990) considered the habitus as unconsciously acquired. It is culturally ingrained and we learn such dispositions without thinking. Toby’s repeated practices have seemingly developed an embodied habituation which has been acquired with little reflexivity. However, at the same time, many of my informants did express and reflect on their own subjective positions and thinking in relation to such dispositions and the sense of meaning they drew from such acts. Shona from Sacred Heart said she likes to think ‘about the words, [her] family’ during prayer and although she was unsure if she did believe in God, she liked to spend that time thinking about something important to her. Rachael: So what do you do during prayer? Shona: mmm well I do this (puts hand together in front of face and tightly closes her eyes) Rachael: so you do that and do you think about anything? Shona: I think different things like listen to the words or I think about mum, Barney (grandma’s dog) or our play we’re practising. I am nervous about that so I think about it and wish it goes well. Bourdieu’s (1990) conception of habitus has come under criticism due to the way it views the body as passive, unreflexive and over-socialised (Williams & Bendelow, 1999; Calhoun, 1993; Shilling & Mellor, 2014). In his research on religion in the primary school, Hemming (2015) reflects on children’s agency and the embodied tactics children develop during worship, such as opening their eyes during prayer, rushing the sign of the cross so they can leave assembly quickly or recreating prayers in their own mind to resonate with their own religious tradition. Speaking in relation to ongoing debates and concerns around faith schools and fears of indoctrination, Hemming (2017b) argues for attention to be paid to children’s agency and that such observations can make us rethink such anxieties about children’s engagement with religion in schools: I would suggest it is difficult to sustain the argument that faith schools are necessarily in the business of indoctrination in a way that compromises children’s autonomy and freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Whilst

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faith schools could in theory be promoting problematic values and practices that do restrict children’s rights, there is no reason to assume that they are inevitably doing so. (Hemming, 2017b, p. 4)

This focus on children’s agency demonstrates that viewing children as passive receptacles, mimicking and unreflexively acquiring habitus, is insufficient when trying to understand the everyday lived reality of children’s encounters with religion. In trying to develop a more agentic perspective on habitus, Shilling and Mellor (2014) draw heavily on insights from Bourdieu, Weber and Durkheim but reconfigure such thinking in new ways in order to account for the ways in which both our ideas of the sacred and religion have changed and adapted over time. Shilling and Mellor (2014) locate the body as an important area of research in the study of religion and argue that the body is vital in order to understand both the changing place of religion in society and issues concerning differentiation, modernisation and secularisation. By focusing on the body, we can observe how ‘religious forms are reproduced, strengthened or undermined’ (Shilling & Mellor, 2014, p. 133) Mellor and Shilling, adopting a neo-Durkheimian approach, interpret religion as a social fact which has the potential to produce ‘culturally sanctioned embodied orientations to self and world, characterised by a transcendent configuration of immanent social realities’ (2010, p.  28). In response to the renewed interest in religion in public life, they argue that new theoretical tools are needed for understanding religious phenomena. Mellor and Shilling suggest that we consider the individual’s experiences of religion through the framework of body pedagogics (2010). By religious body pedagogics, Mellor and Shilling focus on embodiment not only being the reproduction of social facts but as being a ‘physical and experiential mediator’ of such experiences and it is through such mediation that religious habitus can be cultivated and developed (2010, p. 28). In their more recent work, Shilling and Mellor (2014) have taken this framework of body pedagogics a step further and argue that modernity has called into question that ability for religious habitus to reproduce embodied dispositions for routine practices. Shilling and Mellor (2014) look to build on Bourdieu’s thinking by considering how we can conceive of a habitus that is reflexive and relies on the agency of individuals. They note that in Bourdieu’s work, you get ‘little sense of the deliberative and reflexive dimensions’ that are involved in developing an individual’s habitus (Shilling & Mellor, 2014, p.  136). In order to overcome this

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unconscious and unreflexive approach to habitus, Shilling and Mellor (2014) draw on Latour’s (2011) concept of instauration as a way to ‘reconceive the religious habitus as a phenomenon that is actively re-made, or instaured, through the deliberations of individuals intent on cultivating a repertoire of religious orientations, techniques, feelings and beliefs within religious modalities of the sacred’ (2014, p. 137). Changes within society have affected the way solidarity is created and sustained and our personal habits now rely, to a large degree, on our own reflexivity and subjectivity. This turn to the self and the promotion of the individual as a site of meaning and authority has necessitated that we revise our understanding of embodiment and of religious habitus. It can no longer be held that individuals simply reproduce certain actions and that our bodily dispositions are so deeply ingrained that we just perform them without thought. We need to consider the agency of the individual and their interpretations and how such reflexivity impacts the social facts that are subsequently internalised and reproduced. Alishah, a child from St Peter’s, demonstrates this reflexivity when discussing assemblies and in particular, singing assemblies. Singing assemblies were held on Wednesdays at St Peter’s and during this time the children practiced religious and non-­ religious songs. Initially unsure as to the relevance of singing assemblies, Alishah goes on to reflect on the assembly’s function as a ritual of cooperation (Sennett, 2012). I don’t know why we do singing assembly … I think it’s to work together and … to like to fit in. We do fit in, all of us. You know like when we have new people we do that. Make them like fit in and we do things together and to make friends.

Sennett (2012) in his work on the rituals of cooperation explores how cooperation is pursued within politics and how cooperation is historically contingent. Sennett (2012) discusses how cooperation affects both child and adult life, with the former being a phase where inequalities inform and affect children’s cooperative experience and with adult life being struggle for cooperation as our micropractices of cooperation have subsequently been diminished. For Sennett (2012), rituals play a large role in creating cooperative societies and he argues that the loss of such rituals, through significant changes within the structure of societies, can risk communities losing their patterns of cooperative practice. ‘Ritual makes expressive cooperation work-and this is a large the point … ritual enables expressive

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cooperation in religion, in the workplace, in politics and in community life’ (Sennett, 2012, p.  17). This approach to ritual is also shared by McGuire who argues that rituals ‘strengthen and reaffirm the group’s beliefs. They are ways of symbolising unity of the group, and, at the same time of contributing to it’ and that through rituals ‘the group renews its sense of fervour and sense of unity, and individual members come to identify with the group and its goals’ (2008b, p.  17). Alishah was aware of such strategies and the function the singing assembly has as a ritual of community-making and cooperation. Alishah specifically reflected on how useful such occasions were when new people start at the school in order to ‘make them fit in’, ‘do things together’ and ‘make friends’. Individual choice, encouraging children’s individual meaning-making and reflection, was also a predominant feature of collective worship in schools and, drawing on the work of Bourdieu (1990) and Shilling and Mellor (2014), we can consider the impact that such contemplative and deliberative practices have on how both religion and non-religion were mediated and experienced during moments of collective worship. I will now consider how this approach to the reflexive religious habitus resonates and complements the sociology of childhood’s study of the body. In bringing these two conversations together, I discuss how children at my field sites demonstrate a reflexive habitus and discuss the importance of embodiment in relation to childhood and religion.

Childhood and Embodiment The approach to the body as agentic and reflexive is shared by recent thinking within the sociology of childhood. Corsaro (2005) in particular argues that children do not simply copy adults’ actions but interpret and appropriate the strategies of adults into their lives. Thinking about children’s bodies pushes us to rethink the dominant narratives within both childhood studies and the work on embodiment. Both the body and children have been treated as passive subjects and objects that are acted on rather than agents and actors which have the ability to both shape and be shaped by wider structural forces. As a result, children’s bodies and their embodied experiences have been significantly marginalised with sociology with research emphasising their passivity and tendency to be simply shaped into the moulds as set out by society (Prout, 2000). Fingerson (2011) observes that there has been little connection made between those who study the body and sociologists of childhood. Alan

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Prout (2000) also notes the little contact between these two fields and that despite the growth in these two areas of study respectively, there has only been the occasional cross-reference. For example, James and Prout (1997) discuss embodiment in their edited collection, while Shilling (2004) also discussed the embodied nature of education and the civilising process of children’s bodies which are implicated in this. Fingerson (2011) describes how children’s bodies have always been used as markers of status and identity. For example, children using height as a way to determine social rank or adults using the abilities of children’s bodies as an indicator of the different structural placements within childhood (e.g. baby, toddler) (Fingerson, 2011, pp. 218–219). Elias’ and Bourdieu’s work on the body in terms of the ‘civilising process’ and habitus can relate to childhood studies but such approaches are lacking in terms of their approach to childhood, which does not view children as creative performers, and purely sees them in terms of gradually accepting culturally embedded practices and dispositions. Such focuses on children’s bodies promote the view that children are merely passive receptacles that are changed and adapted in the wider process of childhood socialisation. When considering children’s bodies, it is vital, as Prout argues, that we should not treat children’s bodies as ‘imperfect’ or ‘incomplete’ versions of adults’ bodies, instead we should appreciate that ‘children understand and perform their bodies in ways often different from adults’ (2000, p. 2). Prout (2000) takes a lead from Shilling (1993) in his view of the body as both biologically and socially unfinished and synthesises antifoundationalist and foundationalist approaches to the body as set out by Turner (1992). In doing so, Prout (2000) attempts to overcome biological and cultural reductionism which can often characterise studies of the body. Viewing the body as biologically and sociologically unfinished allows us some space and flexibility to bring these two different theoretical orientations together and therefore removes the obstacle which social constructionism placed.3 The approach to the body within childhood studies encourages an agentic view of the body which complements Shilling and Mellor’s (2014) thinking on the reflexive religious habitus. The body and children’s bodies 3  The attempt in social constructionism to see all things as social resulted in cultural reductionism with regards to the study of the body and as a result did not account for the biological understandings of the body. As Prout (2000), Shilling (1993) and Turner (1992) demonstrate, this is very problematic but trying to find a theoretical approach that accounts for both biological and cultural understandings of the body is also difficult.

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more specifically are not outcomes of social processes or passively receptacles but are social agents who have the ability to act to be acted upon, to shape and to be shaped. Scourfield et al. (2013) in their work on Muslim childhood also explore children’s religious habitus. They use Bourdieu’s thinking on habitus to explain the embodied habituation of religious practices such as prayer or fasting and focus on the family as a particular site for the socialisation of children’s religious habitus (Scourfield et al., 2013). However, they depart from Bourdieu’s (1990) approach as being characterised by unconsciously acquired habitus, by demonstrating how children learn practices and the pedagogical processes behind such socialisation. Bourdieu argues that habitus functions ‘below the level of consciousness and language, beyond the reach of introspective scrutiny and will’ (1984, p. 466). In contrast, Scourfield et  al.’s (2013) research shows how children gradually learn embodied practices. They find that their participants’ version of habitus fits with the work of Saba Mahmood (2001b) as opposed to Bourdieu, in the sense that, like the worship at Sacred Heart, the children in Scourfield et  al.’s (2013) study learn such processes through gradual learning and socialisation. They pick up and copy the actions of adults rather than acquiring the habitus completely unconsciously. As such, there is a reflexive pedagogy involved in developing habitus: it is a learning process and one that is not simply acquired passively. Mahmood’s approach to habitus, focusing on the learned process of acquiring embodied dispositions, would fit closely with many observations throughout my fieldwork. I often saw teachers reminding children how to sit, pray, speak and move during worship. From entering the hall to leaving, children were often given explicit guidance as to what they should be doing at any given moment. The field excerpt from Sacred Heart at the start of this chapter demonstrates this in Mollie taking a great deal of time and care to clearly communicate and teach the children how to worship. This approach would also seem to fit with Mauss’ thinking on techniques of the body as Mauss pays particular attention to the education and training that surrounds how individuals acquire such techniques. This pedagogical process was particularly clear during the reception class’ worship time at Sacred Heart. However, Toby’s reflection on his embodied practice were more closely aligned with a Bourdieusian (1990) reading of embodiment. In this way, although we can observe how children are taught and trained to hold their bodies in particular ways, the teacher’s constantly reminding of this could still result in an unconscious habitus, as the habit of holding their bodies in certain

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ways gradually becomes unconscious with repetition (Bourdieu, 1990). Nevertheless, Mahmood’s (2001b) thinking is helpful in that it draws our attention to the conscious as well as the unconscious processes of embodiment. Taken together, a reading of embodiment that draws on both Bourdieu (1990) and Mahmood (2001b) advances our understanding of the diverse ways in which children’s embodied dispositions are acquired. Mahmood (2001b) in her work on ritual and the disciplines of salat also explores individuals’ relationships to rule-governed behaviour and how this relates to different conceptions of the self. Mahmood discovered that prayer was a conscious process for her participants and that it was ‘a key site for purposefully moulding their intentions, emotions, and desires in accord with orthodox standards of Islamic piety’ (2001b, p. 828). Such embodied processes became a moral act where women understood their bodies as a way to realise the ‘pious self’ (Mahmood, 2001b, p. 828). The children as part of my study also reflected on the ways they acquired particular embodied practices and the standards of piety that such acts generate. For example, the idea of ‘how to pray’ came up in a number of interviews. Rosie and Saima, two girls from Year Five at St Peter’s who identified as Christian and Muslim respectively, discussed how you can pray in a number of ways, just as Rosie noted at Sacred Heart. However, for Rosie, the way in which you prayed also reflected how seriously you were taking this act. Rosie:

So some people when they’re praying really seriously they go [Rosie puts her chin to her chest, closes her eyes tightly and puts her hands together in front of her chest]. So, their hands are like down Saima: (laughs). Yeah like they’re doing Konichiwa! Everyone: laughs Saima and Rosie were not only reflecting on how certain bodily positions were acquired but how some were ranked higher than others in terms of how seriously someone was taking prayer. Saima and Rosie were not only demonstrating how they consciously learn particular bodily practices, but also how they reflected and created their own meaning from such actions. Aaliyah and Natalie from Sacred Heart also revealed the depth of their reflexivity during collective worship when discussing the emotions they felt during such times.

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Aaliyah: Rachael: Aaliyah: Natalie: Rachael: Aaliyah:

Basically, prayers, what it means … it just brings the collective worship in. brings the collective worship in? it just makes the assembly more powerful. So it’s a bit weird to me if we don’t have an assembly with a gospel or something, yeah a prayer. It makes us reflect on it, so we don’t just come in the hall and start to like achieve things and stuff. We take a deep moment and we say a prayer And what do you feel or think about during that moment Normally Mrs Allen will tell us to look at the candle and shut our eyes and when we say our prayer, we feel like we’re in a deep hole praying to God. Trying to get close to him.

For Aaliyah and Natalie, collective worship is not something you simply do unconsciously. It involves a great deal of reflection and thought. The girls take this time in order to feel close to God and Aaliyah notes that the assembly is more ‘powerful’ when they have such moments. They understand that prayer is a moment initiated and instructed by an adult, Mrs Allen, and are consciously aware of the process taking place. Natalie understands that prayer is a strategy which encourages children to reflect. This was a deeply emotional and reflexive experience and not one that was simply unconsciously reproduced. Natalie noted the importance of taking the time to make a conscious effort to reflect and take a ‘deep moment’. They acknowledged that the teacher was an important part of this process but it would be very misleading to think that children like Aaliyah and Natalie simply repeat and mimic the actions of adults without any thought or contemplation. Both Bourdieu’s and Mauss’ account of the body are insufficient here in terms of attending to the agency and reflexivity of Natalie’s and Aaliyah’s experience and the emotional states generated. Rather, drawing on the work of Shilling and Mellor allows us to consider the ‘reflexive dimensions’ involved in the development of Natalie’s and Aaliyah’s habitus and how such dispositions are consciously and deliberatively acquired (2014, p. 135). At the start of this chapter we saw how the children in reception at Sacred Heart were taught certain ‘techniques of the body’. The children were clearly instructed to sit in a circle, close their eyes, hold hands and make the sign of the cross. Over the course of their time in school these children become increasingly accustomed to such practices and associate

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them with particular ways of behaving and acting during moments of worship. However, although we see examples of religious habitus that tie in closely with Bourdieu’s and Mauss’ conceptualisations of the body, we can also note the reflexive dimension of such practices and the agency of the children in remaking the ritual for themselves. Mollie, the class teacher, encouraged the children to make the ritual their own by reassuring them that it’s up to them if they want to say anything while holding the candle. It was suggested that they may wish to say thanks to God or ask for help, but that this was up to them and that they didn’t have to say anything. The agency and reflexivity of children’s religious habitus on the part of the children was therefore not developed in resistance to adult strategies but one encouraged by adults themselves. The authority of the child to internalise their embodied dispositions during collective worship and develop his or her own meaning was not only seen as acceptable but as a vital aspect of collective worship. Once Craig had dipped his finger into the middle of the candle all the children did the same. Mollie did not stop this from happening and enjoyed the fact that the children made it their own. As she said, ‘it became an important ritual’. This encouragement of children developing their own reflexive religious habitus was something I observed many times during my time at Sacred Heart.

Embodying the School Family Jen and Rhianna, two girls from Sacred Heart, discussed the act of praying in collective worship and what this meant to them. When describing prayer, Rhianna showed me the different ways you can use your hands. Rhianna: It can be however you want it, it can be like that, that or that [Rhianna puts her hands together in different ways]. Rachael: So your hands have to be together? Rhianna: Yeah Rachael: And why is that Rhianna: I think it’s to know that God is one and we are joining together Jen: I think it’s to show that everyone’s part of one world and we’re all made together…cus we’re joined together and touching For Jen and Rhianna, the act of praying embodied a sense of community and belonging to one another. It also took on a theological meaning

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of God being One. During an interview with Declan and Ben at St Peter’s, the boys discussed what they saw as the point of collective worship. Ben, a nine-year-old who likes to play practical jokes and is often referred to as the ‘class clown’, thought for a moment or two and said that for him, collective worship is about ‘getting together’. Ben: Everyone together and to get everyone knowing each other and like the teachers probably think let’s get them together so we can like … I think when we’re praying they’re putting us altogether if you know what I mean. If you’re doing this [puts his hands together and closes his eyes] and everyone else in the hall is doing it, it’s … Ben struggles to find the words to complete his reflection but Declan jumps in and continues with this idea and says: Declan: It kind of means you’re doing the same thing. So it’s like a collective worship … doing it in unison Ben: Like we do everything at the same time and they just make us do everything at the same time and I think it’s just to make us be in a bit more unity. For Declan and Ben, the point of collective worship was to come together and for the act itself to foster a sense of solidarity and belonging amongst the students. Both Ben and Declan spoke of the importance of this being mediated through the body, noting both being in the same location with everyone else and performing the same actions as integral to this meaning making. Both boys commented specifically on prayer as the way in which such togetherness was mediated. Both Ben and Declan identify as non-religious but observe how the religious habitus is cultivated in order to create a sense of ‘unity’. Unlike Jen and Rhianna, however, Ben and Declan did not express this in relation to God and neither did they mention how such bodily practices were at odds with their non-religious identity. However, Ben did reflect on this in terms of the structures and pedagogies that were in place to generate such solidarity. Ben said that ‘they’re putting us together’ and ‘they make us’. For Ben, the processes involved in this ritual were entirely transparent. It is the teachers who were actively trying to create a sense of community within the school and tried

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to achieve this through both the ritual performance of collective worship and the embodied dispositions which were cultivated during such times. Both Declan and Ben here not only saw the strategies at work within this ritual but also the way in which their bodies were implicated in this process. Their bodies during collective worship were no longer only seen as individual but as interrelated to the other children in the room. This view of the body takes into account the ‘social body’ and how forms of embodiment are implicated and shaped by the others around them and the bodily practices which are performed. Here we can also draw on theoretical thinking in relation to subjectivity and intersubjectivity to enhance our understanding the ways in which these communal practices generate a sense of shared belonging. McGuire (2008a) argues for scholars to rethink religious experience in relation to intersubjectivity and the sense of communion and collective consciousness that can arise from shared practices and collective beliefs. In trying to understand the linkage between religion and the body in relation to health, McGuire states that, ‘the unity of body/mind/self makes plausible the idea that religious experiences are fully social and even intersubjectivity shared. The participation of “mindful” bodies in ritual action can create an intense sense of togetherness’ (1996, p. 113). However, scholarly work in subjectivity and intersubjectivity is not without its critics. Strhan discusses some of the criticism from scholars such as Turner (1983) and the ‘overemphasis on the intentionality of the human actor’ and the perceived decontextualised nature of these terms (2015, p.  75). However, Strhan contends that such accounts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity do not simply ‘imply the givenness’ of the individualised social being but rather do attend to the wider social contexts in which individual’s actions occur and the broader social forces under which they are placed (2015, p. 76). As Strhan argues such analysis: invites attention to how the subjection of subjects takes place through practices in which forms of power inhere, leading people towards certain kinds of interaction and relationality, shaped by the conditions of our human embodiment … [this]rather draws into question how the formation of subjectivities takes place through forms of identification with and separation from particular others formed by practices that delimit future possibilities. (2015, p. 76)

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When thinking about the embodied dispositions that are cultivated during worship and the formation of children’s subjectivities, it is important to situate the subjection of the children in relation to the boarder structures, forms of power and the various people which inhabit and shape such spaces. This is not to reduce the capacity for children’s agency but to focus our attention on how children’s subjective experiences are formed in relation to others. We can tie this into conversation with childhood studies and thinking on children’s agency. As Allison James (2000, p. 28) highlights in her work on primary school children, this shows therefore ‘not just the particular body a particular child has but the particular body a child is among other bodies’. A school is a highly differentiated place for children. They are marked off and bounded throughout the day according to height, age, gender, and so on. Religion is also one area that differentiates children throughout the school day (e.g. school lunch choices). Collective worship, therefore, becomes a time and space where such differences are potentially transcended. Cultivating embodied dispositions which all the children perform in unison is an attempt to foster this sense of community and belonging in school. However, as Ben reflects, such performances are controlled and regulated by adults. Ben in this way is demonstrating his own awareness about how his subjectivity and embodied experience is shaped and implicated by others and the forms of power within operationalised within such practices. As James argues, through their experiences in school ‘children get to know that an acceptable body must both be controlled and seen to be controllable: teachers exhort children to “walk properly” just as often as they insist that they must “sit up straight” and refrain from fidgeting’ (2000, pp. 31–32). In both St Peter’s and Sacred Heart, the children are aware of what the ‘acceptable’ position of their bodies should be throughout different times in collective worship. During many acts of collective worship at St Peter’s, I observed the teachers regulating the bodily positions of children. For example, if the teacher leading the worship felt that the children were not sitting straight, the teacher would ask the children to ‘tie their strings’ and upon this request, all the children would reach their hands above their heads and imagine they are tying a string which pulls their body into an upright position. Before each moment of prayer at St Peter’s and Sacred Heart, children were always asked to bow their heads, close their eyes and place their hands together. During one of the child-centred activities I conducted during my fieldwork, one group of children decided to draw a table of their likes and

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dislikes of collective worship. Under the ‘dislikes’ section, the children reflected how they did not enjoy singing, or sitting on the floor, being still, having to sit with straight backs or the adults watching them. They were aware that such positions were expected from them but they did not find them an enjoyable experience. Foucault (1977a), in his work on power and disciplinary regimes, observed the practices of institutions that regulate and control bodies in order to produce particular kinds of bodily dispositions. The children here, in addition to recognising technologies of governance deployed by the school, are also aware of the tactics developed by children to resist such strategies and subvert such disciplinary regimes. They listed, ‘people be silly—laugh, funny faces, made sounds’. I often noticed such behaviour while in collective worship: children playing with the Velcro on their shoes, pulling faces at each other or lip syncing in an exaggerated fashion to make the other children around them laugh. Although such behaviour often went unnoticed by teachers due to the highly skilled subversion of many of the children, some children did notice and would often get frustrated as they also risked being punished as a result of such behaviour. The children’s own reflections on being watched by the teachers resonate with Foucault’s (1977a) thinking on the Panopticon. The spatial arrangements, which will be discussed in greater detail in Chap. 6 in relation to sacred space, lend themselves to a panoptic style of surveillance.4 The panopticon of the prison as described in Foucault’s (1977a) Discipline and Punishment also shares certain similarities in terms of the arrangements of children’s bodies and the strategies of surveillance adopted in schools. Kulz (2017) in her work on secondary schools reveals how inequality is produced through the panoptic architecture of the school building. Drawing on both Foucault (1977a) and de Certeau (1984), Kulz argues that the panoptic style of surveillance in her field site served to reproduce particular stereotypes in relation to race, gender and class. During worship at all three field sites, children sat on the floor in the middle of the hall and the staff sat around the periphery, elevated on seats. As the children commented in this exercise, they were acutely aware of the watchful eye of the teachers. At St Peter’s, children who were seen to not be participating in worship were given blue slips that served as detentions. In Foucauldian terms, ‘the gaze alert was everywhere’ as ‘the panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognise immediately’ (1977a, 4

 See also Gallagher (2010).

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pp. 195–200). Speaking on how particular strategies are rationalised by those in positions of power and authority, de Certeau (1984), describes how certain spatial practices are developed in order to demarcate ‘the place of its own power and will’ (1984, p. 36). The strategic management and establishment of space creates, A mastery of places through sight. The division of space makes possible a panoptic practice proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and ‘include’ them within its scope of vision’. (de Certeau, 1984, p. 36)

Although prisons and schools are different types of institutions, it is worth noting that the children were clearly aware of such strategies and the teacher’s surveillance of their habitus and bodily movements. Collective worship was always subject to the strategies and authority of those in charge. This could be in relation to the seating arrangements, the readings used, the songs chosen or the way in which behaviour was monitored. At St Peter’s, when the children walked into assembly, teachers confiscated items children had brought with them for the playtime which followed collective worship. This might be Pokémon cards, conkers, books, hair clips and ties, Rubik cubes; ultimately anything that could distract children from the act of collective worship. These items were placed on the top of a cupboard which I sat next to during the worship. As noted in Chap. 3, some children, however, were adept at sneaking such items in without teachers noticing. During worship children were sometimes reminded to ‘sit straight’, ‘not to fiddle’ or ‘mess about’. This was especially the case with younger children who could constantly be seen hiding in their jumpers, playing with the hair of the person sitting front of them or giggling with the friend next to them. The regulation of children’s bodies and their resistance in collective worship demonstrate both the agency of the children and the power structures enforced on them. As such, the children’s engagement and compliance with the embodied dispositions cultivated during worship was intrinsically linked to the wider disciplinary regimes of the school. At Holly Oak, the children were given greater freedom as to how they used their bodies. Very few instructions were given; however, children were always gathered in a circle and encouraged to dance and clap during

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movements of celebration and singing. During one afternoon in early July, my class teacher Sophie decided to spend the afternoon doing quiet reflection and meditation. Assembly for that day had been cancelled but Sophie wanted to do something for her class instead. I was asked to push the tables and seats back while Sophie searched the internet for new age music. The children were asked to lie on the floor and listen to the music quietly. We spent the next ten minutes listening to a YouTube meditation play list as the children lay on the floor. After the class assembly was over, Sophie asked if the children enjoyed that and they all nodded and shouted ‘yes’ enthusiastically. I spoke to Sophie afterwards and she told me that although assembly was cancelled she still wanted to do something with the class, as they very rarely get to come together and do things as a group. The importance of coming together as a school was also echoed by other teachers. One teacher, Martha, spoke of the necessity of coming together and the sense of community that such occasions evoke. Rachael: So, if the children weren’t to have assemblies anymore do you think that would have an effect? Martha: Yeah cus we do Key Stage assembles and then we do the celebration assembly on a Friday and I think the Key Stage assembly gives them pride and importance in their Key Stage… it’s their thing, it’s where they all are, they all gather together to do something and I think…cus as wingey and complaining as they might be about it, it gives them a sense of belonging to something, belonging to that Key Stage, cus often you might not do things together. So coming together as that and doing something celebratory, fun and thoughtful is I think, brings them together as a group and then the celebration assemblies that get show pride in themselves and in each other and get to celebrate each other and feel pleased for their classmates if they get certificates … erm but yeah I do I think it gives them a sense of ownership and a sense of belonging and pride. Pride has a lot to do with it. People like to be proud of the school that they go to. They should be. They should be happy with where they are and want to shout about it and go ‘Yaaay I go to this school and we do these things and it’s all great!’ and yeah…I think it’s quite important.

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At Holly Oak, the sense of community and belonging was not established through any religious practices and drew heavily on non-religious and secular processes and rituals. In addition to collective worship, there were other activities at some field sites which also evoked a sense of togetherness and belonging outside of worship. At both Sacred Heart and Holly Oak, I also observed non-religious events, where children came together. These were ‘Movers and Munchies’ and ‘Wake and Shake’. These events typically took place in the morning and involved the children singing and dancing together. This speaks in conversation with Hemming’s (2009, 2011b) findings who also noted the use of non-religious activities in relation to collective worship and assemblies in schools to foster a sense of togetherness.

Conclusion Observing collective worship as a ritual and paying particular attention to the embodied techniques that are employed to foster this sense of togetherness allows an account of collective worship that attends to the community-­building functions of such acts while also opening up space to consider children’s embodied experiences and agency during such events. The findings in this chapter show how collective worship created an embodied school community and how, in part, this was achieved through the bodily dispositions cultivated during worship. In all three schools, this togetherness was mediated through the cultivation of religious and non-­ religious habitus. Children’s reflections also revealed that they did not simply mimic or imitate the teacher’s strategies but created their own meaning from such rituals while also observing the wider structural forces at work. Chapter 5 will develop thinking in this chapter by considering the ethical dimensions of collective worship and the moral formation of children’s subjectivities during such events. As we have established in this chapter, the body cannot be ignored as an area of meaning or analysis and as such, the attention to the moral dimensions of children’s embodied practices will be explored. Chapter 6 moves on to the spatial and material dimensions of collective worship, considering how ‘sacred spaces’ are created during worship and how children’s bodies are implicated in the process of materialising and mediating such meaning.

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Hemming, P.  J. (2009). Religion and Spirituality in the Spaces of the Primary School: Social and Political Explorations, Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Leeds. Hemming, P. J. (2011b). Meaningful Encounters? Religion and Social Cohesion in the English Primary School. Social and Cultural Geography, 12(1), 63–81. Hemming, P. J. (2015). Religion in the Primary School: Ethos, Diversity, Citizenship. Routledge. Hemming, P.  J. (2017b). ‘No Offence to God But I Don’t Believe in Him’: Religion, Schooling and Children’s Rights. Ethnography and Education, 13, 154–171. James, A. (2000). Embodied Being(s): Understanding the Self and the Body in Childhood. In A. Prout (Ed.), The Body, Childhood and Society (pp. 19–37). James, A., & Prout, A. (1997). Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (2nd ed.). Falmer. Jansen, T., Chioncel, N., & Dekkers, H. (2006). Social Cohesion and Integration: Learning Active Citizenship. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27(2), 189–205. Kapferer, J.  L. (1981). Socialization and the Symbolic Order of the School. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 12(4), 258–272. Kemper, T. (1972). The Division of Labour: A Post-Durkheimian Analytical View. American Sociological Review, 37, 739–753. Kulz, C. (2017). Factories for Learning: Making Race, Class and Inequality in the Neoliberal Academy. Manchester University Press. Kymlicka, W. (1999). Education for Citizenship. In J. Halstead & T. McLaughlin (Eds.), Education in Morality (pp. 79–102). Routledge. Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2011). Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les diferents modes d’existence, trans. Muecke, S. In L. Bryant, N. Srnicek, & G. Harman (Eds.), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (pp. 304–333). Re-Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell. Lynch, G. (2012b). The Sacred in the Modern World: A Cultural Sociological Approach. Oxford University Press. Lynch, G., & Sheldon, R. (2013). The Sociology of the Sacred: A Conversation with Jeffrey Alexander. Culture and Religion, 14, 253–267. Mahmood, S. (2001b). Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of Salat. American Ethnologist, 28(4), 827–853. Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the Body. Economy and Society, 2, 70–88. McGuire, M. (1996). Religion and the Healing the Mind/Body/Self. Social Compass, 43(1), 101–116. McGuire, M. (2008a). Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. Oxford University Press. McGuire, M. (2008b). Religion: The Social Context (5th ed.). Waveland Press.

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Mellor, P., & Shilling, C. (2010). Body Pedagogics and the Religious Habitus: A New Direction for the Sociological Study of Religion. Religion, 40(1), 27–38. Mellor, P., & Shilling, C. (2014). Re-conceptualising the Religious Habitus: Reflexivity and Embodied Subjectivity in Global Modernity. Culture and Religion, 15, 275–297. Orsi, R. (2005). Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton University Press. Otto, R. (1923). The Idea of the Holy. Oxford University Press. Pickering, W. S. F. (1994). Émile Durkheim: Durkheim on Religion. Scholars Press. Prout, A. (2000). Childhood Bodies: Construction, Agency and Hybridity. In A. Prout (Ed.), The Body, Childhood and Society (pp. 1–18). Macmillan. Quantz, R. (1999). School Ritual as Performance: A Reconstruction of Durkheim’s and Turner’s Uses of Ritual. Educational Theory, 49(4), 493–513. Reay, D. (2004b). ‘It’s All Becoming a Habitus’: Beyond the Habitual Use of Habitus in Educational Research. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(4), 431–444. Scourfield, J., Gilliat-Ray, S., Khan, A., & Otri, S. (2013). Muslim Childhood: Religious Nurture in a European Context. Oxford University Press. Sennett, R. (2012). Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation. Allen Lane. Shilling, C. (1993). The Body and Social Theory. Sage. Shilling, C. (2004). Educating Bodies: Schooling and the Constitution of Society. In J. Evans, B. Davies, & J. Wright (Eds.), Body Knowledge and Control: Studies in the Sociology of Physical Education and Health (pp. xv–xxii). Routledge. Shilling, C., & Mellor, P. (1998). Durkheim, Morality and Modernity: Collective Effervescence, Homo Duplex and the Sources of Moral Action. The British Journal of Sociology, 49(2), 193–209. Shilling, C., & Mellor, P. (2011). Retheorizing Emilie Durkheim on Society and Religion: Embodiment, Intoxication and Collective Life. Sociological Review, 59(1), 17–41. Shilling, C., & Mellor, P. (2014). Sociology of the Sacred: Religion, Embodiment and Social Change. Sage. Shils, E. (1975). Centre and Periphery: Essays in Macro-Sociology. University of Chicago Press. Short, G. (2002). Faith-Based Schools: A Threat to Social Cohesion? Journal of Philosophy of Education, 36(4), 559–572. Smelser, N. (2001). The Problematic Link Between Differentiation and Integration. In W. S. F. Pickering (Ed.), Emile Durkheim: Critical Assessments of Leading Sociologists, Volume Four (Third Series) (pp. 346–362). Routledge. Strhan, A. (2015). Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals. Oxford University Press.

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Stringer, M. (1999). On the Perception of Worship. The University of Birmingham Press. Swartz, D. (2002). The Sociology of Habit: The Perspective of Pierre Bourdieu. The Occupational Therapy Interventions, 22(1), 61–69. Thijssen, P. (2012). From Mechanical to Organic Solidarity, and Back: With Honneth Beyond Durkheim. European Journal of Social Theory, 15(4), 454–470. Tönnies, F. (1988). Community and Society. Routledge. Turner, B. (1983). Religion and Social Theory. Heinemann Educational. Turner, B. (1992). Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology. Routledge. Vincent, C., Neal, S., & Iqbal, H. (2018). Friendship & Diversity: Class Ethnicity and Social Relationships in the City. Palgrave Macmillan: London. Williams, S., & Bendelow, G. (1999). The Lived Body: Sociological Themes, Embodied Issues. Routledge.

CHAPTER 5

‘Doing Good’: Children’s Ethical Formation Through the Everyday

On a bright September morning, I arrived at St Peter’s Primary School and made my way up to the school entrance, saying hello to some children as they arrived on their scooters. I had been at the school for two weeks and so was fairly well acquainted with everyday school routines and was building an increasingly good rapport with both children and staff. In the Year Five classroom, I began to help Jane, the class teacher, prepare resources for the morning’s maths lesson. We spent 40 minutes learning ‘place value’, where children learnt the value of each digit in a number, and then the children were asked to line up in ‘lining up order’ to ‘get ready for assembly’. As we walked down to the hall, I chatted with Callum, a nine-year-old boy, fond of Minecraft and Pokémon cards. I asked him if he was looking forward to assembly. ‘Yeah’, he said, ‘it just gets a bit boring after a while’. Asking him what he meant by this, he responded ‘It just gets a bit samey samey. It’s all about being a good person and doing good and it just sometimes… yeah… gets borin’’. Empirically speaking, schools serve as an important site to address and explore the ethical turn within the social sciences and humanities1 (Das, 2010, 2012; Boothroyd, 2013; Robbins, 2013) as this is not only a space  For a useful summary of the cross-disciplinary ‘ethical turn’, see Boothroyd (2013, pp. 1–27) and Sheldon (2013, pp. 15–19). 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Shillitoe, Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Childhood, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39860-5_5

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where children are socialised with particular ideas of the good but also a space where children arrive with potentially different and competing understandings of the good due to the various ways in which families may transmit or socialise their children. As Mattingly in her ethnographic research observes: ‘each such social and institutional world is characterized by an array of specific norms and practices. Morally speaking, these are not homogenous spaces, and they are often conflicting ones’ (2014, p.  8). Children moving across these spaces and places will encounter and therefore navigate between different visions of the good, and it is this heterogeneity and contestation of the good that we find in everyday school life. Paying close attention to the school as a space in which good is explicitly performed and taught, while also paying attention to how children internalise and negotiate the values embodied in this vision, creates an opportunity to view different visions of what the ‘good life’ is and the different resources and actions through which this good life is subsequently sought for and achieved. Focusing on the question of ‘the good’ in relation to childhood—and more specifically schooling—contributes to our understanding of the good by exploring how parents, teachers, children and policy-makers construct and enact particular moral ideals and values in everyday life. The ways in which the good is constructed and enacted in relation to childhood exemplifies the dreams, wishes and desires we have for our social worlds, with children standing as the moral visions for the betterment of society (see Strhan, 2019, p. 173). However, examining the good in relation to childhood is also revealing of the anxieties, hopes and aspirations adults have in terms of children’s moral formation (Frankel, 2012, 2017). When faced with periods of environmental insecurities, political upheaval, increasing populist rhetoric and growing inequality, children represent opportunities to project, plan and realise a different and better reality than the one we currently live in. Consequently, even the seemingly mundane and inconsequential aspects of children’s everyday lives are imbued with particular imaginaries and ideas of the good. Studying schools and foregrounding children’s understanding of the good can therefore enhance the sociology of morality more broadly in terms of investigating the formation of how individuals conceptualise the good and how this is created and sustained across different spaces and contexts. In this sense, schools and childhood more broadly can

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contribute to Hitlin and Vaisey’s (2013) three core areas of the sociology of morality. Through both looking at the micro level of everyday school life, coupled with the meso and macro level of school leadership, educational policy and political rhetoric, we can observe the pressures and pulls on schools to create particular visions of the good and how this is translated and enacted in the classroom. As schools encourage the children to behave and practice particular values in daily school life, we can also examine how morality affects action and how children internalise these values and desired behaviours. This institutional focus also provides a way to explore where these morals are derived from and the variation that might occur across different sites. To begin with, I sketch out the important contributions that both childhood and education studies have within this field and explore the importance of childhood when considering ideas of morality and the good in social life more broadly. I then move on to data collected from some of my field sites, investigating how children encounter and experience the good in their daily lives and how they negotiate, internalise and reflect on such positions and practices. I begin by exploring the context of morality and values in relation to both childhood and education. I then situate this discussion in conversation with scholarly work on ordinary ethics (Lambek, 2010) and suggest that collective worship helps draw attention to these dimensions of ethical life, which consequently shifts and deepens our understanding of the lives of children. I consider understandings of childhood in relation to discourse on ordinary ethics and the anxieties of adults in terms of children’s moral formation (Frankel, 2012, 2017). Following this, I explore how schools can be seen to be performing their own ‘vision of the good’ during acts of collective worship (Robbins, 2013). I focus on the everyday ethics of collective worship and how schools celebrate the children’s ordinary achievements. Finally, I discuss children’s desire for authenticity (Taylor, 1992) when encountering values and ethical practices in school, reflecting on the cynicism and scepticism that can emerge when such acts are deemed inauthentic. I conclude by arguing that the findings presented in this chapter demonstrate the need to pay closer attention to this ethical dimension of everyday school life—and children’s lives more broadly—in order to observe how idealised notions of the good are enacted and performed in everyday life and, in turn, how children accept, contest and negotiate such visions.

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Childhood, Education and Morality Childhood in relation to morality has been an ongoing preoccupation for both sociology and psychology. Jenks (1996) and Mayall (2002) explore how constructions of childhood emerge in relation to children’s perceived moral status—or lack of it. According to Mayall (2002), children and young people are found in a paradoxical situation when it comes to matters of morality. On the one hand, children are seen as lacking in the ability to make competent decisions of their own and must therefore defer such decision-making powers to adults, who are considered to be fully complete moral beings. On the other, Mayall (2002) also observes a misfit in this, as children, while being perceived as morally incomplete and immature, are continuously placed in situations where they are expected to take on moral responsibility. This paradoxical situation arises from the various constructions and views of childhood in society. From the ‘savage child’ to the ‘natural child’, children’s place in society has always been marked by adults and their anxieties over children’s biological immaturity (Jenks, 1996; Frankel, 2017). Writing on morality and society, Durkheim (1978) reflected on his own uncertainty and fear around childhood and the perceived threat children pose to the social structure. On childhood, Durkheim considered that ‘one cannot help but tremble with fear’ at this ‘delightful but fragile mechanism’, and that ultimately, ‘it [the child] is fickle, changeable, capricious, full of disappointment and pleasant surprises’ (1978, p.  148). Speaking directly in relation to childhood and morality, Durkheim in the same essay goes on to state: As a rule, neither good nor evil is very deep-rooted in his [the child’s] nature; he is incapable of great and sustained effort; good resolutions are no sooner made than forgotten. But at the same time, what eagerness greets novelty! This diminutive conscience is a veritable kaleidoscope. (1978, p. 148)

There is, then, a view of childhood that is fraught with uncertainty, fragility and risk and entangled in this is the duty of parents, teachers and society more broadly to ensure children are raised as ‘good people’, ‘good citizens’ and that they make the ‘right choices’. Durkheim (1978) goes on to suggest how educationalists should support children’s moral formation, identifying children as ‘organisms’ that are ‘scarcely formed’ and weak in terms of their intellectual ability and capacity. Frankel (2017) draws on

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Durkheim to explore the relationship between social order and moral action, noting that children were seen as the weak link in society and therefore careful socialisation was needed to ensure children’s moral inculcation into society. Jenks (1996) observes how the Parsonian paradigm of socialisation also reproduces this image of the child as ‘potentially dangerous’. Talcott Parsons considered childhood to be the crucial stage for socialisation, as the child has ‘so far to go’ in this respect (1951, p. 142). Speaking on the internalisation of value orientations, Parsons considers these to be, in the main, laid down during childhood and not ‘subject to drastic alteration during adult life’ (1951, p. 142). In this way, Parsons’ treatment of childhood socialisation concerning their ethical formation relies heavily on treating children as merely adults in becoming (James & Prout, 1997; Ridgely, 2011). Jenks (1996) also observes how Parsons’ (1951) treatment of socialisation produces an image of the ‘profane’ child alongside a sense of society’s duty to inculcate its own morals and values in order to draw children into the social structure and continue to bolster and reproduce its own norms. The child, like the deviant, signifies difference. In an un-socialized state, the child is manifestly profane, it threatens to bring down social worlds and the threat can only be mollified within theory by treating the child through an archetype as a proto- adult. (Jenks, 1996, p. 20)

Writing on child migration and morality, Lynch (2014) observes that nation states’ cultural imaginaries play a significant role in the socialisation of children. In this process, children are formed as part of an ‘imagined community of the nation’, and such socialisation is achieved through various mechanisms within education, fiction, play, music and broader participation in society as a whole (Lynch, 2014, p. 166). The school, as Lynch (2014) argues, is a vehicle within children’s socialisation, and educational institutions have long been observed as a key space for children’s moral formation and as a site for civilising processes (Foucault, 1977; Elias, 2000; Beck, 1990; Watson & Ashton, 1995). According to Beck, schools ‘reinforce the values learned in the home, and foster new outlooks and behaviour needed in the workplace and other public settings of pluralist societies’ (1990, p. viii). This is especially the case in British schools where values and citizenship in schools receive particular attention, within both

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academic and political discourse.2 This raises the question: what values (and whose values)? And can we assume there is a simple correlation between values at home and values in school? A number of scholars (e.g. Rich, 1993; Strhan, 2017a) have found that schools can be places to promote ‘middle-class values’. Reay (2006) and Kulz (2017) argue that middle-class children can be viewed as ‘valuable commodities’ in schools, especially in relation to meeting attainment targets. Dill and Davison Hunter explore ‘culture wars’ in American schools and the need to attend to how ‘schools participate in the legitimation and reproduction of moral order in society’, acknowledging that ideas of the good life saturate all areas of school life (2010, pp. 289–290). However, such literature tends to focus on areas of the curriculum and more explicit forms of school life (e.g. sex education) rather than children’s everyday lived experience. This raises the question as to what sorts of values should children develop in school and how do you ensure that such values are inclusive and can be adopted by all? Equally, what do these values mean and how are children expected to learn and reflect on them? Fader, in her work on the moral lives of Hasidic girls in Brooklyn, also calls for more attention to be paid to the ‘intimate spaces’ of children’s lives, including the school, arguing that adults’ perceptions about children’s moral formation ‘may be very different from what adults intend’ (2009, p.  3). Within education studies, there is a significant amount of literature on values (Wringe, 1998, 2006; McLaughlin & Halstead, 2000; Halstead & Pike, 2006; Osler & Starkey, 2006; Hemming, 2015). Halstead and Taylor (2000), in their review of values in education, note that the purpose of the school with regards to values is twofold. First, the school aims to help develop children’s pre-existing values by enhancing their understanding and awareness of what is important to the school and wider society, and secondly, to develop their ability to reflect on such values. Schools are a major source of socialisation in a child’s life and the inculcation of values is central to this. Schools also, Halstead argues, ‘reflect and embody the values of society’ (1996, p. 3). These values are performed, embodied and lived out in a variety of ways; they do not 2  Following the Crick Report (QCA, 1998), citizenship education was made a compulsory part of secondary education and since 2014, all schools in England have a duty to ‘actively promote fundamental British values’ (Department of Education, 2014). Space does not permit to discuss British values, however, see Eaude (2017) for a helpful overview of British values and their implications in relation to religion and spirituality.

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simply exist in a policy document uploaded on to the school’s website. Values are seen in the everyday behaviours and actions of both children and teachers, in the aims and ethos of the school, the spatial arrangements of the classrooms, the materials and objects found in the school, the curriculum and by the various school-led community projects (Gallagher, 2005; Parker, 2009). However, as I argue in this chapter, findings from my fieldwork demonstrate the significant place collective worship has in terms of the explicit performance (see section on ‘Emotion Work and Values’) of the school’s values and the cultivation of children’s ethical subjectivities. From a historical perspective, John Hull stated that collective worship is a time where ‘the school affirmed explicitly what was implicit in all of its work’ (1975, p. 22). For Hull (1975), such values were intrinsically linked to nurturing a sense of Christian identity and fostering that within the wider setting of the school community. However, little attention has since been paid to the content of collective worship, with much commentary instead being focused on the justification of collective worship in today’s society. As Smith and Smith (2013, p. 7) argue, the difficulty with the existing literature is the continual focus on the legal issues of compliance at the expense of other perspectives. Rather than considering what the content of collective worship might be and how such events feed into wider school life, the conversation starts and stops at the level of policy, leaving very little attention paid to the empirical, everyday realities of collective worship. Consequently, little is known about what actually happens during acts of collective worship, particularly in relation to their ethical dimension.

Exploring the Good and the Everyday Robbins (2013) was motivated to explore what people find valuable in life after undertaking ethnographic research with the Urapmin in Papua New Guinea. Robbins (2013) observed how anthropology has shifted in its approach, from once being focused on the ‘other’, in those societies which are markedly different to the anthropologists’; and then shifting again to an anthropology of the ‘suffering subject’, which drew attention to the disposed, marginalised and vulnerable in society; now shifting again towards an anthropology of ‘the good’. According to Robbins, an anthropology of the good focuses on ‘how people living in different societies strive to create the good in their lives’ (2013, p. 457). Rather than trying to promote an idea of what might be good across all societies, the aim of

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an anthropology of the good is to consider how different communities understand their own idea of the good and how they coordinate their lives in order to promote what they consider to be the good. Robbins (2013) sees a number of themes emerging within anthropology, all of which he argues contribute to this growing body of work on the good. Such themes include well-being, empathy, care, morality and value, and it is such themes that are constantly found within collective worship in schools. What is particularly important to note about this anthropological work on the good is that it is about understanding how a particular group or persons understand the good: how they articulate it, how they perform it and how it features within their everyday lives. The anthropology of the good is not meant to produce some sort of grand metanarrative that explains what the ‘good’ is. Rather, it is to highlight the varied and culturally, and historically contingent, nature of the good and how individuals understand this. However, Robbins’s approach (2013) has come under criticism by some for its lack of attention to the ‘everyday’ as a site of spontaneous moral action.3 The turn to the everyday is perhaps best encapsulated in Lambek’s (2010, 2015a) seminal edited volume on ‘ordinary ethics’, which compels anthropologists to pay closer attention to this often taken for granted aspect of human existence. By ordinary ethics, Lambek (2010) focuses his attention on those implicit practices that may seem inconsequential, but often shape our ethical sensibilities and actions. Lambek (2010) argues that ordinary ethics can be found in everyday activities, such as ordinary language, and that we should avoid looking for ethics in solely explicit or special instances. We need to attend to how ordinary ethics are intertwined within our everyday lives and how we come to make subtle ethical decisions or judgements. Collective worship and other reflective or contemplative practices in schools, which are everyday practices of normal school life, can be ways in which schools create an environment for children to encounter values and reflect on various ethical considerations. In relation to religion, Lambek also suggest that our ethical dimension has also been closely intertwined with religion and that historically speaking religion was the means by which the ‘the ordinary is transcended, and ethics intellectualized, materialized, or transcendentalized’ (2010, p. 3). Lambek suggests 3  See Venkatesan (2015) for a detailed debated between Robbins and Das with regards to the good and in particular, Das’ critique of Robbins which see she’s as closely aligned with Badiou’s contempt for ordinary life.

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that our ethical actions, previously, would have only been understood within the domain of religion and that we need an alternative approach to understanding ethical life.4 Taking Robbins’s (2013) work on the good and Lambek’s (2010) contribution to ordinary ethics together, we can enhance our understanding of the values schools seek to reproduce in assemblies and explore how children enact particular forms of ethics through their everyday actions. Focusing on these micro-practices invites us to observe the often taken for granted aspects of everyday life and reflect on what my participants see as the good in life. What is crucial in respect to this literature is that it pays heed to the often taken for granted aspects of everyday life and compels anthropologists to reflect on what their participants see as the good in life. This approach therefore lends itself very nicely to understanding the ethical dimensions of collective worship and demands the researcher take seriously those ideals and visions of what is moral, rather than dismiss them as inconsequential or insignificant. At St Peter’s, the school had a clear and established ‘values framework’, which was made up of six core values, with a different value assigned to each term of the school year.5 These core values permeated throughout all school life, with assemblies focusing on that term’s value. During assemblies, the children were encouraged to think about this particular value and were often presented with hypothetical situations, being asked to reflect on how they would act or behave in a given context. Friday assemblies were known as ‘celebration assemblies’, and a child from each class was awarded a ‘super learner’ certificate and a ‘values champion’ certificate. The values champion certificates always referred to the core value of the term, while on occasion, touching on others too. These certificates were handed out for a variety of reasons, such as the thankful attitude a 4  In this chapter, I approach ethics following Lambek (2010) and think of ethics in relation to the everyday rules of social interaction, in that ethics are intrinsic to social action and, drawing on Rappaport (1999) and Cavell (2000), that ‘practice is always understood in relation to criteria and based on judgment about the relevance of specific criteria … and new criteria are instantiated by means of illocutionary force or acts’ (Lambek, 2015b, p. 129). 5  The schools full list of values was as follows: Thankfulness Compassion Unity Respect Hope Trust

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child had demonstrated during the school week. The values here were clearly linked to character and celebrated children who had demonstrated such desirable behaviour. The school’s values could be seen throughout the school. For example, each classroom had a wall display for the term’s value, and there were occasional activities during lesson time that explored the term’s value in more depth. Some teachers also integrated this official values discourse into everyday conversations with children, and it was also a footer on every document or letter produced by the school. However, it was only during acts of collective worship where the values were explicitly performed6 and explored. Each act of worship had some sort of teaching that explored the value of the term. In addition to this, prayers, greetings, mottos and songs were used, which also helped bolster such values. The school hall, where assemblies took place, also had each value painted in bright colours on every wall. Smith and Smith (2013) argue that a virtue discourse, as opposed to a values discourse, was more commonplace at the schools they sampled as part of their research on collective worship. A virtue discourse, or virtue ethics as they labelled it, focused more on the personality and the desirable characteristics children should aim to have, rather than abstract values. My findings, to some extent, support Smith and Smith’s (2013) research. Smith and Smith (2013) argue that the difference between moral values and a type of virtue ethics is that virtue ethics are more likely to be located in some sort of tradition or culture. Values, on the other hand, are more likely to transcend particulars and are more universal in their application. St Peter’s bridged both a virtue ethics discourse and a values discourse. Collective worship in schools was indeed focused on what Smith and Smith (2013) call virtue ethics, as it encouraged the children to think about their behaviours, actions and attitudes. However, this was embedded within a wider values discourse which provided the overarching categories under which such desirable behaviours and attitudes were placed. On the first day of term, Mrs Larson, the head teacher, began the day’s act of collective worship by introducing all the new staff and pupils who had joined that year. After this introduction, Mrs Larson asked the children what they could do to help the new people and make them feel welcome. After a minute or two of thinking time and conferring with their partners, children provided various suggestions, such as helping the new 6  Although values were lived and seen throughout wider school life, I use the word performed here to denote the performance of values in line with Goffman’s (1959) work.

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people to find their way around the school, being kind and talking and playing with them at playtime. Mrs Larson thanked the children for their answers and agreed that these were good examples of how they could help. Pointing to the values painted on the walls of the school hall, she said that such actions demonstrate ‘our core values such as compassion and how it is important to show compassion and love towards others’. Mrs Larson concluded that ‘we need to show respect and compassion to others as these are our school values and we should behave like this in school’.7 Collective worship at St Peter’s Primary were designed to attend to both the virtuous behaviour teachers desired of the children while promoting a wider framework of values under which such virtues could be situated. The framework of values developed by St Peter’s and the ethical sensibilities that they attempted to cultivate amongst the children were developed and used to instill their vision of the good within the children and ultimately to create good citizens for the world. However, this may also be interpreted in terms of performing the school’s inclusive ethos for particular imagined audiences, such as Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (OFSTED) inspectors. When discussing with me what they thought the aims and purpose of assemblies were, two children, Oliver and Luke, argued that collective worship was aimed at making children ‘good people’ and helping them to think about ways to do good in the world: Oliver:

They’re trying to make us more thankful for the world around us and help other people that are in need. Luke: Making us a good person. Rachael: so, they’re trying to make you a good person. So, go on, tell me a bit more about this. Oliver: Erm, well they’re trying to help us in life to be a good person, be nice to other people and to help and to I don’t know, donate money to charities, help children in need, sponsor … Luke and Oliver describe being a good person in terms of being kind to others and showing care and compassion. This idea of ‘the good’ was intrinsically linked to the school’s vision of the good and the types of 7  Although on this occasion, Mrs Larson refers to behaving well in school, there were many times during fieldwork good behaviour was spoken of in relation to outside of school (e.g. playing nicely in the park) and embodying the school values at home and in the wider community.

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children it seeks to produce. Lynch (2014), writing on child migration, also observes this process of socialisation in terms of children’s moral development and how children became symbolic of society in itself. Lynch argues that in modern times, the cultural imaginaries of nations play a significant role in the ‘public socialization’ of children and that such imaginaries consequently inform: public understandings of childhood as a period of preparation for citizenship in the nation or empire in which concern for the moral development of the child is seen as a public good and the figure of the child has become a symbol of the ‘citizen in embryo’. (2014, p. 166)

We can observe the practices within assemblies as a particular site of children’s moral development where particular visions of the child as a public good are imagined and performed. During collective worship, children are encouraged to reflect on hypothetical situations and, more often than not, are invited to consider how they would feel or react in such situations. The school’s values and vision of the good were often discussed in relation to non-religious situations or contexts. For example, ‘thankfulness’ was discussed in relation to Black History Month and being thankful for various individuals and their contributions to arts, science and music. The only explicit references to religion were during songs referencing God or prayer directed to God. The school values were an important feature of everyday life at St Peter’s. However, while discussing the school’s values, Mrs Larson explained that the values did link in with the school’s religious character while still being inclusive and universal. Underpinning that (school vision) is our core values. Now these come out of the Christian faith but we chose those so that they might be universally accepted and we focus on one of those every term with other values built on top of that… we did an inset day and loads of work on it and it was quite a democratic process really and we talked about what the values meant and where they came from out of theology and we had a lot of talk about what we want for our children at our school and what values underpin our work and I think we got to about 10 and we all sat down and fought for our values corner and it was a whole staff agreement … (the values) are the foundation of everything we do (…) what I think is really special about our school is that no one leaves collective worship, it is really inclusive (…) and well crikey, if our Muslim families opted out of collective worship, what would I do with ninety kids?

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Although Mrs Larson said that their values were selected as they were primarily seen as Christian values, she also saw them as universal and therefore appropriate and accessible for the diverse range of pupils at St Peter’s. For Mrs Larson, it was simply not feasible to create assemblies that emphasise values as specifically Christian and doing so would not be inclusive for the diverse range of children that attended the school. Consequently, Mrs Larson later commented that worship at the school would never be ‘churchy enough’ to get an outstanding Statutory Inspection of Anglican and Methodist Schools (SIAMS) inspection.8 Schools with a religious character raise another set of questions in relation to values and identity, in terms of how such schools are expected to foster cohesion and inclusion, while also promoting their own religious identity and ethos (Pring, 2007, 2012). The Dearing Report, also known as The Way Ahead report (2001), detailed how Anglican schools are to mediate their school ethos and values.9 The report supports the school’s role in embodying Christian values and their duty to effectively communicate these to the students in attendance. Seeing the school’s duty as ‘serving the community’ within the ‘context of Christian belief and practice’, the report goes on to encourage the ‘promotion of Christian values through the experience it offers all its pupils’ (Dearing Report, 2001, p. 15). The role of church schools in terms of inculcating Christian values has been examined from a number of perspectives in terms of how and in what way schools with a religious character should transmit values. Johnson and McCreery (1999) observe the central role of the head teacher in the transmission of values. Colson (2004) also notes the pivotal role of the head teacher in the transmission of values in Church of England schools, noting considerable diversity in head teacher’s approaches. In contrast to the motivations of the Dearing Report (2001), Colson (2004) discovered that none of his head teachers saw the promotion of Christian values as central to their role as head teachers and that serving the needs of their community came first. Street (2007) discovered that the Dearing Report (2001) has had impact on teacher’s practices, while Jelfs found inconsistencies in Church of England Schools’ distinctive Christian character and that ‘schools do not have a

8  Statutory Inspection of Anglican and Methodist Schools (SIAMS) refers to the compulsory inspect of all Church of England and Methodist schools under section 48 of the Education Act 2005. 9  These were devised by Waddington in ‘Future in Partnership’. (1984, p. 71).

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way of clarifying and prioritising their vision and values in all aspects of school (Jelfs, 2010, p. 36). Mrs. Larson’s reflections on St Peter’s values also resonate with Colson’s (2004) findings. Mrs. Larson, although identifying the Christian origin of the school’s values, chose them so that they would be accepted by all, specifically noting the need to ensure that Muslim children were able to participate in assemblies and find them accessible. As Mattingly observes, it is this ‘moral pluralism [that] characterizes ordinary life’ (2014, p. 8), and ‘social communities are unlikely to be morally homogenous; there will be multiple and even rival moral schemes and traditions in circulation’ (2014, pp. 154–155). It is this morally heterogeneous terrain that schools and teachers have to navigate in daily school life and that is further intensified by a legal requirement for daily worship in all schools, for all pupils, which is to be of a Christian character. Assemblies at all schools became a type of moral project where the good could not only be performed but also where everyday ethics could be celebrated. At Holly Oak, Joe and Zara described what they did during assemblies and, in particular, in moments of celebration and achievement. Rachael: Can you tell me about assemblies here Zara: They’re fun Joe: They’re fun and they’re awesome and funny and awesome Rachael: What do you do in assemblies Joe: You give out certificates Zara: We clap Joe: And we listen to music Rachael: You listen to music and you get certificates Zara: We clap for our friends Joe: And we get certificates and then we listen to music Zara: Because people done something really good Rachael: Really good? Zara: Yeah Rachael: And what sorta good things would someone have done? Zara: doing good working …. they can do good thinking Zara said that she would ‘feel really proud’ of her friends who were awarded a certificate. When observing assemblies at Holly Oak, I often saw the children awarded these certificates, or ‘Stars of the Week’. Assemblies at Holly Oak rarely made any reference to any particular religious tradition, however, as with St Peter’s and Sacred Heart, the

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cultivation of children’s ethical subjectivities and the celebration of the ‘good’ was a particularly important part of the act. There were typically reflective and contemplative practices each day, but the time of day of these varied along with the format. However, every week there were both class assemblies and whole school assemblies where good behaviour was celebrated. These were called the ‘Star Awards’ and every Friday one child from each class was chosen as the ‘star’ for that week. Before the teacher leading the assembly announced a particular week’s stars, children sang and danced to either Heather Small’s Proud or S Club 7’s Reach for the Stars.10 After a few moments, the music was turned down, and the teacher introduced the star awards. One assembly was led by Lisa, who had taught at Holly Oak for several years. ‘Right then everyone, now it’s time for our special celebration where we get to hear about all the wonderful things some of you have been doing’. Lisa then invited each class teacher to speak for a few moments about which pupil had been chosen as this week’s star and why. The child was then invited to the front, and everyone clapped. Children were always encouraged to behave well around school with empathy particularly encouraged in assemblies and school life more broadly. Children were not only encouraged to think about how other’s might feel but to learn from them as well. When a child with a visual impairment joined the school, the school held an assembly about blindness and invited a speaker to talk to the children about how being blind affected his everyday life. In class later that day, the children took part in activity where they were blindfolded and guided with a partner around school in order to learn about how it is like to be blind at school. Gary, a teacher at the school, also spoke about this during an interview. Gary was partially deaf and decided to deliver an assembly about this during ‘Deaf Awareness Week’ and talk about his own experience of being deaf. In this way, we can see how Holly Oak encouraged empathy in a particular way, which not only focused on knowing about the other but also ‘learning from the other’ (Todd, 2003).11

 See, for example, Small (2012) and S Club 7 (2014) for songs.  See Todd (2003) for an examination of empathy as an educational resource. In this Todd (2003) critically investigates how we invoke empathy strategically in order to create new ways of being together and understanding each other. 10 11

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‘My Friend Jesus’ at Sacred Heart In contrast to Holly Oak and St Peter’s, at Sacred Heart, the idea of the good was always explicitly referred to in terms of Christianity and linked to a gospel reading. Assemblies at Sacred Heart were firmly rooted in Catholic teaching, with assemblies designed to resemble Mass in a number of ways. Prayer was a significant feature of assemblies and wider school life, with prayers often selected to reflect both the time of year nationally and in terms of the Roman Catholic tradition. One prayer that featured regularly in collective worship was ‘My Friend Jesus’. During one Friday afternoon in late November, children at Sacred Heart made their way from the classrooms towards the hall for their final assembly of the week. Entering to Pharrell’s Happy, some children sang along or swayed to the music after taking their seats in the hall. While waiting for all the classes to arrive, there was a PowerPoint presentation featuring a slide with a question ‘What has made you happy this week?’ After welcoming the children, Mrs Allen began by asking the children what they thought had made them particularly happy that week. After hearing from some children, Mrs Allen went on to tell everyone what had made her happy, and then began the celebration segment of the assembly. The children’s various achievements ranged from showing kindness during lesson time to helping teachers clean up the classroom at the end of art-based activities. At the end of celebrating the various accomplishments in each class, Mrs Allen told the children, Well what a wonderful set of achievements everyone. You have all done some really lovely things this week and you should feel very pleased with yourself. But sometimes we don’t always do that, do we, and sometimes we slip up as we are human. So, let’s say a prayer that makes us remember that God will forgive us.

Following this, the prayer, ‘My Friend Jesus’ appeared on the PowerPoint, and all the school began to recite the prayer in unison: My friend Jesus, help me to be good, To do the things and say the things that all good children should And if I sometimes slip a bit and do get out of hand Then please my friend Jesus, make the grown-ups understand That it isn’t always easy to be as good as good can be, But I am getting better Lord because you are helping me Amen

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At Sacred Heart, this idea of children’s goodness was celebrated once a week during assembly time. The concept of the good and doing good was framed in terms of forgiveness and specifically God’s forgiveness and love, where children are ‘always able to be as good as good can be’. The idea of the good at Sacred Heart was also very much linked to the ordinary and the everyday. The achievements by the children were actions they undertook during their normal school day. It was the children’s everyday moral actions that were celebrated here. ‘My Friend Jesus’ was then used to locate this idea of the ‘good’ in terms of Christian teaching, demonstrating how a relationship with Jesus can help children to ‘be as good as good can be’ while also acknowledging the potential for children to ‘slip a bit’. Rather than pursuing this idea in terms of sin and Jesus as a heavenly judge, children were encouraged to see Jesus as a friend, who will understand and help them when they are not ‘being as good as good can be’. Rebecca, a girl from Year Four, told me that: We say my friend Jesus prayer to ask for help when we are not in the best of times. When we’ve been mean to someone and we need to ask for forgiveness. And so, he can guide us through the week. So that we have as good of a week as we can.

Ridgely (2005) also found that religious educators at her Catholic field sites would encourage children to form a friendship with Jesus. By focusing on Jesus as a ‘friend or mentor, the catechists moved away from older understandings of Jesus as a judge to whom children must submit without question’ (Ridgely, 2005, p. 227). The adults in Ridgely’s (2005) research wanted to encourage this image of Jesus to make the children feel comfortable—and experience the church as a safe and judgement-free space. Outside the school hall at Sacred Heart was a reflection area, where children could write down suggestions as to how they could ‘make Jesus welcome in their everyday lives’. One child, for example, wrote: ‘I could care for my friends and family helping them by doing my best. Also, I could work hard for my parents and do what I was told to do. That is how I will welcome Jesus in Advent’.12 12  This resonates with Orsi’s (2005) work on material childhood in relation to advent. Orsi (2005) notes how the perception of children’s ‘cognitive limitation’ presents particular issues with children when it comes to Advent. As such, his participant, Sister Mary, has to materialise time in the form of a calendar and in doing so ‘invisible minutes and hours acquire a solidity borrowed from the corporeal experience of children’ (Orsi, 2005, p. 76).

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As Hemming (2015) also found at the Catholic field site for his research, an ethic of love for God strongly underpinned the school’s ethos and values. This focus on Catholic values at Hemming’s (2015) school was seen in relation to a strong collective identity rather than in terms of diversity or individual rights. Ideas of love for God and seeing Jesus as a friend were also clearly expressed throughout life at Sacred Heart. Building on Hemming (2015), I observed how this love for God and Jesus and children’s moral formation were expressed and enacted in everyday interactions at home and at school. In this way, we can draw some similarities between all three field sites, as although Sacred Heart has an explicit Christian ethic, St Peter’s an implicit Christian ethic and Holly Oak was not linked to any religious tradition, all three field sites privileged and celebrated the everyday as a site of children’s ethical formation.

Ordinary Ethics Although children’s good behaviours were acknowledged at other moments in everyday school life at all three schools, it was assembly time that formally reflected on how children can be good at school and at home. Das (2010) attends to the intricacies of these kinds of interlinked social contracts in her work on ordinary ethics. Das (2010) discusses the nature and limits of ordinary ethics, how we are to understand quotidian ethical acts and how we are to distinguish between that which is ordinary and that which is ethical. Veena Das’s (2010) argument is that we can recast many of our ordinary habits as forms of moral action and that our public rituals, and the rules that surround them, are grounded in everyday life. In her work on life after experiencing trauma and violence, Das (2007) argues that it is through descending into the everyday rather than ascending into the transcendent that individuals can recover, and that, as a result, we can observe that the everyday in itself is an achievement. Drawing on the work of Das (2007, 2010, 2012) helps us to situate the assembly as a site of moral action and a daily ritual that seeks to ground, legitimise and reproduce particular framings of what it means to be good and do good. Children at all three schools articulated an understanding of being good in relation to demonstrating the school’s values through their everyday activities. Showing kindness, respect and care for the other was especially important. Within this was a particular framework of morality that focused on individual responsibility. Amy, a Year Four pupil from Sacred Heart,

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commented on this during an interview when she reflected on the purpose of assemblies: Rachael: What do you think the point of assembly is? Amy: I think it’s to like improve yourself and be like and it’s also mostly about behaviour and being good. The point of assembly, as Amy observes, is about ‘improving yourself’, both in terms of behaviour and being good. Children’s ethical self-­ formation here can also be thought of in light of Foucault’s (1988) work. Foucault observed the relations between things, the other and oneself, while questioning ‘how we are constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?’ (1984, p. 49). Foucault (1988) defines technologies of the self as follows: [Technologies of the self] permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (1988, p. 18 [italics my emphasis])

Both Amy and Callum (at the beginning of this chapter) reflect on assembly as being a transformative opportunity, a time to think about how to be a better friend, sister, brother, student and pupil. During one assembly at St Peter’s, Mrs Larson announced that the school’s Parent Teacher Association had purchased three new benches for the school playground. The pupils were told that they would arrive the following week, and pictures of the benches were then displayed on the overhead projector for the children to see. They were painted in bright colours and carved into the centre of the bench were the words ‘Buddy Bench’. The ‘Buddy Benches’, as Mrs Larson explained, were not only to be used as benches but also as way to know if someone felt lonely and needed a friend. She told the children that, during playtime, if ‘you’re feeling lonely or sad, or maybe you have no one to play with or you just need someone to talk to, go and sit on this bench. Now everyone sitting here knows this and so if you see someone alone, sitting on this bench, what do you think you should do?’ Hands shot up around the room. A child from Year Four said, ‘go and be their friend. Ask them if they’re ok and if they want to play with you’. Mrs Larson agreed and said these benches were an opportunity for everyone at

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St Peter’s to be a better friend and to show kindness to everyone. In this way, we can think of assemblies as supporting the development of the children’s ‘technologies of the self’, as they encourage children to take individual responsibility for their own actions in order to effect change and improve their own capacity for moral perfectionism. However, Foucault (1988) acknowledges that an individual’s practices are not created by the individual themselves. They are achieved in relation to others and through ‘patterns that the individual finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group’ (Foucault, 1987, p. 122). This approach also speaks to Carrither’s (1990) use of pedagogy and how human beings hold each other to particular standards. Carrither reflects on the relational process this can take, observing how teachers ‘must frame the moral rules imaginatively to conform with fluid, changing circumstances; and in so framing the rules, teachers change them’ (1990, p. 200). We can see this awareness of how self-fashioning practices and care for the self are supported or imposed by others in Luke and Oliver’s reflections earlier, when they observed that the school was ‘trying to make us a good person’. Mattingly’s (2014) elaboration of Cavell’s (2004) work on moral perfectionism also provides a lens through which to understand these practices. Mattingly (2014) discusses how Cavell’s ethics has an explicitly social dimension whereby your ethical actions are not judged by some impartial transcendent judge; rather, they are questioned and examined by those around us in our daily acts and everyday conversations. Mattingly’s (2014) account of Cavell goes on to explain that in such conversations, we are in dialogue with someone personally significant and that this is ‘essential for reflective self-consideration’ (2014, p. 90) as we are asked to reveal ourselves and, in the words of Cavell, this becomes ‘one soul’s examination of another’ (Cavell, 2004, p. 49) as cited in Mattingly (2014, p. 90)). It is this collective self-examination of each other’s moral capacity and actions that is discussed and reflected on during assemblies in schools. Children are not only told how and why to become a better person but that we all can help each other to do good. In slight contrast, at Sacred Heart, through the prayer ‘My Friend Jesus’, children are encouraged to also think about this moral questioning in relation to a friendship with Jesus. Although a transcendent other, the prayer encourages children to focus on Jesus as being a friend and as someone children can turn to and rely on for moral guidance and as a being that can help children to reflect on their own moral standing. The school community, in this way,

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encapsulates the Cavellian friend through which children are encouraged on a daily basis to reflect on the moral standing of themselves and others, with the aim of becoming better people and having a better school community.

Ethical Utterances The daily and repetitive enactment of collective worship across all three schools created a space in which children could acquire the necessary dramaturgical discipline required to participate (Goffman, 1959). The act of participating in collective worship became an ethical act itself as the very behaviours encouraged during such times were seen as enacting some sort of moral code. For example spoken utterances about particular values, which I term ‘ethical utterances’, were particularly illustrative of the moral character of collective worship. We can see an example of these ethical utterances in the opening and closing mottos at St Peter’s. At the start of collective worship, children walk in the school hall, most often in silence and once seated in their assigned places, the member of staff leading collective worship would always began with ‘peace be with you’, to which everyone responded ‘and also with you’. This was then quickly followed by the same teacher saying ‘as salam wali kum’, to which everyone responded with, ‘wali kum salam’. This was always spoken at the start of each act of collective worship before anything else was spoken. Many of the children reflected that such statements were as sign of respect with some children noting that the two different greetings was a way to show respect Christians and Muslims specifically. At the end of collective worship, children and staff also recited the motto, ‘Our worship in this place has ended, our service in the world has begun’. However, when I asked children what they thought this phrase meant, many were unsure and confused by the statement. Some guessed that it referred to the end of collective worship but many were unsure as to what ‘our service’ referred to, with a few suggesting it meant going to their next lesson or going out to break to play. The repeated and performative nature of these utterances demonstrated the adherence to particular social facts, or norms, and revealed certain ethical sensibilities schools sought to reproduce amongst its students (Butler, 1993; Day, 2011). Therefore, the acceptance or deviation from the norms that were expected within collective worship are not just a sign of an individual’s performance and their impression management. Rather,

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the act of participation in collective worship became an ethical act in itself. (Goffman, 1959). Austin (1962) drew attention to the transformative powers of language, and the fact that speaking something also implies doing something. The speaking and listening practices in collective worship are revealing of the strategies developed by schools to promote an inclusive ethos. The value and legitimacy of these mottos or utterances were intrinsically linked to how they were performed within a social context. Judith Butler (1993) considered how particular ‘utterances’ are legitimised and argued that it is the ‘performative speaking’ of an utterance that provides authority and legitimacy. Ultimately, such utterances have no ‘other legitimating authority than the echo-chain of their own reinvocation’ due to the ‘infinite deferral of authority to an irrecoverable past’ that allows authority to be constituted (Butler, 1993, pp. 70–71). The utterances that were spoken at the start of each assembly were ordinary and made up the everyday ethical practices that were cultivated and mediated in school life. Critiquing Sennett’s (2012) approach to cooperation, Sheldon (2013) argues that we can observe highly skilled instances of cooperation and ethical practice if we cast our gaze beyond the extraordinary and exceptional cases.

Cultivating an Attitude for Gratitude As mentioned earlier, St Peter’s had an official values framework and the value during my period of data collection was thankfulness. On a Monday morning in October, when all the children had found their spaces in the school hall, Mrs Larson, the head teacher, began the day’s act of collective worship. ‘Peace be with you’. The children and staff responded, ‘and also with you’. Immediately afterwards, Mrs Larson said ‘As-Salaam-Alaikum’, to which everyone else replied ‘Wa-Alaikum-Salaam’. Mrs Larson then went on to introduce the theme of the day’s collective worship. Good morning everyone! So lovely to see you all and I hope you all had an awesome weekend. So what are we feeling thankful for today? Our value this term is thankfulness and I would like to know what everyone is feeling thankful for?

Enthusiastic hands shot up around the school hall with many children stretching their arms as far as they could, waving their hands and shouting ‘me me me!’ Mrs Larson selected several children to explain what they

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were feeling thankful for that day. The responses varied from being thankful for being able to solve a maths problem, to having lovely teachers and friends. She then introduced that day’s song, ‘God created them all’. Mrs Larson reminded the children that this was a fairly new song which they had only sung a handful of times during the last academic year. Mrs Larson then explained the relevance of the song and why the children were singing it that day: ‘God Created Them All’ is all about the things we are grateful for and all the things God created. So when you’re singing this, think about what you are grateful for and how lucky we are to live in a world surrounded by all these things.

The lyrics appeared on a PowerPoint at the front of the hall with a Year Six student managing the music. The children repeated the song a few times but at no point were children told they had to take part and no children were reprimanded for sitting and watching. I noticed Josh sat downplaying with his shoelaces, mouthing along to the words with his head tilted to one side. Most children appeared to take part, as did the staff. At the end, four children from my class were called to the front to read a prayer they had written. Mrs Larson reminded the children that it was a ‘time for thinking or talking to God before Malcom, Max, and Brandon read their prayer as a group’. Dear God, We are very thankful for the scientific process plants go through every year to make food for us, We are thankful for everyone in our families and everyone in the world We are also thankful for the farms and farmers for planting crops and turning it into food. We are thankful for God and ask him to help us share food with those who do not have much food. Amen

After the children repeated ‘Amen’, Mrs Larson said that we could all sing ‘Our God is a great big God’ on the way out, as long as the children ‘don’t shout it, but sing it’. After announcing this, a number of children exclaimed ‘yes!’ and the majority appeared excited about the prospect of singing this song. The children sang enthusiastically with accompanying dance moves

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and class by class, all the children left the hall, singing as they made their way out to the playground. Giving thanks at St Peter’s was often referred to in relation to both religion and non-religion. On the way out of the hall, I spoke to Malcom and Max about their prayer as they prepared their conkers for battle at playtime. Malcom and Max, who both identified as non-religious, said that they wanted to do a prayer of thanks as this was the school’s value and they wanted it to link to what they have been learning about in science as well as the Harvest festival. They both said they ‘did not mind’ mentioning God as it is ‘respectful’ for those who have a religion. Collective worship at Holly Oak also focused on thankfulness, however, in contrast, did not draw on any religious tradition, belief or practice to mediate this value. The school poem, as discussed in Chap. 3, specifically focused on gratitude and giving thanks. Each day, whether in Key Stage, whole school or class-based collective worship, all children said the following: Thank you for today Thank you for working hard and learning well Thank you for friend’s fun and everyone Thank you for today

The poem did not address any particular being or transcendent other and, as we have previously learnt, was reworded so that ‘Dear God’ and ‘Amen’ were removed in order to make it into a poem rather than a prayer. The unknown recipient of the thanks being given here afforded the children the opportunity to give thanks to anyone, and as described in Chap. 3, Tom decided to give thanks to the school and the head teacher. According to Simmel (1950), gratitude can be seen as a method for fostering cohesion and bonding between individuals and social groupings: ‘This atmosphere of obligation belongs among those ‘microscopic’, but infinitely tough, threads which tie one element of society to another, and thus eventually to all of them together in a stable collective life’ (Simmel, 1950, p. 395). However, as Callum reflected earlier in this chapter, the school’s attempts to cultivate this value are not always successful, as the frequent, repetitive use of particular discourses and rituals can result in them losing some of their meaning and significance.

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Valuing Authenticity During one of the interviews with children, Toby and Doug discussed the school’s values and what they thought of them: Toby: But the thing is … the values, the values, they’re so … like I’ve gone for every year I’ve had to go through all the values, can we just stop already man! … I was in nursery OK. I came in on the first day of nursery (…) and basically every year we have the same values just so— Doug: And again and again and again and again! …. It’s kind of like they’re forcing it into our brain because they do it over and over again Toby: It’s mushing our brain… I don’t want to become an adult! Although children at St Peter’s commented on the importance of the school values, many spoke of the repetitiveness in the way the values were sometimes applied to or featured in everyday school life. Lambek (2015b) argues that it is ritual and the performance of ritual that helps to produce the criteria by which we make ethical judgements. Drawing on Rappaport (1999), Lambek suggests that ritual acts are ‘embodied, highly formalized, and embedded within what [Rappaport] called liturgical orders’ (2015b, p. 22). However, one weakness of ritual is that if it becomes static and fixed it may lead to the over-sanctification of the liturgical order (Lambek, 2015b). Values are grounded in sanctification and ritual order, but if such performances are unable to adapt to the changing needs of the community, they can lose their significance and meaning. Observing such assemblies over the course of a term, I noticed how, if time was lacking, the process of awarding certificates to the values champion was rushed. The children also reflected on this, describing assemblies as sometimes boring. Abi from Year Five in St Peter’s talked about how values could sometimes be indiscriminately applied and that anyone could get a values champion certificate. Sometimes it’s all really boring because sometimes it’s the same old, same old. It’s just like um … (puts on a different voice, with an element of sarcasm) ‘because he was very thankful to his friends this week. (pulls face)

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Two other children at St Peter’s spoke of how children would make jokes about the school’s values and mock them in given situations. Bella: It’s just like, sometimes, not needed. Rachael: What do you mean? Bella: Like I know being thankful is important, but sometimes, it’s just sounds silly. Sandy: Yeah! Like when were in the dinner queue and like, you know when someone passes you a spoon and you’re like (Sandy changes her voice and adds sarcasm) ‘oh thank-you!’ Bella and Sandy both laugh Bella: It’s just not needed sometimes. In this sense, assemblies and the celebration of the school’s values were a way to reaffirm the ‘moral parameters’ of the children’s social worlds (Abbott, 2019, p. 68). However, due to the focus and attention the school gave to continually performing and displaying their core values, children felt they were exaggerated and, at times, inappropriate. Researchers within the Jubilee Centre warn ‘that such interventions may fail to give young people the opportunity to reflect on when and where gratitude is appropriate, thus promoting an indiscriminate and uncritical “attitude for gratitude”’ (Arthurs et al., 2015, p. 8). The children’s reflections show their desire for authenticity (Taylor, 1992, 2007) and valuing this in relation to values, commenting on how a lack of authenticity can question the credibility and legitimacy of the school’s established set of values. The modern ideal of authenticity has received a great deal of scholarly attention within a variety of disciplines.13 In The Ethics of Authenticity (1992) and A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor describes modern societies, their perceived malaises and various forms of individualism and modern selfhood.14 He argues that within modern societies a desire to ‘be yourself’ and view your own inclinations and orientations as the source of authority and guidance has emerged. Taylor (1992) ties this particularly to the Romantic period and argues that within the ideal of authenticity emerges an individualistic approach to morality and a liberalism that advocates neutrality when it comes it comes to how individuals should both  See Whitehead (2015, p. 125) for a useful summary of this.  Other writers such as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002), Heelas et al. (2005) and Beck (2010) argue that contemporary society and modern forms of religion are individualised. 13 14

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understand and pursue the good life. Taylor claims that ‘the good life is what each individual seeks, in his or her own way, and government would be lacking in impartiality, and thus equal respect for all citizens, if it took sides on this question’ (1992, p. 18). In response to this, criticisms have been expressed in relation to this idea of apparent self-obsessed individualism, moral subjectivism and soft relativism, which as Taylor (1992) argues silences the discussion about the good life and obscures the importance of authenticity as a modern ideal. Taylor (1992) wishes to resist such cultural pessimism and reposition the ethic of authenticity as an important moral ideal for modern culture. Whitehead (2015), in her research on evangelical Christian motherhood blogging sites, argued that this ethic of authenticity played a central role in the cultivation of online communities. This ethic of authenticity emerged as an ideal as a result of instances of deception and fraud, whereby users and bloggers in the forum described particular miracles which were later discovered to be untrue. The initial posting of such miracles was seen as evidence for God’s work and contributed to formation of these online communities: In a culture sceptical about religious authorities and institutions, these blogs seemed to provide, at least for a time, credible evidence for many of their readers of authentic faith, the power of prayer, the possibility of miracles, and God’s mysterious and often incomprehensible workings. (Whitehead, 2015, p. 142)

The revelation of the deception resulted in some bloggers feeling disillusioned while others took the opportunity to reflect on their faith and reform their online communities. Ultimately, Whitehead’s (2015) findings point towards the need to attend to authenticity when trying to understand the formation of religious communities and practices and how such ideals are constitutive of everyday religious life. In relation to my field sites, Abi, Sandy, Bella, Callum and Toby from St Peter’s also demonstrated this desire for authenticity when discussing the credibility of the values mediated during worship. The children did acknowledge the importance of the school values but often expressed frustration when asked about them in relation to collective worship. Drawing on Taylor (2007), Whitehead explores similar contradictory stances in relation to the emergence of decentralised spaces in late modern societies that have a produced an appetite for encounters which ‘can at the same time be both

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personal and collective, spiritual but not religious’ and authentic while at the same time struggling to define the distinction between authentic and inauthentic (2015, p. 126). The ethical utterances spoken in collective worship at St Peter’s along with the repeated performance of the school’s established set of values can also be analysed in terms of authenticity and approaches to childhood and morality. Many children, when asked about the meaning of the opening and closing mottos, struggled to articulate their meaning or knew why thy repeated them. Frankel (2017), writing on the different approaches taken towards childhood and morality, observes how a narrow view of children’s agency can result in a particular approach to moral transmission and socialisation. Frankel refers to Elkin (1960) who was heavily influenced by Piagetian developmental paradigm and as such considered children’s moral capacity to be intrinsically linked to their maturity and particular biological stages. In reflecting on this, Frankel (2017) describes how such constructions of childhood can have a particular bearing on the formation of their moral subjectivities. The limitations on children as moral meaning-makers results in the transmission of morality being seen through a restricted focus on the adoption of rules and norms which promotes the child as passively imitating rather than actively processing. Thus, it is experiences of predictable patterns that will bring the child within society’s sense of order. (Frankel, 2017, p. 27)

In this way, we can also view some practices of collective worship as adopting this approach to children’s moral socialisation through the experience of ‘predictable patterns’. However, Doug and Toby’s reflections on such ‘predictable patterns’ illustrate their desire for authenticity and their frustration over the repetitive model used to shape their ethical subjectivities. My analysis of the children’s reflections on values demonstrates their moral desire for authenticity and how this emerges out of a narrow approach to moral formation which relies heavily on repetition and the copying of particular well-worn phrases. William, from Year Five at St Peter’s, demonstrated his awareness of the adult’s strategies and his frustration over a lack of authenticity in relation to other areas of school life. Speaking about a banner tied to the school railing, which described the school as ‘good’ in relation to the most recent OFSTED inspection, William appeared a little sceptical about what this actually meant. With his head in his hands, William said, ‘you know

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outside when it says “we’re a good school”, well, we’re only a good school when they (Ofsted) come!’ William is aware, as were the other children at all three field sites, of the various strategies the schools develop in order to transmit particular values. They were not passively absorbing them but critically and reflexively engaging with them while being aware of the wider structural forces and power at work. Children at Holly Oak also recognised this idea of ‘performing the good’ in relation to their behaviour and receiving celebration certificates. Zara and Joe commented on their behaviour in school and assemblies, noting how they will ‘do good’ on the days they know there are certificates in assembly. Rachael: So, when do you have assemblies? Zara: Friday Joe: and we like Mondays and Fridays all day and all day we always do good. Rachael: so, you always do good on a Monday and Friday Joe: because we always want to go up and get certificates and I really want to have the trophy Rachael: oh, you really want to have the trophy, the star of the week? Zara: yeah yeah! Joe: the head teacher’s award. But I never get it Rachael: you’ve not had it yet. So, you’re always especially good on Mondays and Fridays because you know you get an award, if you’re good Joe and Zara both nod Rachael: and why is the head teacher’s award more special Zara: because Joe: because it’s a trophy and its gold Rachael: so, because it’s a trophy and its gold Zara: and because it’s a really nice award for the children It was not only children who expressed this desire for authenticity. Mrs Allen, Sacred Heart’s head teacher, expressed frustration at the idea of children simply imitating and passively processing collective worship and desired for some form of authenticity when children participate in worship. Mrs Allen: It [collective worship] was a ‘done to thing’ when I arrived, it wasn’t an experience. Rachael: When you say ‘done to’, do you mean like a tick box?

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Mrs Allen: Yeah it was a ‘we’ve done collective worship’ but the questions and the purpose, what do you want that to be on the part of children and staff and therefore erm. … do you know what I can’t stand it when children say a prayer and I say, say it rather than pray it. So, there’s a massive thing to me about saying something and actually internalising and thinking about it and they get done and they go ‘AMEN!’ And I’m like, why would you say ‘AMEN!’? The performative nature of worship could result in such occasions losing a sense of authenticity and meaning for both children and staff. For Mrs Allen, this was particularly the case during moments of prayer and she was frustrated by the perceived subversion of the children’s pronunciation of ‘Amen’. In this next section, I explore the nature of this performance in more depth and drawing on Hochschild (1983) and Goffman (1959) consider how children play along with the narrative of collective worship.

Emotion Work and Values Despite the cynicism and scepticism expressed by some children in relation to the school’s value frameworks, children still complied with the performance of collective worship and participated in the ritualistic celebration of the school’s values. In her work on emotion, Arlie Hochschild argues that individuals manage their emotions so that they are deemed socially acceptable and desirable for the given situation: By “emotion work” I refer to the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling. To “work on” an emotion or feeling is, for our purposes, the same as “to manage” an emotion or to do “deep acting.” Note that “emotion work” refers to the effort-the act of trying—and not to the outcome, which may or may not be successful. (Hochschild, 1983, p. 561)

Hochschild’s (1983) work and findings resonate with my informants’ reflections on their school values. Through emotion work, Hochschild does not mean to imply that such self-management is manipulative: individuals are often aware of the emotion work at play, actively adapting their feelings and expression of such feelings to what is deemed acceptable given the social situation or ‘official frame’ (1983, p.  563). For example, the assemblies and other practices in St Peter’s establish an official system

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whereby children can explore and understand values within a given a framework. Although moments of reflection, quiet time and other school exercises provide children with the opportunity to develop their own thoughts on values, the social guidelines actively at work throughout everyday school life encourage the children to understand and perform values in a certain way. This can be seen by the repetitive nature of the awards for value champions, children’s responses during conversations and also through an exercise the teacher carried out during lesson time. During one lesson, the children were asked to consider what they were thankful for. The teacher had asked the children for some suggestions and provided each with a sycamore leaf cut-out where they could write down their answer. Most children mentioned friends, family and education, with the rest expressing gratitude for homes, food and things we use in our daily lives. The type of gratitude found in this school and throughout the materials sampled is a benevolent gratitude, one filled with a sense of duty, rather than awkwardness or embarrassment. One child’s leaf read, ‘I’m thankful for my family and food and warter I am also thankful for that there is no war in our contry and there is pecie’ (sic). Gratitude towards family, friends, education, food and security was a prominent theme on the thankfulness tree and repeated by many children. What we are seeing from the children here could be seen as a form of ‘values-work’. Drawing on the work of Goffman (1959), as Hochschild (1983) also did, the children at St Peter’s were also ‘surface acting’ in their management of values and the performance of this. The children were aware of the performative dimension of collective worship and in particular the theatrical nature of the celebration of values. Goffman argues that, Within the walls of a social establishment we find a team of performers who cooperate to present an audience a given definition of the situation. This will include the conception of own team and of audience and assumptions concerning ethos that is to be maintained by rules of politeness and decorum. (1959, p. 231)

In describing the performances which occur in social establishments, Goffman (1959) goes on to describe how such performances are divided into frontstage and backstage. Part of the success of the performance relies on the audience not being able to see the backstage preparations and the secrets of the show (Goffman, 1959). We can observe that the children’s frustration with collective worship was that their regular and daily

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experience of worship led to their awareness of these back-stage preparations and therefore ‘the secrets … of the show’ are given away (Goffman, 1959, p. 231). The performance of values was carefully managed by the schools in various ways, through child and teacher interaction, celebration assemblies and also through the materials and objects located around the school, for example, in classroom displays focusing on the core values. In this way, the school’s values and the performance of such values are found throughout all school life, from the daily acts of collective worship to the display boards situated at various points around the school building. As Goffman (1959) identifies, the performers and the audience involved in such performances also establish what he calls ‘dramaturgical loyalty’: an agreement between all participants of the agreed norms and behaviours that are to be enacted during such performances. In relation to thinking on everyday ethics, we might view the children’s compliance with the performance of collective worship as in itself a form of everyday ethics. Lambek states that the ‘ethical is intrinsic to action and practice’ and such practices are always seen in relation to and judged on specific criteria (2015b, p.  128). We have observed how children respond to particular mottos and spoken utterances during worship, clap and cheer for their friends when awarded ‘Values Champion’ or ‘Star of the Week’ and recite prayers and poems about being good. Observing their compliance towards such actions is neither to diminish their agency, nor to suggest that children participate in such acts disingenuously. Rather, taking Lambek (2010, 2015a), Goffman (1959) and Hochschild (1983) together, we can observe how the emotion work undertaken by the children and the performance of collective worship through their dramaturgical loyalty is itself a form of everyday ethics.

Conclusion Listening to my informants’ reflections drew my attention to the significant place values and the idea of ‘doing good’ have within collective worship. Values and cultivation of the ethical subject was at the heart of collective worship at all three schools. Collective worship was used a ‘tool as part of ethical self-improvement’, employed by the school to create and shape ‘good’ citizens for the world (Hirschkind, 2006). As we can see from the data in this chapter, collective worship was one way in which schools performed their own visions of the good. Although the schools differed in how religion and non-religion were mediated in relation to

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such values, there were similarities throughout the field sites. The prominence afforded to celebrating children’s ordinary achievements, viewing the everyday as a site of children’s ethical formation and cultivating an attitude of gratitude, were found at all schools. In addition to this, children’s reflexivity and meaning-making also proved to be a key theme emerging in this data. Through carefully embedding their core values in each performance, collective worship became a space where children’s ethical subjectivities could be cultivated. However, such performances were not without their issues. The overuse of some of the values, and the repetitive nature of collective worship, could result in such events becoming meaningless and boring. Hearing their frustration, boredom and cynicism at such moments, in addition to observing their practices, has shown how performance is a crucial part of collective worship. This is not to trivialise or underplay the relevance or depth of such acts but to draw attention to the performative dimension of children’s moral formation in a similar way to Day’s (2011) notion of performative belief. Day defines performative belief as referring to a ‘neo-­ Durkheimian construct, where belief is not pre-formed but a lived, embodied performance’ (2011, p. 194). Building on this, we can see how within collective worship, we can find ‘performative values’. They are spoken, celebrated, embodied and materialised within worship and throughout school life. Building on the findings from the previous chapter, which demonstrated how collective worship acts as a community-building ritual, we can also observe how practices geared at children’s moral formation, such as the ethical utterances, also reinforce particular values while also creating a ‘binding power’ (Butler, 1993; Day, 2011).

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CHAPTER 6

On Silence, Candles, Jelly Timers and Enya: Creating Sacred Spaces in Collective Worship

On a Thursday morning in October, I walked with Year Five at St Peter’s to collective worship. My class, along with the rest of the school, walked in the hall as usual and sat down in their respective class areas waiting for Mrs. Larson to begin the worship for that day. However, this collective worship was different. Rather than beginning with the usual greetings, the children were immediately informed that there would be ‘no collective worship today’ and that instead they would practice how to enter this space in silence. Children, from Years One to Six, were then immediately escorted in their classes to the playground before being walked back to the school hall so they could practice how to enter ‘our special place’ quietly. When the children returned to hall and sat back in their places, Mrs. Larson, with a stern and serious tone, spoke to the children. This is what we have to do St Peter’s when we cannot be silent. When we walk down to collective worship and we when sit down in the hall, we are going into our special space and our special time with everyone. We should be respectful of this time and not be giggling, shouting or talking to the person next to you. And if you can’t do that, then we will practise and practise and practise until we can learn how to be silent and respectful.

The atmosphere was sombre and still. The only movement came from me as I awkwardly sat on the school bench, trying to write my notes as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Shillitoe, Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Childhood, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39860-5_6

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subtly as possible. Mrs. Larson then informed the children and teachers that they were going to spend the rest of collective worship walking to and from the school hall in silence. Starting with Year One, the children in single file walked quietly and silently to and from the school hall as the teachers walked back and forth, checking to see if any child was speaking. On each journey, after the last class had entered the hall and sat down, a few moments of silence passed before Mrs. Larson asked each class to stand up again and walk back to the playground, silently in their lines. In total, this happened three times. At the end of ‘collective worship’, Mrs. Larson spoke to the children before they left for playtime. It’s a shame we had to do this and spend our special time learning how to be quiet and respectful. This is what we expect for every collective worship and if we don’t get it right next time, then we’ll practise again. But I hope we don’t have to. Let’s make the right choices St Peter’s

.Mrs. Larson then concluded the worship and said the closing motto, ‘Our worship in this place has ended’ and the children responded ‘our service in the world has begun’. This chapter attends to the spatial and material dynamics of collective worship and how these affect children’s experiences of collective worship and encounters with religion and nonreligion. In previous chapters, we have explored children’s embodied experiences during collective worship and the moral orientations that are promoted during such occasions. In this chapter, I build on these discussions by investigating the spatial and material dimensions of collective worship and demonstrate how schools attempt to create sacred spaces within seemingly secular environments. In conversation with object orientated ontologies such as Act Network Theory (ANT), I consider space and materiality in a number of ways, not only by focusing on the physical layout of the space but also the wider dimensions of space and materials including the arrangement and influence of bodies, the ‘acoustic architecture’ of worship and the networks of human and non-human actors (Latour, 2005; Hirschkind, 2006, p. 8). In this way, my account of collective worship and the ways in which religion, non-religion and spirituality are mediated during such occasions considers the wider scope of collective worship and how sound, silence, objects and the interactions between humans and non-humans shape how the worship is both constructed and received by children.

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This chapter begins by situating the discussion in conversation with scholarly work on religion, space and schooling before moving on to explore how sacred spaces are created within collective worship. I pay particular attention to the use of sound and silence in creating sacred spaces during collective worship, and building on insights from previous chapters, I consider how disciplinary powers are used in such spaces to regulate children’s bodies and voices. In conversation with literature from children’s geography, education studies and Foucault’s (1988) work on silence, I show how power and children’s agency affect how silence manifests itself in collective worship while informing children’s meaning-­ making of such events. I also examine the wider ‘sonic space’ of collective worship and consider how these other sounds work to create or disrupt this sacred environment. I then move on to the use of music within collective worship and consider how music, together with practices of silence, creates a sacred soundscape aimed at sacralising the collective worship space. When analysing the acoustic architecture of the collective worship space, I highlight some of the ambiguities and tensions that can be found within such spaces as schools try to create a shared space that can be used for children from a variety of religious and non-religious backgrounds. Integral to this spatial analysis is attending to the materiality of collective worship. Taking into consideration object-orientated ontologies and the agency of non-human actors, in the final chapter, I discuss the use of objects in collective worship, exploring how these are agents within particular social processes and how the materiality of such spaces informs and shapes the worship experience (Latour, 2005). The central focus of this chapter is how schools manage the material and spatial environment of collective worship in order to transform it into a sacred1 space. In doing so, I also consider how conflicts become particularly visible when attending to these dimensions of worship and how children experience this. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to move beyond simplistic representations of collective worship in schools that have arisen from polarising media narratives by analysing the spatial and material dynamics of worship and how children’s experiences of such occasions shapes and is shaped by their physical, material and auditory surroundings.

1  The word ‘sacred’ was not used by my informants but is a concept I employ (following the scholars as cited in this chapter) in order to analyse the way in which the space was constructed, transformed and experienced by participants.

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Religion, Space and the School Historically, studies on space, religion and the sacred within religious studies were clearly separated from scholarship in geography on religion (Garbin & Strhan, 2017). Early in the twentieth century, geographical approaches to religion were primarily concerned with the ‘mapping of religion’ and identifying the location and origin of religious beliefs, practices and institutions (Gökarıksel, 2009; Knott, 2005a). In examining these initial debates between geographers and scholars of religion, Knott (2011) identified various concerns for scholars who worked across these contested disciplinary boundaries. For example, it was suggested that geographers should pay particular attention to the effect religion had on people, space and place, while scholars of religion should focus on the impact the environment had on religion. It was also felt that geographers and religious studies scholars should focus on geographies of religion and religious geographies respectively and that these two disciplines should be in conversation with each other (Knott, 2011). These debates are revealing of ‘attempts to imagine and divide scholarly territory’, with later contributions, such as Kong (1990, 2001, 2010), attempting to overcome such disciplinary disconnections (Knott, 2011, p. 493). Subsequently, a large and varied body of work has emerged on religion, space and place, in which we can find studies which focus on spatial patterns of religious landscapes, the territories and the distribution of religious groups, embodiment, urban religion and accounts which focus on contested spaces and the spatial tactics which emerge in such environments (Kong, 1993a; Holloway, 2003; Garbin & Strhan, 2017). Within this work, a range of debates concerned with the term ‘the sacred’ as a conceptual category have emerged, due to the variety of stances adopted across these disciplines such as phenomenological, post-­ phenomenological, positivist and social constructionist approaches (Stringer, 2008; Knott, 2011). This has resulted in a high degree of ambiguity with authors often using such terms without any particular clarity about what is actually meant by the word ‘sacred’ (Stringer, 2008). Although geographers have not been central to the debates on the categorisation of religion and the sacred, their work and contributions to this field have ultimately raised more questions regarding definitions and concepts in relation to religion, space and place (Olson et al., 2013). These debates are similar to those found within the study of religion about the concept ‘religion’ (e.g. Asad, 1993; Fitzgerald, 2000, 2007; McCutcheon,

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2007) and centre around what counts as ‘sacred’. How, for example, do we determine what the sacred does or does not mean, and regarding space, where do we look for the sacred, in traditional religious spaces or further afield? Lily Kong calls for those studying religious space to move beyond ‘officially sacred spaces’ (e.g. official religious spaces and institutions) and examine those places which do not so clearly or neatly fit into our conceptual category of religion (2005b, p. 615). This approach to religion and the sacred moves away from more ontological approaches within Religious Studies, such as Rudolph Otto (1923) and Mircea Eliade (1959), and disrupts the notion of ‘real religion’ with more attention to be paid to sacred spaces in the periphery (Garbin & Strhan, 2017). Kong’s (2005a) thinking resonates strongly with the Lived Religion approach to the study of religion, which focuses on practices, spaces and persons which are invisible or ‘equally infused with spiritual options’ (Ammerman, 2007, p. 222). For example, Garbin and Strhan (2017) identify urban religion as an area that has been, historically speaking, particularly neglected within the studies of both cities and religion due to the perceived decline and ultimate disappearance of religion from modern urban life. However, the authors demonstrate that within the past 15 years there has been a shift towards recognising the city as a place where both religion and the secular live simultaneously (Garbin & Strhan, 2017). Robert Wuthnow (2001), for example, explored how artists materialised their spiritual lives, through their creative practices such as pottery, art and dance. Kong (1993a, 1993b), in her work on religious landscapes and buildings in Singapore, pays particular attention to the symbolic meanings institutions are invested with and the role of the State in determining which spaces can be considered sacred, while demonstrating how spatial variations of the religious and secular are diverse and nuanced. Kong’s (1993b) work pays attention to how space becomes sacred and how such space becomes politicised in diverse and plural settings. In this Kong (1993b) not only focuses on the processes of sacralisation but also the contested nature of such processes and the ‘politics of religious place-making’ (Garbin & Strhan, 2017, p. 6). Sophie Gilliat-Ray (2004, 2005a, 2005b) has also explored both the process of sacralising space as well as the political struggles involved in making space inclusive and for all faiths and none in the case of the prayer room in the Millennium Dome. However, studies such as Kong’s (1993b, 2001), which seek to find the sacred in otherwise secular spaces, have generated criticism in relation to

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the dualism of the sacred and profane that can emerge in such work (Holloway, 2003). In departing from Kong’s (2001) approach to sacred space, Holloway seeks to ‘challenge the pretence that the everyday always implies the profane, by revealing practices that seek to (re)enchant the “routine” spaces and times in and through which we make our lives’ (2003, p.  1961). Holloway (2003) does not wish to do away with the sacred and profane but rather cast a critical gaze on how the sacred/profane is achieved rather than take such divisions as a given. In his account of everyday spiritual practices, Holloway puts forward a relational account of the sacred/profane and reveals how particular spiritual practices can result in the sanctification and ‘(re)enchantment of seeming profane objects and actions’ with the body occupying a central role in such processes (2003, p. 1972). Holloway argues that ‘by revealing spiritual practices of the profane, the division begins to dissolve completely into an enchanted everyday’ (2003, p.  1963). This runs in contrast to Berger’s (1969) thinking which viewed the profane in direct relation to the everyday. In addition, Holloway (2003) also seeks to build on Kong’s (2001) account by incorporating the often-neglected corporeal dimension of sacred space and how embodied practices create sacred spaces. Brace et al. (2006), in their account of the geographies of Methodists in Cornwall, also move beyond the spaces of the church and chapel and, in line with Holloway’s (2003) call, seek to reposition the everyday as an important site of the sacred. In this way, by moving beyond formal worship, Brace et al. approach ‘allows a critical examination of how aspects of religion intertwine with the construction and performance of everyday dynamic and hybrid place-based identities’ (2006, p. 38). However, such accounts do not adequately attend to the non-religious and the secular and its relation to religion. Gökarıksel (2009) makes a similar claim in his work on Muslim women’s veiling practices, arguing that only attending to the religious dimension of sacred spaces limits our understanding of the relationship between the secular and the religious. Calling for a wider gaze to be cast when examining sacred spaces, Gökarıksel moves beyond simple accounts of the religious and secular being in competition with each other and identifies how they can ‘also intersect in complex and sometimes contradictory ways’ ((2009, p.  658). In the following sections on silence, music and materiality, I explore the relationship between religion, non-­ religion and the secular in collective worship, demonstrating how the experience of worship is mediated by particular spatial dynamics.

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As in previous chapters, I use the term ‘sacred’ following the cultural, sociological approach in order to provide an account of sacred space that incorporates religious, non-religious, spiritual and secular dimensions (Lynch, 2012b). Following Lynch (2012b), I treat the sacred as historically, socially and culturally contingent, I avoid universalistic assumptions that can be found in Durkheim’s work which still rests on an ontological view of the sacred, albeit a social one rather than pre-social or cosmological. The ebbs and flows of particular forms of the sacred, whether dominant or subjugated, are dependent on its ability to be recognised as a powerful and meaningful force in human life; ‘a process influenced by social actors, the spaces and structures through which that sacred form is mediated, and the nature and operation of power in that context’ (Lynch, 2012b, p. 134). Lynch (2012b), in his re-reading of Durkheim, tries to overcome the binary opposition of the sacred and profane, which Holloway (2003) was also critical of, through drawing the ‘mundane’ into his analysis of the sacred. The profane is therefore understood as the evil that threatens the sacred while the mundane ‘as the logics, practices, and spaces of everyday life’ which can be interrupted by forms of the sacred and profane (Lynch, 2012b, p. 28). My reading of Lynch (2012b) and his cultural sociological approach to the sacred complements and builds on Kong’s (2001) spatial approach, by focusing on unofficial sacred spaces while attending to the everyday as a site which can manifest both the sacred and profane. This approach to the sacred therefore avoids placing the profane and the sacred as a binary opposition and sees the sacred as existing across religious, non-religious and spiritual dimensions and manifesting itself within various assemblages of spaces, places, objects, divine beings and persons as well as the interactions which occur between them. This is particularly useful when approaching the sacred in material and spatial analyses because, as Berns observes, such an ‘understanding avoids perceiving the ‘sacred’ as an inherent property of an object or as a construction of the devotee’ and describes a ‘form of engagement that could arise anywhere’ (2015, p.  10). In this way, as McDannell argues, ‘if we look at what [people] do rather than what they think, we cannot help but noticing the continual scrambling of the sacred and the profane’ (2012, p. 135). Just as the past decade has seen a growth in spatial approaches to religion, there has also been a growing literature on the spatialities of education and childhood, which have explored how the construction, negotiation and regulation of education spaces are intertwined with various social and

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cultural processes (Cook & Hemming, 2011). Such accounts have focused particularly on issues related to power and how schools regulate educational environments and how space is strategically used to produce particular embodied behaviours and reproduce values (Titman, 1994; Tranter & Malone, 2004; Hemming, 2015). Burke and Grosvenor, for example, in their historical analysis of school buildings, demonstrate how the architecture of the school building is revealing of their function as ‘fragmented sites of cultural memory and creation’ (2008, p. 10). Tratner and Malone (2004) also explore the influence of educational spaces in their examination of school grounds and focus on how schools mediate their ethos through particular arrangements. By exploring the various strategies and ways in which the school dining hall is regulated, Pike (2008) uncovered the rationalities and discourses at work and demonstrated how, through careful management of this space, schools cultivate children’s behaviours and subjectivities in relation to food in order to promote particular ideas about ideas of healthy living. The school building, therefore, is not a ‘neutral or passive “container” and the classrooms’ ‘walls, windows, doors and furniture together with outdoor “nooks and crannies” actively shape the school experience and our understanding of education’ (Burke, 2005, p. 490). It is with this thinking, I argue that the school also mediates particular understandings of religion and shapes children’s experience of this, with collective worship being a key example of how schools mediate religion, non-religion and spirituality through spatial and material dimensions. There is a small but growing literature on space in relation to religion and children and young people. Kong (2005b), Hemming (2011a, 2011b, 2011c) and Mills (2012) have all attended to the ways in which spatial geographies inform and shape children and young people’s encounters with religion. However, as Hemming (2013) observes, although there has been a great deal of literature emerging that concerns educational spaces and children’s agency within such environments, there is little research that considers this in terms of spirituality.2 This observation can also be extended to religion and non-religion in educational spaces, which I address in what follows. Mills (2012), however, is a notable exception to this and has attended to sacred space and childhood in terms of searching beyond official sacred spaces, through concentrating on children’s 2  An exception to this is Hyde’s work on space in regards to spirituality, noting that particular usages of space can either promote spiritual questing or serve to stifle it (2008, p. 162).

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embodied practices in her research on worship in the Scout Movement. In exploring worship outside designated religious spaces, Mills (2012) demonstrates that while there exists an openness and flexibility to worship, wider changes within British society in terms of immigration and multiculturalism have influenced particular practices and perspectives, resulting in both an accommodation of religious diversity and an emergence of politically charged tensions. Parker (2009) analyses 6th from colleges in Birmingham and explores the use of quiet/prayer rooms as sacred spaces in these institutions. Parker (2009) shows how the use of the quiet/prayer room, in addition to some colleges employing chaplains and the plural makeup of two field sites, all shaped how these sacred spaces were managed and developed. For example, the quiet/prayer room at two field sites, which had a significant number of Muslim students in attendance, were located on the periphery of the school grounds and out of sight from the wider school. Parker reflects on such micro-geographical practices and the extent to which the ‘politics of the [school] environment’ are reflective of the issues found in wider society in terms of accommodating religious minorities (Naylor & Ryan, 2002, p. 39 as cited in Parker, 2009, p. 34) In terms of the processes of how space becomes sacralised, Knott (2005b) identifies five elements of the spatial approach to religion: the body, the dimensions of space, the properties of space, the aspects of space and the dynamics of space. Drawing on this approach in relation to the primary school, Hemming (2015) considers space in schooling through a number of lenses: nation, community, religion in public and private spaces and the body. This approach enables Hemming (2015) to explore how religion is encountered in school space, how schools accommodate religious minorities and how they promote social cohesion, while also paying attention to children’s religious and spiritual embodied practices. Drawing on this, I approach space through focusing on the material, the physical and the embodied, and build on this by also considering the auditory dimensions of space within collective worship in order to explore how these shape the ways in which children experience religion, non-religion and spirituality. In the following section, I draw on the use of children’s voices in the creation of sacred spaces, focusing particular attention on silence as well as singing.

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Sacred Soundscapes: Silence Although there is a significant body of literature on religion and space, the study of childhood and space in relation to religion is much smaller, and there is little literature exploring the significance of sound, including silence, in shaping spatial dynamics. Albeit with some exceptions which will be discussed below, existing literature on education, space and sounds has predominantly focused on the disciplinary regimes of silence, the pedagogy of silence and teachers’ perspectives3 (e.g. Ollin, 2008; Gallagher, 2011) and rarely considers how sound is also used to mediate moments of reflection, prayer and contemplation in worship. One of the few exceptions to this is Copley (1981, 1992) who argued for the importance of silence in collective worship and draws comparisons with silent practices within Quakerism, Buddhism and Hinduism. Although power dynamics are important to attend to and will be explored in more detail later, I argue that understanding the motivations for silence beyond paradigms of power and governmentality are also vital in order to appreciate how sounds and silences can act as a tool in the sacralising process of the collective worship space. Just as Mills (2017) argues that not all sounds of childhood are the same, I argue that not all silences of childhood are the same either, with silence in collective worship taking on a different meaning and significance than other silences in wider school life. Silence has historically had a central feature within education and has varied uses, from allowing reflection and fostering sense of school identity and belonging to a technology of power and control (Lees, 2012; Goodman, 2017). Drawing on interview data with teachers across the UK, Lees (2012) differentiates between two types of silence: weak and strong silence. The former denotes the practices that are aimed at punishment and behaviour control and the latter being a more positive tool used to support student’s experiences and development in school. Lees (2012) observes how these strong, non-disciplinary forms of silence are not common within schools and as such, schools are missing an opportunity to use silence as a way to improve and support children’s wellbeing. Walkerdine (1985) argues in her work on silence and speaking in schooling that experiences and practices produce complex subjectivities among children and 3  For further reading on silence, speaking, gender and class see Walkerdine (1985); for silence as a communicative practice see Sobkowiak (1997) and for silence in pedagogy see Zembylas, M., and Michaelides, P. (2004).

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are also informed by class and gender as well as childrearing practices outside of the school. Wood and Tribe (2016) explored silence in a Quaker school and found student’s experience of silence to be highly relational, and as they became more ‘habituated’ to practices of communal silence, they were able to create more individual meaning over such events with increasing levels of ownership. This relates to Lees’ strong silence which also encourages a democratic use of silence in order to avoid students being ‘coerced or cajoled’ into moments of silence (2012, p. 110). Wood and Tribe (2016) also discovered that students found the efficacy of silence to be spatially contingent, noting that nature, indoor lighting, wider school acoustics and comfortable seating all supported their experience of silence in school. However, silence within collective worship has not received a great deal of attention, and it is my argument that silence plays a central role within collective worship and impacts on how children both encounter and experience religion during this time. I argue that silence, in combination with other techniques and materials, is used to create a sacred space which would otherwise remain secular due to the multipurpose use of the school hall. Speaking with my participants and observing acts of worship in schools, I found that sound was an integral feature in the cultivation and creation of the worship space. Throughout my fieldwork at all three schools, I noticed how sound and in particular silence were used in collective worship. Although this was a normal feature of everyday school life, as an outsider, I was struck by the transition from what was a busy, hectic and very noisy school environment to one that was calm, quiet and still. Only minutes beforehand, children and staff were busy engaging in their various lessons and yet only a short while later, the entire school was together in one space for a moment of quiet reflection and contemplation. As we walked to the hall, children at all three schools were encouraged to walk in silence and more often than not, calming new age or classical music was played as the children entered the hall. The school hall was the space in which all three schools had whole school collective worship. Although the vignette at the start of this chapter was an anomaly in terms of my usual observations of collective worship,4 it highlights the importance the school placed on sound and in particular silence in relation to the collective worship space. Walking in silence was regulated by 4  It was anomalous as although children were often reminded to be quiet, silence during worship was never regulated like this on any other occasion.

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t­ eachers at all three schools and was usually a challenging task as the children, who walked in single file lines from their classes, often talked and whispered to each other as they walked across the playground and down the corridors towards the hall. Class teachers could often be heard reminding the children that they should be quiet as they were about to go to assembly and if a child consistently resisted such silence, they were told that they were at risk of missing their break. When entering the hall at St Peter’s, the blinds would be drawn, calming music played with the teacher leading worship stood at the front observing the children as they walked in and sat down in their assigned places. Around the hall were various objects and pieces of equipment. Surrounding the edges of the school hall were a handful of motivational posters, a screen, Physical Education (PE) equipment, a crucifix fixed to the wall, the school values painted in large letters across walls and foldaway tables and chairs for breakfast club and lunch time. The children were all seated cross legged on the floor, with the exception of Year Six who were sitting on benches at the back. The class teachers were all seated around the children on chairs with the head teacher, who led the worship, standing at the front. Edward and Rebecca, two pupils from Year Five, reflected on this silence and why they thought it was necessary to enter in collective worship quietly. Rachael:

I notice that when you go to assembly you’re always told to be quiet. Why do you think that is? Edward: Its cus what they are talking about in assembly might be important, so you have to listen so you don’t miss something important. Rebecca: Well again, I think it’s because it’s a Christian school, so erm being quiet as we enter, it’s the same with ‘asalam wali kum, wali kum salam’ erm and ‘peace be with you and also with you’. It’s like that. So once you’re going in, you have to be silent, that this is a holy place. That’s what I kinda think why you have to be quiet going and out. Cus you’re in a holy place. Edward: It’s just like if you’re a Christian, it feels like a church and like other places you go in religions. Rachael: But like that’s where you have your lunch too right? Rebecca: Yeah, it’s kind of, it’s kind of, once everyone’s out from assembly then that’s the lunch hall and that’s not a holy place.

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There is, as Edward observes, a practicality to silence during collective worship. It is, after all, one of the few occasions that the whole school gathers together and therefore an opportune moment to discuss important matters within wider school life. Although practices of silence can be observed throughout wider school life, in lessons for example, silence in collective worship took on a different meaning. There was a more spiritual quality to this silence which Rebecca reflects on as being connected to the collective worship space being a ‘holy place’. Several children throughout the course of this research mentioned the idea of the school hall becoming a sacred space or resembling a church. This may not be that surprising in the sense that the way in which schools set up collective worship does mirror a typical church layout. As I observed collective worship over the term I was at St Peter’s, I noticed the various strategies developed by adults in order to regulate the worship experience. We have already considered how adults construct worship for children in relation to how children’s bodies are managed and regulated and how they seek to cultivate their ethical subjectivities. However, it is clear that the space in which the worship takes place also has a significant bearing in terms of how the worship is constructed and experienced by children. The auditory environment of collective worship, in particular, shaped the space in which the worship was performed. In investigating religious technologies in relation to Islam in Singapore, Kong demonstrates how auditory surroundings inform and add ‘a new dimension to religious space that is predicated on the auditory’ (2006, p. 915). The rules about how children enter the space, either to music or in silence, coupled with the content and materials featured throughout the worship all contributes to the school’s attempts to sacralise this space. The silence in collective worship was not optional and was strictly governed by the teachers in attendance. Throughout my fieldwork I observed how children’s bodies and, in particular, their voices were used and regulated in order to create the sacred space of collective worship. Children who were speaking and whispering were seen to be in defiance of what was expected of them during this time. The teachers at all my field sites often spoke of this need to be silent in terms of showing ‘respect for our special time together’. I was struck by how children knew exactly when and where they had to be silent and the risk of defying such moments. Jaworski and Itesh Sachdev (1998), in their research on silence in rural, urban and suburban schools in Wales, also noted such power dynamics and the conditioning of silence in school. The authors (1998) observe that the silence

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of students is always unmarked in comparison to teachers, which is marked, as teachers are expected to talk and pupils to listen. They argue that ‘teachers can self-select to speak, nominate new speakers, choose to be silent, or silence others, with greater freedom than the pupils’ (Jaworski & Itesh Sachdev, 1998, p.  279). Hemming (2011b) explored this control and power in terms of the relationships between children’s embodiment and the spaces they encounter. Hemming (2011b, 2015) explored the processes through which schools tried to cultivate civilised bodies. Drawing on Foucault (1977a), Hemming (2011b) investigates the disciplinary powers at work and how regulating children’s bodies gave way to particular encounters and experiences. In the same way, we can also see how the school attempts to discipline and regulate children’s bodies when entering the collective worship space. Foucault (1977a) argues that through training our bodies in particular ways, we become self-governing subjects through embodying and normalising certain discourses. This discourse of collective worship being a sacred space and special time was cultivated and governed by particular embodied and spatial practices. The discourse of the sanctity of the collective worship space and the value of respect towards others was therefore legitimised through the training of children’s bodies and the development of their habitus. Exploring everyday Catholic life, Orsi considers children’s bodies as central to the materialisation and concretisation of the sacred (2005, p.  76). Orsi states that ‘children’s bodies, rationalities, imaginations, and desires have all been privileged media for giving substance to religious meaning, for making the sacred present and material, not only for children but through them too, for adults in relation to them’ (2005, p. 77). Orsi (2005) argues that children’s bodies are one way in which the religious is materialised. Through acts such as prayers, nativities, singing and holy communion, children make religion ‘real, tangible and accessible’ (Orsi, 2005, p. 75). We can also observe the sacralisation of the collective worship space as being deeply implicated by, if not depending on, children’s bodies. If the children did not sing and were not silent, how could the sacred soundscape be created? As such, it is not only the space of the school hall and the materials located there that are sacralised during worship, but children’s bodies also become ‘vehicles for the materialisation of the sacred’ (Orsi, 2005, p. 76). Gallagher (2010, 2011) in his research on children’s geographies also examined how the school space and the behaviours enacted there were regulated, particularly in relation to silence and the surveillance of this

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aural spatiality. Silence and the regulation of silence during collective worship at my field sites proved to be a key tool in creating sacred space. The management of the soundscape overall, including silence and music, worked towards the sacralisation of the space, but it was sound that was one of the most crucial areas of surveillance during collective worship. How children sat and participated in collective worship was always monitored but sound was the one aspect which would be enforced more than others. Drawing together ideas of sound and surveillance, Gallagher (2011) considers how schools manage sound throughout everyday school life and the various tools of surveillance they use to exercise their power. Gallagher (2011) argues that power is exercised and produced by sound and that sound itself creates particular spatialities. Drawing on the insights of Jacques Attali (2007), Gallagher pays attention to the ways in ‘which beings use sound and hearing to produce spaces, to lay claim to territories, to demarcate realms of power’ (2011, p.  50). I observed this territory-­ claiming at all schools and the vignette at the start of this chapter is a clear, albeit extreme, example. Therefore, the soundscape of collective worship is not only used to mark a transition from a secular to a sacred space but also a way to demarcate power. Modalities of silence varied across schools. Children did not always experience silence in terms of feelings of power and subjugation, with many children enjoying moments of quiet reflection during worship. Such moments, for some children, exemplified what Lees (2012) notes as a ‘strong’ form of silence and created a sense of peace and relaxation for the children, in what was otherwise a very busy space for them. Laura, a Year Four pupil from Sacred Heart, described how collective worship felt like a special time and space that was different to other aspects of daily school life. When I asked Laura whether collective worship was important to her, she expressed this in terms of whereas it should say: a sense of escape from the busyness of wider school life. Laura: Rachael: Laura:

Yes, it [collective worship] touches us. It helps us to be more and more closer to God … Mrs Allen makes it a bit quieter, a bit peaceful and she takes us out of the busy world. So, does the space feel any different when you have collective worship? It feels as though you’re in a whole new world and you’re away from all the busyness and learning because it’s all set ­differently with candles and sometimes if it’s PE you’ll have benches out.

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This idea of creating a particular soundscape to escape the busyness of everyday life was something that Strhan (2012) also found during her fieldwork with an evangelical congregation in London. Strhan found that the listening practices and silence that took place at her field site, St Johns, were a way for the congregants to escape the busyness of the city and more specifically, ‘to discipline the self and all their everyday practices in obedience to a Spoken Word orienting them towards the transcendent beyond the fragmentation of the city’ (2012, p.  175). My participant, Laura, echoed similar sentiments when she reflected on the quietness during collective worship and how such moments of reflection enabled a deeper and closer relationship to God. This idea of silence creating a deeper relationship with God or Jesus was also reflected on during the child-centred activities, where some children often noted the importance of silence. Children who did not identify with a religion and who expressed no belief in any particular God or transcendent beings likewise found value in such silence. Without speaking with children such as Laura, Edward and Rebecca, it would be easy to miss the perceived spiritual or sacred quality of such silences. Cheetham’s research on collective worship did not attend to children’s perspectives, nor reflect on silence during worship which he noted as ‘perfunctory short silences for reflection’ (1999, p.  213). Although Copley (1981, 1992) did recognise the importance of silence, his analysis was caught between a strict religious and secular binary and did not consider how silence may mediate religious, non-religious, spiritual and secular conditions simultaneously. In an article comparing silence in collective worship to silence in Quakerism, Copley (1992) concludes that: There is a discontinuity between this [silence within Quaker worship] experience and the emergence and development of silence as a method in school collective worship. As words are varied, so is silence. In collective worship at least, silence is not God. (Copley, 1992, p. 78)

Although the comparison between silence in collective worship in the school and that found in the Society of Friends is interesting, Copley (1992) ends up treating Quaker practices as the more official and legitimate examples of silence than those that can be found in the unofficial spaces of the primary school, which are treated as godless and secular. My argument here is not to romanticise silence but to draw attention to the range of ways children experience silence and by doing so to demonstrate

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that it is unwise to make assumptions on the perceived secular or sacred nature of such acts. It was not only the children who referred to silence in collective worship as particularly significant in terms of their overall experience, teachers also noted this. Mrs Allen, the head teacher at Sacred Heart, who led whole school collective worship, spoke about the importance of silence during worship and the sense of calmness it evokes. Mrs Allen: And one of the things that links with collective worship in terms of the spiritual development of the children, we do expect there to be some explicit planning for that. So that sense of awe, that sense of quality and silence, that sense of change, that pattern and order, that sense of worth and relationships and things … I didn’t used to do silence. I find silence really hard and erm one of the things that will be looked for and what I would be looking for if I was interviewing someone, is if they are prepared to have silence in the hall and again that takes time for the children to have an understanding of what that means, whether it’s to be meditative, reflective or prayerful. Rachael: Why do you think silence is important? Mrs Allen: Because I think that’s when we’re closest to God because everything else, if it’s true, everything else is pushed out. Mrs Allen’s reflection is similar to Laura’s in terms of disconnecting from the busy outside world. The sacred space of collective worship emerges within the everyday and mundane space of the school hall, thereby transforming it in such a way that it becomes markedly different from the wider school building. In this way, Mrs Allen has a more traditional understanding of sacred space whereby it is the presence of God and the removal of other distractions that sacralised this environment (Knott, 2005a; Stringer, 2008). Stringer (2008) also discovered how a closeness to God in addition to peace and quietness created a sacred environment for some of his participants. It was, however, only at times when the space was empty of other people that it was truly ‘sacred’… and it was only in opposition to the space of the home—a space of chaos, noise and violence—that this space of quiet and order could be defined as ‘sacred’ at all. (Stringer, 2008, p. 55)

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However, my findings differ from Stringer’s (2008) in that it was possible for a sacred space to be created and generated within everyday space. As school halls were multipurpose, they were spaces of noise, chaos and mess, especially during PE, wet play and lunch, and so teachers had to develop particular ways of using these spaces in order to transform the school hall from an area of secular activity to a sacred space. Mrs Allen, Rebecca, Edward and Laura observed that this, for them, was achieved when other competing and disrupting sounds were removed. However, such techniques did not completely transform the space, as some things were beyond the teacher’s control and as such the secular functions of the hall did not fully disappear. Consequently, the sacred soundscape of collective worship needs to be carefully managed otherwise, as we saw through the vignette at the beginning of this chapter, the special and sacred quality of the space is compromised. This happened on a number of occasions. For example, for whole school collective worship, all schools used the main school hall and as a result, the spatial dynamics were affected by the competing and sometimes conflicting needs of different school functions such as PE, breakfast club, wet play and lunch which stretched across religious and secular demands. At times, teachers commented on the lack of space for collective worship due to the gym equipment stored around the hall. Many children also spoke about how distracting they found the smells of the food being prepared for lunch and found it difficult to focus on prayer or talking to God when food was being cooked. During one week of fieldwork at Sacred Heart, while on playground duty, I spoke to some of the girls from Year Five about collective worship and whether they had enjoyed it. Lisa responded, ‘yeah’ but said that she could not really concentrate as it had made her hungry as she could smell the chicken curry being prepared for lunch later that day. This was also problematic for collective worship that took place after lunch as children complained about the dirty floors which sometimes contained remnants from the children’s lunches. On a number of occasions, collective worship at St Peter’s was also disrupted by the noise of catering staff in the rooms adjacent to the school hall. During one collective worship, Miss Larson was finding it increasingly difficult to manage the acoustic atmosphere of the act. Her voice was raised and strained to try and drown out the voices and noises coming from the kitchen. During a moment of silence, with the blinds drawn, the children’s heads bowed, the staff in the kitchen could be heard discussing the events of the weekend, the radio was also playing and the noise from

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cooking utensils and equipment could be heard. Miss Larson decided to stop the moment of quiet contemplation and ask a member of staff to speak with the kitchen staff and ask them to keep down the noise as this was ‘our special time’. Again, this was another example of the contested space of collective worship, one that battled to retain a sacred environment while still accommodating the necessary secular functions of wider school life. Chidester, drawing on Jonathan Z. Smith, observes how the ‘sacred is produced through ritualization’ but how ‘regular ritualization’ can result in ‘competing claims to [the] ownership’ of the sacred (2011, pp. 85–88). We can observe how the multiple functions of the school dinner hall also resulted in competing claims over the use of such space and how schools tried to claim such sacred space through ritual. Beckford and Gilliat (1998) also observe the dynamics between secular and sacred space in relation to the design of prison chapels noting that some of these spaces were also used ‘for musical concerts, drama productions or committee meetings’ and as such the religious fixtures and furnishings need to be moveable (Beckford & Gilliat 1998, p.  54). This transformation was, in part, as a result of the transition from compulsory to voluntary Chapel attendance in 1976 and as such, newer prison chapels had to be built and furnished with a ‘more utilitarian and “domestic”’ purpose in mind’ (Beckford & Gilliat, 1998, p. 53). Although collective worship is still compulsory in schools, schools nevertheless have to meet the demands of various social functions, whether this be catering or sports and as such, the creation of a permanent and immovable sacred space is not always possible nor desirable. Accordingly, the silence in collective worship takes constant management, regulation and planning. Silence in worship does not just appear in a vacuum. It is a curated silence. Mrs Allen from Sacred Heart spoke of this need to curate silence earlier and mentioned the ‘explicit planning’ that was needed, as children find moments of silence difficult and that it takes time to develop this ability. This was clear at St Peter’s too when the whole school had to practice silence. In this way, we can see how children’s bodies are trained and cultivated in order to produce bodies capable of silence (Foucault, 1977a; Gallagher, 2011). Silence is of course a technique used throughout wider school life, but during collective worship, silence has an especially sacred and moral quality. As with the teachers in my field sites, Gallagher’s (2011) teachers also connected silence with particular moral orientations and sensibilities that the children should seek to cultivate. In Gallagher’s school, sound and silence were used by teachers to see which children were

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working and behaving well. In my schools, silence in collective worship was used as a sign of respect and therefore not only shaped and constructed children’s sacred landscapes but also their moral geographies (Pike & Kelly, 2014).5 Copley (1981) considered silence to be an important and necessary feature of collective worship and argued that our desires as adults to have spaces and moments of silence which serve to meet our spiritual needs is a clear indicator of the need to cultivate such practices within childhood, so that children are better prepared for the busyness of adult life. Growing adult interest in TM, yoga and other forms of relaxation and silence is perhaps in itself a sign that we fail our children if we do not prepare them to find stillness and depth in a noisy and racing world. (Copley, 1981, p. 107)

Resonating with Strhan’s (2015) work on cities and listening practices in conservative evangelical congregations, Burke and Grosvenor (2011), in their historical account of sound, space and childhood, also discovered this desire on the part of schools to curate silences in response to changing urban soundscapes. They claim that ‘noise had become a serious urban problem in the late nineteenth century as populations grew and new technology generated new industrial noises. At the same time, previously accepted levels of noise became less tolerated’ (Burke & Grosvenor, 2011, p.  329). This ‘aural irritation’ and perceived ‘sensory damage’ was felt strongly by schools and provoked a desire to manage the auditory environment through the creation of silent spaces. In the same way, I also found the auditory space of collective worship was managed and deliberately constructed by the staff and children. Collective worship was almost always referred to as a special time for this particular reason. It was unique in the school day in that it was an opportunity to take time and reflect; something that was difficult to achieve in my field sites at any other point. Mrs Allen also reflected on the difficulties of silence, even for adults, and the need for authenticity during such moments as it was only when such silence was ‘true’ that a close relationship with God could be formed, in her view. The move to provide children with quiet moments of 5  Pike and Kelly (2014), deploy the term ‘moral geographies’, in their work on childhood and food, arguing that such cultural and personal choices are always morally inflected and that the spatial dimensions of this also shapes food consumption and practices. See also Pike (2008) for a spatial analysis on the school dinner hall.

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contemplation was seen as increasingly important by both students and teachers. It was often spoken of it in terms of a special time and space which was markedly different to that of wider school life. As we saw in the previous chapter, collective worship provides an opportunity for moral reflection and the development of children’s ethical subjectivities. Silence and moments of quiet contemplation and reflection also provided times for such ethical cultivation. Foucault (1988) discusses the nature of Christian moral formation and individual self-reflection and the importance of verbally and explicitly showing your belief in God. As we have seen earlier, Foucault (1977a) also touches on silence in the formation of behaviours but does so mainly in terms of disciplinary techniques. Carrette (2000) develops Foucault’s ideas about silence and attempts to develop silence as a central area of analysis.6 Carrette’s (2000) discussion of Foucault’s thinking on silence shows that although Foucault primarily thought of silence as a disciplinary, oppressive technique, there are also areas of Foucault’s work which consider silence in more varied and ambiguous ways (Foucault, 1977b). Foucault (1988) interprets Christianity as a confessional religion, one that requires speaking and disclosing the truth in order to develop a close relationship with God (Carrette, 2000, p. 27). Carrette (2000) observes that Foucault’s focus on speech within Christianity neglects the importance and centrality of silence. Carrette argues that if Foucault ‘had been able to assimilate his theoretical work on silence into the discussion of Christianity, his “religious question”, would have assumed far greater clarity and importance’ (Carrette, 2000, p. 28). Although, as Carrette argues, Foucault did not fully appreciate the interconnected nature of his work on silence in relation to his thinking on confession, Carrette discusses how Foucault’s work demonstrates how both silence and speech are revealing of the way in which the ‘religious “subject” is constituted’ (2000, p.  39). Carrette concludes that ‘what Foucault has managed to illuminate, albeit without conceptual clarity and at a marginal level of his work, is the way Christianity shapes and controls the self through coercive forces of silence and speech’ (2000, p. 42). Through considering how the nature and variety of silences feature in collective worship, we can explore how religion is also understood and mediated during such times. My argument is not only that silence provides a time of moral formation but also that it is a particular strategy used by 6  Carrette’s appraisal of Foucault’s work in relation to silence draws mainly on Foucault’s work between 1976 and 1982. For a review of this see Carrette (2000, pp. 25–43).

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schools to shape children’s embodied habits in order to support and normalise the discourse of the sanctity of collective worship and the sacred quality this space assumes during such times. As a result, we see multiple usages of silence across all three field sites during collective worship. At times, it was used as a disciplinary technique to create more ‘civilised bodies’, while at other times it was also used as a way to create a sacred space. Sacred Heart promoted silence as a way to develop your relationship with God and all schools used silence as a quiet time of self-reflection that ran as a counter balance to what was otherwise a busy and hectic school life. In this way, silence in collective worship had multiple purposes and uses. Music and singing also formed an important and significant aspects of the worship spaces and soundscape. In the following section, I focus on the music featured in collective worship across my field sites and children’s experiences of this.

Sacred Soundscapes: Music There are numerous studies and collections on religion and music (e.g. Ingalls, 2011; Porter, 2017); however, typically, such work focuses on congregations and official worship spaces and as such, hybrid, contested or unofficial spaces are missed. Such accounts also rarely consider children’s and young people’s voices, with Taylor et  al.’s (2014) study on music and queer-identifying religious youth an exception. Taylor et  al. (2014) examined young people’s responses and feelings towards music within their worship practices, finding that their informants often enjoyed traditional Christian music as well as progressive, modern music while using such spaces and practices to reconcile and negotiate particular tensions within their own identities. Within childhood studies more specifically, the sounds and voices of children have often been hidden and missing, with Mills calling for ‘closer attention to the sonorous’ in order to ‘open up spaces of childhood that have thus far been difficult to access for adult researchers’ (2017, p. 2). The use of songs and music also affected the spatial dimensions of collective worship and, at times, revealed tensions felt by some children in relation to how religion was mediated. Music was an important of worship and often schools had acts of collective worship solely geared towards singing. At Sacred Heart, music was a central feature of collective worship and school life more broadly. The display below, located outside the Year Three classroom, focused on singing as an act of worship, quoting Psalm

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96:1, ‘Sing a song to the Lord. Let the whole earth sing to the Lord’. Singing formed an integral part of worship and served to change the school space, both acoustically and also materially through such displays. When I began observations of worship at Sacred Heart, I noticed how Mrs Allen, the head teacher, frequently reminded the children during collective worship that ‘those who sing, pray twice’ and this phrase was often repeated by children during interviews. Nearly all acts of singing, whether during collective worship or in the classroom, used religious, Christian music. This included traditional Christian hymns, Christmas songs (as this was the period of my data collection) and more contemporary Christian pop music, such as Matt Redman7 or the Rend Collective. Nearly all children when given the opportunity specifically asked for contemporary Christian pop music such as My Lighthouse by the Rend Collective,8 to which they sang enthusiastically and danced in unison with corresponding actions. The origin of this popular music style can be traced to the Jesus People Movement and groups such as the Music Gospel Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, with the contemporary sound and tonality mirroring bands such as Coldplay but diverging with their biblically rooted content (Ward, 2005; Hartje-­ Doll, 2013). Teachers also participated in this. For example, Katie, the Year Three class teacher, sometimes played her guitar and sang the acoustic version of this song, often swaying with her eyes closed and singing along with the children. At Holly Oak, in comparison, no religious songs were sung during my time there, however, I still witnessed a similar effervescent energy and emotion in room as children joyfully stood up and jumped around, singing loudly. Music here typically featured Heather Small’s Proud, S Club 7’s Reach for the Stars and variety of songs by Enya.9 Although it would be easy not to take seriously popular music such as Enya, S Club 7 and Heather Small in worship, we would miss the varied and nuanced musical soundscapes of collective worship. Partridge (2012) argues for popular music to be taken seriously in the study of religion, and through focusing on embodiment in singing and dancing and the acoustic properties of songs, he draws attention to what he calls ‘the affective space’ 7  See, for example, Matt Redman’s ‘King of My Soul’ You Tube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkszeFYc4pA (accessed 21 November 2015). 8  ‘My Lighthouse’ You Tube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reAlJKv7ptU (accessed 21 November 2015). 9  See, for example, Enya’s Only Time You Tube video: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7wfYIMyS_dI (accessed 21 November 2015).

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and in doing so explores the relationship between music, meaning and emotion. Through the lyrics and upbeat tempos of the Rend Collective, S Club 7 and Heather Small, particular meanings such as hope, joy and success were mediated and the slow and soothing acoustics of Enya produced a peaceful and relaxing environment. Partridge states that such music ‘contributes to the creation of a particular affective space; it communicates particular values, it instills certain attitudes, it encourages certain emotional states’ (2012, p. 186). Sue, the deputy head at Holly Oak, discussed the music choices during worship as an important technique in changing the school environment, signaling to the children that something special was about to happen. She explained that ‘we used to put some instrumental music on that was calming … we would have the room in darkness, music, again something Enya-ee type music’. The music was a particular way in which the school changed the space from a classroom or hall, to a space for their special time together. Sue said they ‘put the special music on and that music wouldn’t be played at any other time. It would only be played then’. Sue was using music from artists such as Enya to change the space which could be viewing as having ‘sacralising impact on the affective space of the listeners’ (Partridge, 2012, p. 190). In comparison, a range of religious and non-religious music was used at St Peter’s. Wednesday assemblies were dedicated to practicing these songs. Discussing the use of songs in collective worship, Luca and Michael reflected on their experiences of singing assemblies and the music that featured in collective worship. Luca: Rachael: Michael: Luca:

Rachael: Luca:

I don’t get singing assemblies. you don’t get singing assemblies? Sometimes I like assemblies, but sometimes I find them quite boring. Singing assemblies are sometimes ok but not always … In singing assemblies, you always have to sing the same kind of songs about God and stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a song that we’ve sung in this school that isn’t to do with teambuilding or God or something. and what do you think about during those kinds of songs? I think some songs are quite good but it’s like getting annoying because some of the children are like atheists and a lot of children just don’t sing it. They’re getting tired of it … they’re just … this is going to sound bad but they’re just too Christian

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Michael: they’re annoying. For atheists, like with the Great Big God song erm I think that some people find it like they just find, I’m not sure if they do but sometimes I think they might find it a bit offensive like. Luca: and also with upbeat songs like that, instead of signing with joy, they just take the mick out of it. Like with the actions with the Great Big God Song, everyone just does it over enthusiastically and takes the mick. The songs featured during collective worship varied across all three field sites, with a mix of hymns, contemporary music and Christian rock. Michael and Luca considered the inclusion of Christian songs inappropriate or offensive due to the non-religious children present. Luca went on to discuss the tactics children developed to resist such strategies developed by the school. Children exercised their resistance by ‘taking the mick’ out of such songs through singing particular lines over-enthusiastically. I was already aware of such tactics at St Peter’s as I had witnessed children do this on several occasions. During one singing assembly, Mrs. Tate decided to practice ‘Our God is a Great Big God’. To begin with, Mrs. Tate asked the children to sit up straight. ‘Right everyone, let’s get ready to sing properly. Let’s tie our strings!’ All the children pretended to tie a bow above their heads in order to sit up in an upright position with the backs straight. Mrs. Tate continued, ‘OK, so we are going to sing one of our favorite songs, Our God’ and nearly all the children responded with smiles and quietly saying ‘yessss!!’. ‘OK OK but what are we not going to do when we sing this song? We are not going to shout and we are not going to be silly are we? At the end of the last line of Our God is a Great Big God’, I don’t want to hear anyone shouting this out at the top of their voice. It doesn’t sound nice and it’s not respectful’. When we were walking out after collective worship, I walked with Bradley from Year Five as he went to collect his coat and Pokémon cards for break. I asked him if he liked this song as he seemed to be particularly enjoying it and Bradley responded ‘nah, well not really. It’s alright. We just always like to sing that one loudly. The teachers don’t like it when we do that (laughs) and I sometimes say dog instead of God (laughs) but no one ever notices’. Bradley abruptly departed our conversation to commence trading cards with his friends who were sitting by the benches. Children at St Peter’s often expressed mixed responses to the act of singing during worship. We can think of Bradley’s actions here in light of Oswell’s (2013),

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‘tactical interstitial agency’, as discussed earlier. During collective worship, it was the adults who were, for the most part, in control of the space. They decided who sat where, what songs would be sung and what the overall content of worship would be. As we saw at the start of this chapter, the school occasionally enforced weak forms of silence in order to control and manage the worship space (Lees, 2012). However, Bradley through the act of singing, tactically subverted the adults’ strategies and improvised to make the song his own by replacing the word ‘God’ with ‘dog’. In this way we can observe how there are moments where children can resist and reclaim some of this space and by ‘grab[bing] opportunities the moment the arise’ children can ‘find strength through their creative bricolage’ (Honwana, 2005, p. 50 as cited in Oswell, 2013, p. 59). However, other children found singing to be the most enjoyable aspect of collective worship and particularly enjoyed the song ‘Our God is a Great Big God’. This ambiguity was expressed during the child-centred activities, where children would list their likes and dislikes about collective worship. Under likes one child wrote: ‘I like the singing assemblies’, whereas under dislikes another child wrote: ‘we always sing songs about god and school. Children such as Edward and Rebecca were aware of teacher’s strategies and the attempts to construct such space into a ‘holy’ or sacred space through the auditory environment, whether this was music or silence. However, the monopoly of Christian songs, for some children, was not appropriate and this particular soundscape jarred with their own non-­ religious identities. Michael, Luca’s and Bradley’s reflections in particular reveal their experience of the music in collective worship as predominantly mediating religion and their dissatisfaction with this. Michael, in particular, reflects a type of ‘anti-religious secular’ perspective (Lee, 2015, p. 60). Lee (2015) develops the idea of the substantial secular through drawing on Habermas (2006), Casanova (2011) and Berger et  al. (2008). This particular conception of the secular takes account of substantive expressions10 as oppose to subtractive, negative or insubstantive accounts (Lee, 2015).11 This anti-religious secular condition, which falls under the wider substantial secular category, emerges out of a focus on anti-religious  As what something is rather than what it is not.  The substantial secular would contrast to forms of the insubstantial secular which treat the secular as a everything that is not religion and therefore rests on an account which relies on subtraction. 10 11

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perspectives. Michael approaches the secular as a substantial condition rather than insubstantial one, as there is ‘some form of position-taking’ involved (Lee, 2015, p. 60). Songs in collective worship were ‘annoying’, ‘boring’ and potentially ‘offensive’ to atheists. However, Michael does not assume this position directly and distances himself from this viewpoint by adding that this might be the case ‘for atheists’. Luca, Michael and Bradley all considered songs like Our God is a Great Big God to be ‘too Christian’ as potentially offensive to atheists. As with Michael and Luca, Bradley also adopted a substantive secular position. Rather than not participate in the singing assembly and assume a godless, areligious state, Bradley did join in and changed the lyrics of the song from ‘God’ to ‘dog’, which is revealing of an anti-religious perspective and gives substance to his notion of secularity. Within the limited literature on childhood, education and religion, children are often presented as passive beings with little agency or ability to resist the strategies of adults. This becomes particularly contested within education spaces as fears of indoctrination emerge. However, as Hemming (2015, 2017b) and Madge et al. (2014) have shown, children and young people often demonstrate resistance and non-compliance when encountering religion as constructed by adults, and children also reimagine such constructions and generate their own meaning from these framings. The varied and diverse reflections from children on their experiences of singing and silence during collective worship demonstrates the need to move beyond narrow understandings of such practices which would rest of notions of power, domination and regulation. The children’s mixed and tactical responses to these moments could be read in terms of what Walkerdine (1985) notes as ‘subject-positions’. Subject positions emerge out ‘complex subjective investments’ and consequently, are not unitary, but ‘are multiple and often contradictory such that the constitution of subjectivity is not all of one piece without seams and ruptures’ (Walkerdine, 1985, p. 204). Ultimately, by considering how both sound and silence are deployed in collective worship we can observe how the soundscapes serve to create a sacred space and how such spatial dynamics are then received, experienced and resisted by children. Through considering children’s perspectives of acoustic architecture, we are not only able to observe children as agentic actors, but also provide an account which highlights the heterogeneity and diversity of how religion, non-religion and spirituality are mediated during worship.

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Materiality, Religion and Non-religion Attention to ‘things’ as a significant part of our social worlds is not only a subfield within the study of religion but also within the field of educational studies. McGregor (2004), for example, in her study of objects within a secondary school, examined a school science department and discovered how particular networks of human and non-human agents, such as filing cabinets and wall displays, helped to reproduce and maintain certain practices and values; practices and values that would by significantly different within other subject department offices within the school (see also Fenwick & Edwards, 2010). Fenwick and Edwards (2010, 2014) and Fenwick et  al. (2011) have written extensively on socio-material practices within education, foregrounding materiality12 within learning and practice. They particularly draw on Actor Network Theory as a useful approach to investigating materiality due to the importance and significance this ontology places on objects in their shaping on our social worlds. Sørensen (2007) also argues towards a blind spot within education and social sciences more broadly in terms of materiality, observing science and technology studies as the forerunners in terms of scholarly contributions to this field. Influenced by Latour (1993, 2005), Sørensen argues that materials have therefore been marginalised and ‘treated in association’ with the individual and simply reduced to ‘external, contextual parameters, as resources for or symbols’ of our social worlds rather than actors in their own right (2007, p. 4). Latour’s (1993) thinking and Actor Network Theory (ANT) have opened up new possibilities for our thinking on material objects and their agency. One of the most important contributions of ANT is that it considers the significance of all actors within networks, human and non-­ human, and views such actors as both mediating and transforming social life (Latour, 2005). It is the relational and transformative component of ANT which is particularly important here, as it draws attention to the non-human agent as well as the human agent and presents such materials as capable of shaping the world around us, just as humans are and as such, produce a complex field of relations within these hybrid networks (Latour, 2005). 12  Definitions and parameters in terms of what constitutes ‘the material’ are wide and varied, with no clear definition set. See Sørensen (2007) for a useful discussion on this from both philosophical and social science perspectives, including reviews of Hegel, Heidegger, Kant and Latour.

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Regarding religion, the study of materials draws our attention to the objects and non-human actors which make up individual’s religious worlds. The study of material religion grew out of disciplines and subfields of religious studies such as archeology, anthropology and history (Berns, 2015). This focus on the interrelation between the materials and embodied dimensions of religious life, practice and tradition has produced an exciting body of literature including the journal Material Religion, Orsi’s (2005) account of the lives of Catholics in America, McDannell’s (1995) work on Material Christianity, the edited volume Materialising Religion (Arweck & Keenan, 2006) and David Morgan’s work on visual culture (2010, 2012).13 With regards to collective worship, my focus in this section is drawn to how objects such as Bibles, Power Points and crucifixes are used in collective worship, and how they shape and inform children’s experiences. I attend to those often-ignored objects that shape the experience of collective worship, but frequently trivialised or taken for granted. Through decentering the human actor, Berns’ (2015) doctoral research on sacred objects in museums, considered how such objects affected visitor’s experiences with the divine. Drawing on insights from object orientated ontologies, I attend to how objects within the collective worship space and the materiality of the physical space itself can affect children’s experiences of collective worship. When I entered Sacred Heart Primary School on my first day, it was clear that religion and spirituality had a prominent and explicit material presence in the school. Nearly all the display boards surrounding the corridors referred to the religious character and ethos of the school. I met with Sally, the deputy head teacher, who gave me a brief ‘whistle stop tour’ of the school before she introduced me to the classes I was to spend time with during my fieldwork. As we walked through the Key Stage Two area of the school, Sally briefly excused herself to deal with another matter. As she did, I took the opportunity to look more carefully at the displays in the Key Stage Two corridor. When Sally returned, she explained that the visual images around the school were very important in terms of embedding what was reflected on in collective worship within wider school life. 13  Meyer et al. (2014), however, observe that before material religion became an established subfield of religious studies, it was initially considered an oxymoron, with many scholars and academics privileging thought and beliefs over the material and physical dimensions of religious life.

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As became apparent throughout my time at Sacred Heart, collective worship and the religious identity of the school did indeed permeate all areas of school life. During their spare time, children practiced hymns and Christian songs for collective worship. The visual images and objects around the school reinforced the messages and themes spoken about during collective worship which would always focus on teachings from the Bible and the school’s overall mission, which was for children to inspire each other to excellence, in the Light of Christ. I found such objects all around the school, not just in the school hall, but next to light switches, fire extinguishers and coat pegs. Daniel and Ethan, two boys from Year Five, discussed the materials found in collective worship and how they paid more attention to them during collective worship. Daniel:

You notice the cru cu cru crucifix and the cross a lot more erm and you sort of feel that Jesus is present and that Gods present and you know that he’s there Rachael: And you wouldn’t feel that during PE or when you’re having your lunch? Daniel and Ethan: No Rachael: And what do you think happens in collective worship to make you feel that presence a bit more? Daniel: I think talking about Jesus makes you notice that he’s there. For Daniel and Ethan, the materiality of the worship space became more significant during the worship itself. Although these particular objects were permanent fixtures of the school space, the content of collective worship, stories about Jesus and gospel readings would emphasise and draw out the significance of the objects more so than any other time of the school day. Thinking about Daniel and Ethan’s observations, we can see how their reflections are revealing of relationality between the human and the non-human object (Latour, 2005). Edward and Rebecca from St Peter’s earlier on in this chapter also reflected on the temporal and relational nature of sacred space. As Rebecca observes, secular activities such as PE and lunch time which take place in the school hall are not ‘holy’ and as Daniel notes, you do not take as much notice of the crucifixes during lunch or PE. Silence, materials and music in themselves are not enough to transform the space but is ultimately achieved in collaboration between

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the human and non-human agents and the networks which are generated between them (Latour, 2005). The centrality of the Word of God was also made clear through the way the material and spatial practices of collective worship. After the children entered in silence, a pupil from Year Six would walk from the back of the hall, down the central aisle with the gospel raised over his or her head as the rest of the school sang ‘alleluia’. The gospel would then be handed to Mrs. Allen who would slowly place it on the lectern. She would begin by telling the children that we are ‘now going to hear the Word of God and learn about his goodness’. The gospel reading would be the same that was read at Mass on Sunday. Many children saw this as an opportunity to hear the reading again and take away new things from it or to hear it for the first time if you missed Mass the day before. The PowerPoint was never used during this moment of collective worship. The sole focus would be listening to Mrs. Allen and the children would simply sit together, look up and listen. Strhan (2015) notes the significance of the spatial arrangements in conveying ideas of respect and authority. Drawing on Morgan’s (2012) work on embodiment, Strhan (2015) demonstrates the importance of sitting together in order to convey the notion of solemnity, unity and togetherness. As we have seen in earlier chapters, it is the coming together in the physical sense which helps to emphasise the sense of community in the school and the image of the family which the school tries to create. However, it is not just this idea of belonging and community-making that is bound up in the bringing together of children’s bodies, the spatial arrangement of collective worship and the way in which children’s bodies are used in such spaces also serve to the sacralise the space. When the gospel is held high above the head of a pupil as it is walked down the central aisle of the hall, the pupils’ eyes are drawn upwards and towards the centre. The soundscape is also used to further emphasis the sanctity of the gospel through the children’s singing of alleluia. In this way, the children’s bodies are trained and manipulated in order to reaffirm the importance of the word of God and to support the sacralisation of the collective worship space. In contrast to St Peter’s and Sacred Heart, I never saw crucifixes or Bibles during collective worship at Holly Oak or throughout the school generally. However, during collective worship, I did notice the space change and in particular, the use of objects to achieve this. Sue discussed the use of materials and sound to transform the classroom and create a more spiritual environment:

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One of the things we do is quite time in some of the rooms, where …. In the classroom I was in … we would light a candle, we’d put a special cloth out we’d light a candle, we’d have some quiet time, just just to sort of mediate really and just to think about nothing. We would have the room in darkness, music … a candle would be lit and I would give ‘em a focus, like think of the people in our lives that help us, think of our mummies and daddies.

Regarding the cloth, Sue explained that it ‘indicated that something special was happening now’, adding that some classrooms also used incense burners to create a multisensory experience for worship. For Sue, these materials changed the environment and had a transformative effect on what would otherwise be a normal school classroom. ‘We change it. We put the cloth on, we light the incense’. Sue reflected on why they chose such materials during collective worship and was initially unsure but concluded that ‘well in Christianity erm … candle … light and exercise but yeah it does draw them in and it gives them a focus to look at’. Candles, however, were not always available and as such Sue would improvise with jelly timers14 in front of them to create a nice visual effect for the children. In contrast, at Sacred Heart, candles took on a more explicitly religious meaning. During collective worship at this school, seven candles were lit at the start of every act of collective worship, each one a different size in order to reflect the different year groups in the school family at Sacred Heart. Polly and Laura told me about how the candles in collective worship were used and what they represented. Laura: Polly:

She (Mrs. Allen) lights candles. We all have a class candle that we light. One person lights it in our class and this helps us in reflecting that we are all part of one school family. I think those candles really help because as soon as I look onto the candles, I reflect and I just think about God straight away because those candles really show a big sign that its linked to Jesus and that Jesus is with us.

The use of candles here took on a more explicit and overt religious meaning and all children discussed how candles helped them to feel the 14  Jelly timers are cylinders containing brightly coloured liquid gel, which when turned upside down, causes the gel to separate and move, producing a visual effect similar to that of a lava lamp.

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presence of God and Jesus, while also materialising the school family. At Holly Oak, however, the use of candles was more ambiguous and no participants other than Sue referenced the use of materials in collective worship in relation to religion. This might reflect the higher number of non-religious pupils at Holly Oak than at Sacred Heart, resulting in the materials mediating a less obvious religious meaning. Gilliat-Ray observed this in the creation of prayer rooms in the public spaces such as The Millennium Dome and found that the diverse and plural nature of society compelled those involved in making such space to ‘bring a much wider range of assumptions and preferences to questions of design and furnishing’ (2005b, p.  303). So, what were the interests of the schools when placing such materials in their worship space? As Gilliat-Ray (2005b) observes, no space or material is completely neutral. Even a jelly timer will be imbued with particular motivations and interests. Behind every decision to place a table here (with or without a cloth over it), a chair there, or a picture on the wall (even if simply a pleasant landscape), an environment is inevitably ‘materialising’ and, with it, the particular preferences of individuals with conscious or unconscious interests. (Gilliat, 2005b, p. 303)

During collective worship and wider school life, it would have been easy to view Holly Oak as an entirely secular environment, but doing so would ‘miss important dimensions in everyday action if we assumed religion’s absence whenever we see secular strategies at work’ (Ammerman, 2007, p. 222). Placing a cloth over a table mediates some meaning and as such, the materials used during collective worship at Holly Oak could be used to represent an altar of some kind. However, there are risks in ‘over-­ attributing religious meaning to religious symbols and clothing’ (Lee, 2015: 75 drawing on Knott 2005a). Moreover, when Sue did refer to Christianity and the possible religious meaning of candles, it was with hesitancy and uncertainty with jelly timers being mentioned as being equally effective. As such, I was wary of thinking of candles, jelly timers and cloths solely in relation to religion. There is a desire to transform and change the space into something special and to indicate to children that now is a time to relax and reflect. The objects are chosen accordingly and are only used during those times in order to sacralise the space.

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Conclusion Through considering the spatial arrangements of collective worship (designed and regulated by adults) and the agency of non-human objects in such spaces, I have argued that such processes and constructions are used to create a sacred space for collective worship and in doing so shape children’s experience of collective worship. However, creating such sacred spaces is not without its issues. In all three of my schools, we have observed how the competing uses of the space in which collective worship took place could have significant bearing on both children’s and teachers’ experiences of the event. The continual and careful management of the collective worship space reveals how schools attempt to create sacred spaces, or mirror particular religious spaces, and how tensions also arise due to the multipurpose nature of the space which cross religious and secular dimensions. As Ammerman observes, in her work on everyday religious life, ‘religious identities and practices are present in the midst of all the other social demands of everyday life’ (2007, p. 221). Equally, the daily act of collective worship is also performed and practiced in the midst of the wider demands of primary school life. Unlike spaces such as churches, temples and mosques that are designed with a religious purpose in mind, the school building was not built as a worship space. As a result, the worship that takes place in schools on a dayto-day basis does so in relation to, and sometimes in conflict with, other purposes and activities within everyday school life. Through analysing collective worship by attending to the spatial and material dynamics of this act we can observe how both the secular and the religious are continually negotiated and managed, and the challenges that are faced when creating a sacred and special time for worship. These negotiations are revealing of how schools juggle with the competing demands of educational life and policy and how they attempt to create sacred spaces in otherwise seemingly secular environments. Ultimately, this chapter has shown the often deliberate and explicit strategies schools exercise in order to create sacred spaces and how children experience such spatial and material strategies in order to resist, comply and create their own meaning out of such events.

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Children represent among other things the future of the faith standing there in front of oneself; at stake are the very existence, duration, and durability of a particular religious world … Children signal the vulnerability and contingency of a particular religious world and of religion itself, and in exchanges between adults and children about sacred matters the religious world is at play. This is why discussions of children’s religious lives are fraught with such great fear, sometimes sorrow, and sometimes ferocity, among adults, especially in times of social change or great dislocation … Children are uniquely available to stand for the interiority of a culture and to offer embodied access to the inchoate possibilities of the culture’s imaginary futures’. (Orsi, 2005, pp. 77–78)

I have noted throughout the anxiety that surrounds the collective worship debates and the public attention and scrutiny this requirement and religions in schools has generated in both media and public discourse. Strhan (2017) notes that it is perhaps unsurprising that debates around religion and the secular in western societies are particularly heated when it comes to children due to the ‘increased cultural sense of anxiety and uncertainty about the future’ (2017, p. 59). With this said, we only have a small, albeit growing, amount of literature about children’s experiences of the religious, non-religious and spiritual dimensions of social life. In response to this, I have investigated the role of collective worship in schools and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Shillitoe, Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Childhood, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39860-5_7

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examined how religion, non-religion and spirituality are mediated within such acts while foregrounding children’s experiences of worship. In doing so, I contribute to debates not only about collective worship and the place of religion more broadly in schools, but also deepen our understanding of the negotiation of religion and the secular in social life from a perspective that is sorely missing from both our public discourse and scholarly work. In this concluding chapter, I offer both a summary drawing the observations in this book together and also reflect on what potential answers this work provides and what further questions it provokes. Taking an ethnographic approach allowed me to explore how both religion and non-religion are negotiated in everyday settings in collective worship and found that these conceptual categories are continually reimagined and negotiated by children. Through focusing on children’s experiences of prayer during worship, we can observe the diverse and varied experiences of prayer which were both religiously and non-religiously heterogeneous. By drawing on theoretical approaches from the sociology of childhood, paying attention to those spaces and places outside of official religious institutions, we can see how the categories of religious and secular are constantly under construction and reimagined. Knott and Franks (2007) and Woodhead (2013) all note the tendency of scholars of religion to look for religion in traditional religious spaces and to reflect the views and perspectives of the elite. By employing approaches found in the sociology of childhood and treating children as experts and actors in their own right, the examples of religion and non-religion as negotiated in the everyday practices of children and adults in relation to them explored in this study advance our understandings of how religion and non-religion are constructed and experienced in the setting of educational institutions. The myriad ways in which children across my field sites experienced prayer and negotiated the boundaries between religion and non-religion demonstrates the fluidity between these two categories and how the two cannot always be evenly set apart. As we saw at St Peter’s, children are invited to pray or reflect on the issues explored during acts of collective worship. They had a chance to ‘talk to God, you God’ or to ‘sit quietly and reflect’. Here the option to participate in prayer without talking to God was offered, however, this was not done in a way as to reject religion, rather to provide an alternative or different experience that sits alongside religion. As such, Lee’s (2015) approach to the non-religious is helpful when understanding the relationship between the religious and non-­ religious in collective worship.

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My fieldwork demonstrated the range of strategies used by schools during collective worship and the various ways children tactically reimagine and negotiate boundaries during moments of prayer (de Certeau, 1984). Ultimately, attending to children’s agency and their experiences of prayer in collective worship challenges some of the adult-centric assumptions which dominate discourses surrounding collective worship and reveals how children’s own experiences do not always fit neatly into the analytical categories constructed by adults, thus inviting us to reflect on existing ways of conceptualising. Attending to children’s agency and meaning-­ making during worship reveals the heterogeneity of religion and non-­ religion within the lives of children. I argue that such complexity and nuance within the children’s lives can only add to and enhance our understanding of religion and the secular within contemporary society and the conceptual classifications which pervade it. We have also seen how collective worship functions as a community-­ building ritual and how the embodied dispositions cultivated during worship seek to create a sense of belonging among the children. Through the framework of body pedagogics, I found how these embodied techniques can be reflexively rather than unconsciously acquired, with children generating their own meaning from such acts while also being conscious of the wider strategies at work. Listening to the experiences of my child participants and observing their practices in school, I found that children were acutely aware of how collective worship served as a cooperative ritual. Drawing on insights from childhood studies, I elucidated how children acquire a particular habitus in worship and how this informs and shapes their own subjectivities. Drawing on Foucault (1977) and de Certeau (1984), I situated their bodily habits in relation to ideas of discipline, strategies and tactics. This was not to diminish the children’s own agency but to locate our understanding of the body and childhood in light of the wider structures and powers at work. As Oswell (2013) observes, children’s agency needs to be understood in light of ‘tactical interstitial agency’ and the ways in which children make use of particular resources to tactically subvert strategies when such resources are made available. Thinking about children’s embodied dispositions in relation to subjectivity and intersubjectivity, we have observed how children’s bodily practices are shaped and implicated by others around them, while also noting children’s awareness of particular forms of power that are operationalised within collective worship.

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Collective worship is, as I have shown, also a space for children’s moral formation. Through drawing on literature from the anthropology of ethics which focuses on the everyday as a site of ethical action, we can observe how particular values are mediated and reproduced in collective worship. Drawing on Robbin’s (2013) anthropology of the good, I argued that the celebration of children’s everyday actions is illustrative of how schools locate their own vision of the good. I also considered how the ways in which values are performed during worship reveals the understandings of childhood and anxieties of adults regarding children’s moral formation. However, the repetitive nature of worship and the predictable patterns entrenched in such performances can result in cynicism from children and a desire for authenticity. Drawing on Goffman (1959) and Hochschild (1983), I observed how children manage their emotions and stay loyal to the performance of collective worship, which I argue is an expression of everyday ethics. By considering the ethical dimension of collective worship we can enlarge and deepen our understanding of particular social and cultural practices which seek to shape children’s moral formation. We have also explored the spatial and material dynamics of collective worship and observed how schools strategically manage such environments in order to create sacred spaces. Taking a cultural sociological approach to the sacred, I found that through children’s auditory experience of collective worship, an ‘acoustic architecture’ is produced that sacralises the worship soundscape (Hirschkind, 2006, p. 8). I also found that children’s perspectives of singing in worship revealed a diverse range of non-religious positions. Children’s bodies were also implicated in the sacralisation of space and drawing on the work of Orsi (2005), I found that the sacralisation of the collective worship space was dependent on children’s bodies and materialising the sacred. Through considering the use of such space, we learned how schools negotiate the multiple purpose use of the school hall and how the collective worship space can compete with the wider secular functions of the school hall. This adds to and enhances our knowledge of collective worship, revealing how its sound, its silences, space and materials all mediate dimensions of religion, non-­ religion and spirituality. I showed how children’s bodies are central to such processes and that we can think of children’s bodies themselves being vehicles for collective worship and materialising the act of worship itself. Throughout this book we have seen how children have disrupted the simplistic and often polarising moralising lines often constructed by adults as they experience and encounter both religion and non-religion during

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acts of collective worship. One of the consequences of debates on collective worship is that occasions such as collective worship are often understood in very simplistic terms and only seen through a religious lens. Through refocusing our gaze on the relationship between religion and non-religion through the eyes of children, we are able to view and explore collective worship and its associated acts in new ways. By exploring collective worship ethnographically, rather than focusing solely on the justification and appropriateness of the requirement, I have demonstrated how the everyday negotiation and performance of collective worship is revealing of the lived interrelations between religion and secularity in the life of public institutions such as schools. As I mentioned in the opening chapter, this book is not a defence of collective worship. It is instead an opportunity to explore how children encounter and experience collective worship and more broadly what this tells us about religion and the secular in our contemporary social life. So what has this told us? First, it tells us that during collective worship children have agency and are not purely at the will of adults. This is an important point, as narratives found within public discourse, coupled with the marginalised place children’s voices have within the study of religion, only serve to reproduce this image of the passive, vulnerable child. However, this is not to romanticise children’s agency. As Oswell and Strhan (2019) in their work, children’s agency can often be constrained by their environments and adults in relation to them. As such we should be attentive to the ways in which this agency is stifled or drawn upon and by taking a relational approach and we can observe the tools and techniques available to children when exercising their own agency. Focusing on children’s perspectives on collective worship is revealing of how the religious and the secular are continually reconstructed and negotiated within education which are otherwise constructed in quite binary ways in wider public discourse and academic literature. Although this study is not generalisable in terms of wider populations, it does aid our theoretical thinking when examining religious growth and decline by considering how events such as collective worship form part of children’s religious and non-religious socialisation and the transmission of various beliefs, practices and worldviews. With the growth of non-religious identities and diverse religious landscapes, how children encounter religion and learn about various beliefs and worldviews in such spaces will enhance our understanding of both the religious and the secular in social life more broadly. This work also contributes to our knowledge of institutional life

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from a legal position by revealing how policy is enacted on a daily basis and how teachers attempt to meet the legal requirement of collective worship. Through focusing on children’s perspectives and adopting a child-­ centred approach, we can observe adult’s desires, concerns and anxieties in relation to such policy and how this is negotiated in everyday school life. Throughout all the chapters we have noted and observed the various structures and strategies under which children’s experiences of collective worship is situated. We have seen how the assemblages and interactions between adults, things and other children all shape and inform the worship experience. These structures and strategies, in many senses, did constrain children’s agency due to the limited resources at hand to them which resulted in some children expressing feelings of boredom and frustration towards worship. With this said, we have also observed how children exercise their own agency and create their own meaning, within such structures. Secondly, listening to children’s perspectives challenges and invites us to reflect on some of our own assumptions about religion. Children’s religious and non-religious identities are heterogeneous and complex. If, as Orsi (2005) argues, children stand for the future of faith and for the religious world itself, then we would do well to listen to them. Orsi (2005) states that through children ‘the religious world is at play’. Equally, so the non-religious. With the growth of non-religious identities and ways of making sense of life, the way in which children encounter and/or grow up non-religious tells us a great deal about how religion and the secular manifest themselves within contemporary social life. Scholars assert that the world is ‘not simply religious nor simply secular, but has always been complexly both’ (Dinham & Francis, 2016, p.  6; see also: Ford, 2011; Woodhead & Catto, 2012). However, in order to fully understand appreciate this complexity, we need to attend to the lives of children in order fully round our understanding of both religion and the secular. We have observed how adults construct religion in broadcast collective worship and in doing so constrict religion for children. Although this book was not focused on the nature or justification of worship in schools, I would like to conclude with some observations and recommendations. Regarding the legal requirement of collective worship, I suggest that the current provision should be amended. Although as observed in the introduction, there are arguments for abolishing the current provision, my findings do demonstrate that children can make use of collective worship in their own way and find value in such occasions. This

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is not to minimise the contested nature of the legislation nor to suggest that the provision should remain in its current form. Rather, the children in my schools demonstrated wide ranging perspectives on collective worship. Some children were less than positive, whereas others found such moments to be highly significant and meaningful. The current provision for collective worship can be exclusionary and as both teachers and children in this study have shown, this can cause tension due to the lack of inclusivity while for some children they become disinterested and withdrawn from such occasions. However, it is clear that assemblies or collective worship do play a significant role in everyday school life. The terminology of ‘collective worship’ does seem to be a barrier and cause confusion as to what is expected during such occasions. Notwithstanding, the privileging of Christian belief in the current legislation does not support schools in creating assemblies which are inclusive for pupils from other religious and non-religious backgrounds. Therefore, I advise that collective worship be simply renamed ‘school assemblies’ and that the legal requirement be amended so that no particular religion, belief or worldview is promoted over another. However, before any revision of the current legislation takes place, my main recommendation is that this should take place in consultation with both children and young people, championing their perspectives and opinions. Ultimately, before we make any judgement about whether collective worship should be retained, amended or abolished, we need to learn about what is taking place in schools and how children experience this. To ignore children’s perspectives would not only do a disservice to them but it would also impoverish our understanding of the nature of religious and secular life in contemporary society. Above all, if there is one thing we can take from this study is that children are astute, articulate and deserve to be listened to. Grace Davie, in the forward to Youth on Religion, stated that young people are ‘social scientists in their own right: their perceptions sharp and their comments interesting’ (as cited in Madge et al., 2014, p. ix). The children in this study were social scientists in their own right too and we would do well to listen to and learn from them.

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Index1

A Adult generated constructs, 37 Agency, 4, 30, 36–38, 47, 51, 52, 58–60, 66, 72, 79–106, 114, 123–125, 130, 131, 134, 136, 138, 170, 174, 183, 188, 206–208, 214, 223, 225, 226 B Belonging, 58, 87, 111–138, 190, 211, 223 Bereavement, 89 Bible, 1, 5, 56, 62, 67, 84, 91, 112, 113, 209–211 Bodies, 1, 19, 56, 61, 70, 72, 81, 114, 120–129, 133–136, 138, 150, 161, 182–184, 186, 189, 190, 193, 194, 199, 209, 211, 223, 224 Body pedagogics, 114, 120–126, 223

Boundaries, 37, 72, 80, 96–100, 104, 184, 222, 223 Bourdieu, P., 63, 64, 114, 121n2, 122–124, 126–131 Britain, 3, 5, 8, 11, 14, 48, 71 religion in, 48, 72 C Childhood adult-generated constructions, 37 child-centred perspective, 105 childhood studies, 4, 51, 55, 60, 101, 106, 126, 127, 134, 202, 223 Children’s rights, 1, 21, 22, 36, 55, 124 Christianity in Britain, 3, 15, 17, 17n11 Church and schooling, 5–7, 155 and state, 6, 8

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature license Switzerland AG 2023 R. Shillitoe, Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Childhood, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39860-5

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Clarke, C., 20, 35n35, 48, 49, 97, 101 Cohesion, 20, 37, 114–117, 119, 155, 166, 189 Cohesion, community, 37 Community-building, 37, 113, 138, 175, 223 D De Certeau, M., 37, 54, 80, 99, 102, 114, 135, 136, 223 Death, praying to dead relatives, 81, 87–89, 101 Durkheim, E., 113, 116–119, 124, 146, 147, 187 E Embodied practices, 37, 113, 120, 128, 129, 138, 186, 189 Embodiment, 114, 120, 121, 121n2, 124–131, 133, 184, 194, 203, 211 Emotion, 119, 129, 172, 174, 203, 204, 224 Emotion work, 149, 172–174 Ethical formation, 143–175 Ethical practices, 145, 164 Ethics, 145, 150–152, 151n4, 156, 160–163, 169, 174, 224 Ethnography, 23, 24, 32, 97, 100 Everyday religion, 53 F Family, 17n11, 28, 58, 59, 66, 87, 88, 94, 95, 112, 113, 123, 128, 144, 154, 159, 165, 173, 211 school family, 111–138, 212, 213 Fieldwork, 24, 26n20, 29–31, 33, 34, 47, 61, 64, 66, 68, 70, 79, 80, 96, 104, 121, 128, 134, 149,

153n7, 191, 193, 196, 198, 209, 223 Foucault, M., 121n2, 135, 147, 161, 162, 183, 194, 199, 201, 201n6, 223 Friends, 62, 66, 85, 88, 94, 96, 112, 115, 125, 126, 136, 156, 158–163, 165–167, 173, 174, 205 G God, belief in, 90, 201 God, communicating to, 88, 101 Goffman, I., 121n2, 152n6, 163, 164, 172–174, 224 Good, 18, 25, 28, 38, 53, 67, 81, 91, 94, 95, 143–175, 204, 224 Governance, 99, 135 Gratitude, 164–166, 168, 173, 175 H Habitus, 120–128, 130–132, 136, 138, 194, 223 Hemming, P., 18, 22, 25n18, 32, 47, 52, 60, 61, 68, 69, 81, 86, 89, 90, 102, 114, 115, 120, 123, 124, 138, 148, 160, 188, 189, 194, 207 Hochschild, A., 172–174, 224 Humanists UK, 1, 2, 5, 12, 21 I Individualism, 50, 86, 168, 169 J Jesus, 18, 91, 112, 113, 158–160, 162, 196, 210, 212

 INDEX 

L Latour, B., 38, 121n2, 125, 182, 183, 208, 208n12, 210, 211 Lee, L., 49, 80–83, 82n3, 87, 90, 206, 207, 213, 222 Lived religion, 52–61, 100, 101, 105, 120, 185 Lynch, G., 64, 70, 114, 116, 118, 147, 154, 187 M Mahmood, S, 103, 104, 128, 129 Morality, 144–150, 160, 168, 170 N 1944 Education Act, 2, 5, 7–10, 12, 16, 17, 19, 83 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA), 14–18, 120 Non-compliance, 18, 89, 104, 207 Non-religion categorising, 80, 81, 103 rise of, 71, 83, 105 O Objects, 31, 61, 63, 82, 102, 103, 117, 126, 136, 149, 174, 182, 183, 186, 187, 192, 208–211, 213, 214 object orientated ontologies, 38, 182, 183, 209 Ofsted, 18, 22, 98, 153, 170, 171 Orsi, R., 32, 47, 52–54, 64, 69, 70, 120, 159n12, 194, 209, 221, 224, 226 P Panopticon, 135 Participant observation, 4, 24, 31, 32

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Performance, 31, 89, 114, 116, 118, 119, 133, 134, 149, 152n6, 163, 167, 170, 172–175, 186, 224, 225 Pluralism, 55, 156 Power, adults, 65 Power, institutions, 55 Prayer, 1, 12n7, 18, 62, 80, 83–99, 101, 104–106, 116, 122, 123, 128–132, 134, 152, 154, 158, 159, 162, 165, 166, 169, 172, 174, 185, 189, 190, 194, 198, 213, 222, 223 Pupils, power, 50 R Reflection, 12, 13, 20, 21, 27, 31, 47, 63, 65n3, 66, 80, 82, 86, 89, 90, 93, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 111–113, 116, 123, 126, 128, 130, 132, 135, 137, 138, 156, 159, 162, 168, 170, 172–174, 190, 191, 195–197, 201, 206, 207, 210 Reflexive practices, 131 Regulating, 134, 194 Relational approaches, 118, 225 to non-religion, 82 Religious education (RE), 2, 4, 8, 12, 14, 14n9, 15, 17–19, 17n10, 17n11, 21, 27, 49, 51, 52, 67, 96 Religious nurture, 57, 59 Research with/on children, 1, 17, 24, 30, 34, 50, 51, 57, 58, 60, 61, 66, 69, 100, 104, 123, 124, 127, 134, 149, 170, 188, 194, 222, 224–226 Respect, 15, 147, 151, 153, 160, 163, 169, 193, 194, 200, 211 Ridgely, S., 24, 34, 47, 52, 56, 57, 60, 61, 65, 66, 100, 102, 106, 147, 159

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Rituals, 3, 36, 37, 55, 69, 71, 84, 94, 102, 111–138, 160, 166, 167, 175, 199, 223 S School Standards Framework 1998, 19 Secular, 1, 3, 5–7, 13, 37, 48–50, 52, 54, 55, 69, 71, 72, 82, 96, 97, 99, 100, 105, 118, 138, 182, 185–187, 191, 195–199, 206, 206n11, 207, 210, 213, 214, 221–227 Secularisation, 10, 11, 48, 81, 97, 124 Secularity, 3, 37, 51, 55, 69, 72, 81, 207, 225 Sennett, R., 114, 125, 126, 164 Silence, 91, 163, 169, 181–214, 224 Singing, 26, 92, 116, 125, 126, 135, 137, 138, 165, 166, 189, 194, 202–207, 211, 224 Socialisation (religious), 6, 8, 57, 59 Songs, 35, 62, 125, 136, 152, 154, 165, 202–207, 210 Sound, soundscapes, 38, 53, 135, 182, 183, 190–207, 211, 224 Space, spatial arrangements, 16, 21, 33, 33n33, 37, 52–54, 59, 68, 70, 80, 86, 89, 97, 98, 115, 116, 121, 127, 134–136, 138, 143, 144, 147–149, 148n2, 159, 163, 164, 169, 175, 181–214, 222, 224, 225 Standing advisory council for religious education (SACREs), 16, 17n10, 25 Strategies, 29n26, 36, 37, 54, 61, 65, 72, 89, 99, 102–104, 114, 115, 120, 126, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 138, 164, 170, 171, 188, 193, 201, 205–207, 213, 214, 223, 226

Strhan, A., 3, 24, 47, 48, 52, 56, 57, 59–61, 63, 64, 69, 70, 97, 101, 120, 133, 144, 148, 184, 185, 196, 200, 211, 221, 225 T Tactics, 37, 54, 80, 93, 99, 101, 102, 123, 135, 184, 205, 223 Techniques of the body, 120–126, 128, 130 Technologies of the self, 161, 162 Thank-you, 96, 112, 113, 166, 168 thankfulness, 151n5, 154, 164, 166, 173 Togetherness, 114–116, 118–120, 132, 133, 138, 211 Transmission of religion, 58, 59 U United Nations Child Rights Convention and the Children’s Act 2012, 22 V Values, 11, 13, 14, 19, 20, 26, 35, 37, 51, 56, 58, 102, 118, 119, 124, 143–145, 147–156, 148n2, 151n5, 152n6, 153n7, 160, 163, 164, 166–175, 188, 192, 194, 196, 204, 208, 224, 226 W Withdrawal, 2, 9, 22 Woodhead, L., 3, 3n2, 20, 35n35, 48, 49, 52, 84, 97, 99, 101, 105, 222, 226