Becoming Citizens of 'Post-Secular' Britain: Religion in Primary School Life is a
project funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the project team is made up of Dr Anna
Strhan (University of York), Dr Peter Hemming (University of Surrey), Professor
Sarah Neal (University of Sheffield), and Dr Joanna Malone (University of York). The
project involves ethnographic fieldwork in four contrasting fieldsites in the UK (two in
England, one in Wales, and one in Scotland). In a previous blog post, we discussed
the rationale behind the project and some of the initial findings from child-centred
activities focused on community and belonging – please the find blog post via this
link. I (Joanna Malone) have recently completed fieldwork in the first of these
fieldsites: an ethnically and religiously diverse school in a low-income neighbourhood
where I worked across two classes in Year 5 (aged 9 and 10) over the summer term
(April 2022 – July 2022). During the fieldwork I undertook interviews with children,
staff, and parents. I also undertook child-centred research activities and observed
everyday school life within and beyond the classroom. With fieldwork in one school
now completed and children and teachers on their summer holidays before the
autumn term, this blog post reflects on some of the things I observed in my first
fieldsite, and in particular, the embodied nature of citizenship and belonging between
children through shared everyday activities. Dance, song, and food have been an
important part of what I observed in the classroom and wider school day. In the
interviews with children, they also came up as being key to shaping and revealing
interactions and the children’s shared social lives, as well as important aspects of
children’s faith identities.
All names have been changed in ethnically sensitive ways to protect confidentiality of
the participants and the school.
Dance, Song, and Food
Within everyday school life, embodied activities such as dancing, singing, and the
eating and sharing of food all played an important role in developing a sense of
citizenship and belonging amongst children. Within our project, we see citizenship as
something which is lived, and following feminist analyses, recognise the
shortcomings of rights-based approaches to citizenship. For us, citizenship is not
limited to legal status but is rather a lived practice bound up with people’s identities,
sense of belonging to (or exclusion from) smaller and larger communities, and their
participation (or non-participation) in different groups and contexts (Nyhagen &
Halsaa 2016). When it comes to children’s citizenship, then, we want to understand
their sense of participation, rights, duties, identities, and belonging – including their
sense of national, ethnic, and religious belonging and identity – and how this is
shaped through their place and space in the world, for example, what they engage
with and the use of their bodies.
Song and Dance
During my time at the first school, music played a central role in everyday school life
– from hymn assemblies, Year 5 representing the choir for the Year 6 end-of-year
performance, to a Year 5 performance with songs and dance developed by an
external music teacher that linked to what the children had been learning in English
and Geography. These seemed an important embodied means through which the
school sought to shape a sense of collective belonging to the school. These
instances highlight quite a structured engagement with music and performance for
the children I was working with. There were varying levels of enjoyment and
engagement from the children, and they sometimes resisted the teachers’ efforts to
include everyone in these performances. For example, when I took some children for
interviews, they were happy they didn’t have to practise the songs for the Year 6
performance, with one girl, Summaya (aged 9) explaining that she didn’t like the
songs because they were ‘too Christian’ and it was ‘against her religion’. The hymn
practice/singing assembly also highlighted a tension with religion in some instances.
From my observations, I noticed that a number of children from non-Christian faiths
did not join in with the Christian hymns they were being encouraged to sing
(although some did) but these children would join in with the more ‘secular’ songs.
The presence of Christian hymns as excluding for some children was something also
mentioned in a handful of interviews. For example, Adrianna (aged 10) who is
Muslim, said that she did not like the Christian songs and expressed her wish for
Muslim songs to also be included in singing practice. Savannah (aged 10), a
Christian child, agreed with Adrianna and explained how it can be boring when
everything is Christian-centred, and she recognised that children from non-Christian
faiths in the class might feel uncomfortable about this. These examples show how in
quite structured contexts around music in the school, religion can be quite central,
and the ongoing prominence afforded to Christianity can be something which does
not necessarily create a sense of community and belonging amongst all children in
this multifaith community school.
In contrast, the more unstructured instances of music and dance within the school
highlight how children created forms of belonging that cut across religious difference
by drawing on the cultural resources at hand to them, e.g. TikTok.
Instances of these more unstructured engagements with song and dance include
passing moments in the classroom and on the playground. In the classroom, I
noticed that girls, in particular, were often singing songs together or doing a
choreographed dance together. Upon asking them about it, these songs and dances
are often ones they’ve seen or heard online via platforms like TikTok. Whilst I
observed some of these TikTok dances in the classroom, they were more frequent
on the playground, specifically in the wooden structure pictured below (Figure 1).
This wooden ‘hut’, as it was referred to, was a place several of the groups took me in
the photography exercise, as a place which was important to them and where they
felt they belonged. When probing the children to tell me more about this, several
explained that often girls, and sometimes boys, will perform their TikTok dances and
songs here, and sometimes there would be ‘dance-offs’ (an informal competition
between different groups for the best dance to a particular song). This mixture of
girls and boys dancing together stands in sharp contrast to a structured music lesson
in which children were asked to practice the Waltz with others in the class, when one
boy and one girl got paired together, which caused a lot of giggling and
embarrassment.
On witnessing a few of these children-led performances myself, what struck me was
the manner in which these play-based and unstructured examples of song and
dance seemed to cut across religious difference. These playground interactions
tended to be collectively organised by the children, with a children from a variety of
different religious and ethnic backgrounds taking part together. In contrast with the
more structured examples of music described above, in these kinds of play contexts,
the children did not appear to attach much social significance to religious difference
but focused on what they had in common in terms of their shared enjoyment of
music and dance. As these interactions happened in a shared place, this was the
playground for Years 4, 5, and 6; what was also evident was the mixture of ages
taking part in these collective activities.
(Figure 1, photo of wooden ‘hut’ on the playground)
Food
The consuming, sharing, and rituals around food within the school were things that
had a notable presence in the first field site. Food was something that children
mentioned at various times throughout the project – in interviews, in child-centred
research activities, e.g., drawing activities, photography activities, and through my
observation of daily life.
For example, in an interview with Sam and Michael (both aged 10), the boys
discussed the importance of food in their everyday school experience. Food was
both a key element of what they did and did not like about their time in school – be it
the discussion of the noodles being too dry, or the delicious chicken pasta (that Sam
insisted I should definitely try if I hadn’t already!). It was not just these everyday
encounters of food which were important to Sam and Michael, however – they had
fond memories of trying different types of food and cuisine through events put on by
the school. They also enjoyed it when they had class parties and they got to have a
lot of food donated by parents. Indeed, the day of my interview with Sam and
Michael was the day of the school’s celebrations for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee –
that afternoon a class party ensued, and Sam called me over to tell me that, in light
of what we’d chatted about in the interview, it was actually the food at the Jubilee
party that surpassed all others.
Food was interwoven with different aspects of the children’s citizenship in school life.
In terms of decision-making processes in the school, Sam and Michael explained to
me that in the past they’d been able to request new food on the school menu through
the Pupil Panel (a selection of children from each year who are voted to be a voice
for the year group) and once this had led to new food at lunch time on one occasion,
but it was something that never got added to the menu longer term – this was a point
the boys raised when they were asked what they’d change about their school
community to make it better. Recognising the multi-faith nature of the school and
accommodating religious difference, the school also provided Halal food for Muslim
children and were particularly sensitive to the needs of children who decided to fast
for Ramadan.
In the more everyday observations of daily school life, discussion of food was
common. For instance, at the beginning of the school day or in between classes,
discussions would often erupt regarding food – e.g., which flavour crisp was the best,
what everyone’s favourite food was, what people ate at a party, or what was on the
school menu that day. These conversations often would include me and the class
teacher. During break and lunch times, some children would take great interest in
what I was eating, often asking if I could give them some too!
This important, communal, and present nature of food in the everyday rhythms of the
school also came to light during the photography activity I did with the children. In
groups, I asked the children to take me to places in the school that were important to
them and where they felt they belonged. Many of these places related to eating, as
evident in the pictures below of the folded away lunch tables that were set out every
day (Figure 2), as well as the outside benches (Figure 3) where children could go in
the summer when ‘grab bags’ (a cold school lunch) were on offer from the school
canteen.
(Figure 2, photo of the dining tables folded away)
(Figure 3, photo of the outside benches where children could eat)
Occasionally children observed in the interviews how food could be a marker of
religious difference, for example, in terms of commenting on whether particular
children ate ham or Haribo when talking about their friends’ religious identities.
However, for the most part, how they spoke about food with each other was a way in
which these children actively created their own forms of belonging with each other in
which forms of religious difference were pushed to the background. In these
encounters, they focused on their shared experiences, likes and dislikes, whilst also
recognising and taking for granted points of difference between themselves. Here,
social and religious difference is something that is recognised but it is also part of the
social fabric in which the children are able to operate.
Next Steps
Although we remain in the early days of our fieldwork, the findings from the first
fieldsite highlight the rich and embodied ways in which children can form a sense of
belonging and community with one another. At the same time, we also see the ways
in which more structured forms of activities that seek to shape their sense of
belonging to the school can be resisted and challenged by children, highlighting their
agency in negotiating their involvement with certain elements of the school day. As
we prepare for the next phase of fieldwork exploring the role that religion plays in
children’s citizenship and belonging, we will be considering further how this relates to
social class, race, and ethnicity across our different fieldsites. Whilst these examples
of embodiment are just one element of how citizenship and belonging are being
created and sometimes contested by children, we greatly look forward to undertaking
fieldwork in the three remaining schools and to understand how these embodied
dimensions of belonging and citizenship are being shaped differently, or similarly,
elsewhere.