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Education and Religious Faith as a Dance

This chapter (in a book that has been very positively reviewed in both educational and theological journals) compares two contrasting (and equally unsatisfactory) ways of relating education and religious faith before exploring the potential of the metaphor of dance as casting light on some of the principal qualities required by faith educators and showing some of the delicate balancing acts they need to sustain if their efforts are to benefit those they seek to reach. The chapter’s significance lies in how it gets to the heart of pedagogy by its focus on encounter and relationship and in its guarding against the misuse of power by teachers. In probing the dynamics of the educational encounter between teachers and students, the chapter does four things: (i) it draws upon the author’s forty-plus years of professional teaching experience in multiple settings and with diverse age groups; (ii) it provides philosophical analysis of inappropriate conceptualisations of how education and religious faith may be related in classrooms; (iii) it develops an original deployment of the metaphor of dance for bringing to light central features of the relationship between teachers and students in the context of educating people in matters of faith and (iv) it brings this deployment of the dance metaphor into dialogue with the work of some recent French philosophers of education.