Teacher agency, secularisation, and interdisciplinarity in religious education: an exploratory Scottish study

Interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and learning have gained popularity in Scottish education, and yet to date there is a lack of empirical evidence regarding how this might impact on ‘less popular’ subjects in the curriculum such as Religious Education (RE). While acknowledging the potential gains of an interdisciplinary approach for RE, what is problematised is this article is that if poorly implemented interdisciplinary approaches have the potential to threaten the viability of RE as a subject of study in schools. To the extent that contrary to government policy (policy as ‘text’), in many Scottish non-denominational schools the nomenclature of RE itself has been changed to reflect the curricular area that now come to dominate the subject. The article argues that schools should not lose sight of what the main purpose of RE ought to be, which first and foremost, is about the critical but sympathetic study of religion. Otherwise if interdisciplinary learning is implemented in such a way that issues from other disciplines end up subsuming RE, then on which ground would this subject actually stand as a specialist curriculum area in the study of religion in schools?