Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Project, in April 2022, undergraduate student Kartikeya Uniyal (SFS’23) interviewed a religious education teacher at St. John’s Beaumont in London, England. In this interview, the teacher discusses his approach to religious education in the classroom and how it intersects with the values of the Jesuit Pupil Profile (JPP).
-All right. So I’ve been to your class before, so I know a bit about how you approach education. But before that, can you tell me a little bit about your background and your association with the school?
Absolutely. I qualified well in terms of my background. So after I finished university, what it was, I taught English as a foreign language for a bit in Austria and Spain. And then after that, I did a PGCE [postgraduate certificate in education], like a teacher training qualification. And then I entered a state grammar school in Buckingham where I taught for just over two years in a secular state grammar school. And after that I was in Brisbane, in Australia, for a little bit, and then I came over here back to England and I started to teach at St. John’s.
And for me, one of the things that really appealed to me about teaching at St. John’s was the whole Jesuit ethos. I mean, I’ve kind of had some connections with the Jesuits myself. They were, some of my chaplains at university were Jesuits. But I never, ever really taught at a Catholic school itself. So it was a new environment for me, and I was kind of attracted towards this idea of learning how to teach and learning how to live out this Jesuit ethos in my day-to-day life around the school and yeah, it was really intriguing to me. It was really quite interesting for me seeing or thinking about a school where the holistic education of a child was considered to be important, because coming from the background of a grammar school is very, very academic and it’s focused quite heavily on results and on academic standards and exam results. Whereas for here, I was interested to see what sort of things the school would do in terms of helping the human, you know, helping the students flourish as individuals. That was really fascinating for me. So I was intrigued to see what sort of things that they did in order to achieve that.
So you’ve taught at secular grammar schools before.
Yeah.
Do you notice any difference in terms of the overall approach to someone’s learning experience?
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think there’s a lot more into, there’s a lot more of a focus on each learner as an individual. So partly the school is smaller so teachers have a better relationship with each individual student. It feels a lot more as though it’s got more of a family setting. It was a lot more personal, and often teachers would discuss the student’s individual personality rather than maybe using their exam results to form like a basis or an understanding of who that student is and where they’re going in life. So everything’s very human centered. If a student, for instance, comes from, maybe they’re there from year to business, and that pupil wants to go and continue working in that business, that’s something which teachers will encourage. And for them, it’s not all about just sending students up to the best schools where they do a really good job of doing that. But their main focus and their main emphasis is trying to find out what a student wants or what people want and where they want to go in life and helping them to achieve that and to accomplish that. And so I think there's that.
And I think also there’s a lot of support staff on hand to go and help students with whatever individual obstacles or difficulties they might have or they might encounter. As a teacher, there’s a strong emphasis on, perhaps, maybe what sort of personal issues might be going on in the student’s life that cause them to react in a certain way in lessons. Or if I go to another member of staff and I say, “I’m having problems with this student, a student seems to be inattentive, member stuff,” that support staff might say, “Well, it’s because a student has a difficult life at home. Here’s what we can do to try and help that student overcome that issue.”
So, on my little table over here, I’ve got some highlighters. And these are what we’ve been using with one student who struggles to stop calling out in class. And I was given that idea by one of the support staff who came and said, “Look at this: the student’s got a real problem with cutting out in class. Rather than you just using the behavioral system and kind of knocking them over the head with it, why don’t we try doing something a little bit different?” I’ll go and have a chat with him and have a conversation and discuss maybe using these highlighters to try and give the student an understanding of what he’s doing in class and help them to kind of take more ownership of the fact that maybe he’s calling out a little bit more. He needs to be aware of that and he needs to take accountability of that rather than just using the behavioral system at the school as in place.
So what do you do with the highlighters?
I normally give one to him each time that he calls out in class without first putting his hand up. And so normally, you get three warnings as part of the behavioral policy of the school, but there are supposed to be five, so and if he gets five highlighters, he’ll lose a TYE [point that contributes to a student’s assigned house, either tiger (T), yak (Y), or emu (E)]. He will lose, you know, demerit points. And what that kind of does is it gives them a little bit more of a chance before he loses a TYE. So it’s being a little bit more flexible with him, but also it’s a lot more discreet as well. So I’ll just go and put a highlighter on his desk. And the idea is that no one knows really why I’m doing that, and so prevents him from kind of receiving a lot of attention from the rest of the class for speaking out or for calling out because he is a student who perhaps thrives at a bit more off attention from the members of the class. So it’s, again, something that’s kind of tended towards his personality and how he specifically reacts to the rest of his class rather than just being a general blanket idea that we have.
And just about RE [religious education], what do you think of the institution’s approach to it? Which grades are given RE as a subject, and what’s your personal approach to the subject?
It’s given across all grades here. The school’s been really, really supportive about it. They’ve tried to really, really emphasize the fact that it’s a core subject. And it’s crucial and it’s important even though not all students come from a Catholic background. And most of the RE, not all of it but most of it, is predominantly Catholic. The school really tries to place a strong emphasis on it and so I feel very supported by it. And I think for me when it comes to teaching RE, I’m kind of focused really on two things. One is kind of trying to give students, especially if they’re, well, give any student an emphasis on what it means to have an English Catholicism. So I try to look at the relationships between Englishness and Catholicism just because those students who’ve come to this school, I realized that they kind of, they want to understand what it is that makes St. John’s distinct to other schools across the globe. And it’s one of the rare opportunities that they have to study the relationship between Englishness and Catholicism, which is quite broad and quite strong. So I do that a little bit, which I think is quite interesting. And I think there aren’t that many other kinds of courses in the United Kingdom in general which have something comparable. I mean, it’s quite a nice little course at Cambridge University, but I’m not really familiar with many different schools that have something comparable.
And the second more important thing that I try to do is I try my best to instill a sense of wonder in them. And so we try to maybe take an ordinary subject and try and make it seem extraordinary or interesting. So we’re looking at Hinduism, the other day in RE, and there’s this game called Snakes and Ladders, which everyone’s familiar with and everyone really knows. But it comes from a simpler game called Mokshapat, which is all about reincarnation. So trying to say “We’re going to go and play Snakes and Ladders today, but we’re going to do something a little bit different.” And I might ask the question, “Why is there one of the animals on the board, or what are some virtues on the board?” Or “What do you think the purpose of this Snakes and Ladders game is?” Kind of link that into Mokshapat. I’ll try and take something they’re familiar with and try and turn it around a little bit to make them see actually, they don’t really understand all of these seemingly ordinary things that they have in life. And actually everything we do in the encounter is really full of wonder as I try to get them to think that the world is an amazing place and the world is a fascinating and intriguing place, and for them as learners they have to go to study that beautiful and interesting world rather than just passing tests and ticking boxes and completing assignments. And I think by doing that, it helps them to feel like they’re more of a part of the world. So they’re trying to think of themselves in the context of the wider world.
And I think that can do a lot of different things. I think it’s going to really help them to be young men for others as well, I think, because by getting them to feel that the world is an amazing place, it draws their attention towards it. And therefore, they think, well, you know, maybe my part of the way, some place in the world is to help that world grow and flourish and to help others and to love them and to be someone who gives themselves to others, perhaps.
I’m glad you mentioned Hinduism there because one of the first things I noticed was they called it Religious Education and not Catholic or Christian education.
That’s right.
So could you talk a bit more about that multicultural, multireligious sense of the subject?
Yeah. Predominantly, most of the religious studies that they do are Catholic, but we also go to have a look at other religions as well. At the moment it’s just looking at five of the major world religions: Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. But also we’re kind of trying to have, like, a general understanding of what religion is a little bit as well. So we might even look at things like Judaism and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and get students to think about, well, you know, what’s a cult and what’s a religion, what makes a religion and what makes it a cult. But also, as I say, we look at those major world religions because many of the students here aren’t necessarily Catholic. And it’s really helpful for them to go and maybe bring their faith, if they have a faith, towards the rest of the class and sort of say, this is who I am and I want to go teach you a little bit about one of the most fundamental aspects of my personality.
Let’s think about how that can make us better people in society, how that can help us all kind of grow and develop together as individuals and understand these fundamental, these crucial things that make us who we are, I think. And even if students, not necessarily religious as well, we still come across big ethical and kind of moral issues as well, which I think makes it really, really fascinating. So I think for me, learning a little bit about the other faiths in religious education helps students to kind of get on better and kind of cohesive quite a bit more because they know their students, you know, they know that the student is a Hindu or might be a Muslim or a Jew. And therefore, I kind of it kind of helps those students to really express to the rest of the class those crucial elements of their faith, I think. So yeah, it’s not entirely comparative. It’s predominantly Catholic, but there’s also a comparative religious element to it as well.
Yeah. And I think that’s where maybe the JPP fits in as well, right? So if you could just tell me what (a) your interpretation of the JPP is, how you approach it yourself, and (b) how it reflects on the experiences of the students that you interact with?
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think it’s, like, sort of in many senses, a list of the sort of virtues that teachers and students wanted young people to grow in and to develop. But my interpretation of it, my understanding is that it’s the building blocks for a student to be a good person in life and to be virtuous, really. I think one of the Jesuit focuses is on human excellence, and that for me is a really, really strong and important thing, that idea of human excellence kind of stemming from Aristotle, which again, we’re very, very good at kind of encouraging here. So for me, the JPP is kind of like a crystallization of what it means to have human excellence. What it means to be virtuous, and what it means to be good is kind of taking what it means to be a good person, a man for others, and breaking it down into these little virtues which we try to encourage in students.
And I think by breaking it down in that way, by having a discerning and attentive and compassionate and so on and so on, it helps students to realize, it makes it easier for students to grasp and it helps students to realize that they have to be compassionate and irritating and attentive and whatnot in their daily lives, because you can’t take a really, really abstract concept like being a good person and just immediately shove it into a student. You’ve got to break it down. So I feel students engage with it really well. I think they try and focus. They know they’re pretty familiar with what the JPP theme of the week usually is, and they’re pretty good at following that. So we always try and have these kinds of these virtues, these more abstract concepts into students’ daily existence. I think students react really, well, smart enough to know if I go and have a discussion with them and they want to get a TYE from me, they’ll say, “I haven’t been compassionate today. I haven’t been attentive or active or prophetic today.” So I feel like they respond to it, may engage with it really well as well.
What are some ways the JPP is implemented or executed in the school? And if you can talk about these ways a bit more, how do you see them playing a role in the whole JPP experience for students?
Absolutely. One other way in which they’re produced is kind of through assemblies which are supposed to really be looking into the JPP theme of the week. But we also go a little bit off-piste as well and go to discuss the JPP virtues and values more generally. And I think another really important way that we include them is just by trying to, as teachers, trying to model them as adults more generally, I think trying to model them ourselves, I think. So as you can see from my classroom, I’ve got to give you out of the window. I remember when I first started, year was quite close to summer and I saw Giles, who was also taking an hour in class, going outside to pray, to examen with students. And I noticed that he was really, really engrossed in praying the examen out there. And that, for me, kind of embodied the approach that the school has.
It’s kind of trying to lead as a teacher those virtues that you want to see in ideas. So if you mean you have a reflection period at the end of the school day, we look at the examen and we try to pray the JPP virtues through that, and you’ve got to meet it as a teacher, I think, and you’ve got to be the one who really embodies those virtues and has those values present within your life before you start to teach and before you go into a lesson for the exam. Notes such is the JPP virtues and values are really, really commonly placed throughout the school as well. And so usually when we maybe think of weekly activities or have an oral question of the week, we might go to incorporate a JPP virtue or something like that into a question. It’s, I think, partly trying to make all the different values in the JPP common in terms of importance and getting them into a bit of a routine, getting them into a bit of a habit in terms of how we speak and how we discuss and therefore how we kind of think about things more generally.
So we’ve talked a lot about the JPP coming from teachers or members of the staff.
Yeah.
How do you think a student should be approaching it? What have you noticed? What are your thoughts on that? How should a student approach a profile like the JPP?
I think they should strive to demonstrate each of the virtues of each of the values on the JPP. I think initially they do that as a way of trying to get TYEs. And I don’t, you know, I don’t feel like that’s a bad thing to do. But nevertheless, I feel like students should be motivated by something a little bit beyond just trying to achieve rewards for it. I just, yeah, try to achieve rewards such as TYE as a consequence of being virtuous.
I feel like there also needs to be a strong emphasis on being virtuous, displaying those values and displaying those virtues, just because it’s a good way to live a life. And I think one of the good things about the school is that students can see teachers who do seem to live good lives, who do seem to be good and happy and productive parts of society by showing these virtues and showing these values. And they, of course, don’t have TYE cards themselves. So it’s kind of saying, look, you know, not...when you’re a younger student of the school, you may be motivated a little bit more by trying to get these rewards as you grow up and you can see role models and exemplars who show you that actually the best way to live a good life is just by showing and demonstrating these virtues. These virtues in a good life are kind of the same thing. And hopefully students grow older that kind of see that connection and that’ll go more into their minds as they go into their senior schools.
No, that’s great. So I’ve seen that the school focuses a lot on stuff that happens outside the classroom as well. So have you seen the JPP reflect in their actions when they’re not in class and they’re in their smaller community?
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the most obvious ways in which it’s kind of visible outside class is that almost always students would hold doors open for adults and move out of the way when adults are around, which I think is a wonderful way of showing compassion, I think. So that’s really, really brilliant. But yes, absolutely students are very caring and very considerate towards others. So, for instance, we’ve got a new boy here at the school, Temur, who’s a Ukrainian refugee. And I remember on break due to the other day, I saw one of the members of year six coming up to a student and saying, "Do you want to go and play tennis with us?" Which I think is just such a wonderful way of kind of embodying those virtues, which we try to cultivate in others. So certainly students do share that. And I feel like having an environment where students are encouraged to be virtuous helps students, or if they feel that sense of compassion, they feel a sense of kindness to really go out of their way, to actually go and show it. So certainly I think there’s a culture of kindness and a culture of compassion and sort of culture of those JPP virtues in general across the school.
No, I 100% agree because I’ve seen the same approach of students towards myself. I feel really welcomed. But in one of my interactions with another staff member where they said that it’s funny how these kids see this bubble as their reality.
Yeah.
Because I don’t think there are any disputes that this school is a bubble, right? You need to pay a lot of money to come here. Now how do you see either your class or the experience that the school tries to create for them to look beyond what they have right now, either at home or in the school?
And that’s a good question. And I think it’s a difficult question as well, because it can be hard when students do come from very privileged backgrounds to step beyond that bubble. I think for many students, they can sometimes find it a bit hard to consider the fact that maybe most adults wouldn’t have gone to the rather elite set of senior schools that they go to. One thing that we do is kind of try to help them to look at the local community and deal with the wider world. So there’s the Battersea Cats and Dogs Homes opposite. Sometimes students will go volunteer there. We do things like Gardening Club, which gets them out into nature, not actually away from that privileged bubble, but at the same time sort of connected to the wider world.
And we also, what I do in RE in particular, is I try to give students examples of figures who don’t come from that bubble, but who have demonstrated and showed a good life. So not, you know, the obvious characters like saints, which I use quite a bit, but also people like that new film coming out with Mark Wahlberg, Father Stu, and it’s sort of like this gritty, gritty man who became a Catholic priest. So I’ve introduced that into my classes and then into my lessons, and it’s maybe quite a rough story for students because they’re not familiar with a character who’s going to become a priest who swears quite a lot. But actually it helps them to realize that there are people out there that live very, very different lives from them.
So sort of showing them the stories of these individuals and these people who don’t live privileged lives and saying, you know, “These are the sort of people that exist in the world,” and that “these are the sort of people that you’re going to encounter when you leave school” is one way. Also I know that in the Chaplaincy Department especially we’re trying to do things like, we’ve got a little sleepout coming soon and the boys are going to go and experience sleeping out in rough conditions in the sports hall that I think is another great way of actually getting those students to realize, “Well, you know what? I come from a very privileged background. This is how a lot of people actually live.” And so things such as that, I’d say.
That’s great. And that’s sort of how the school or students at school can understand things beyond their classrooms. How do you see parents being a part of this whole process of either implementing the JPP or just getting a better learning experience for their child? What role do you think that the parent should play? What role do you think they are playing and what are some of the ways that you bridge those two: primary schooling at home and then schooling at the school?
Yeah, absolutely. I think sometimes as with many private schools, you can get an undercurrent of parents who are quite pushy for their students. So they’re always trying to encourage their boy to be the best in the class, which, of course, is not necessarily always possible. And that, I think, can be a bit of a problem because it’s not what they mean by being the best, as they usually mean being the best academically or being the best in terms of extracurricular sports. Having said that, I think because this is a Jesuit school and because there’s such an emphasis on human formation, we also, at the same time, get another undercurrent of students and parents who send their children to the school because they want them to grow as individuals.
So, for instance, there are a lot of a lot of students from Sikh or from Muslim backgrounds who think, “You know what, actually, I don’t want to send my child to just a standard private school because I want my student to think about something a little bit more important than just learning and academics and studying.” So it’s about being a good person and trying to flourish as an individual. So generally speaking, it’s quite a lot of the parents’ encouraging of the JPP and of the virtues and the values that it represents. Not all, but most of them, I would say. And so, for instance, in certain situations where maybe students have been mean to another student, I’ve emailed home and usually the vast majority of times parents will say, “I’m really sorry that my child has done this, and I’ll go and have a discussion with that child” and emphasize maybe the virtue of compassion or how important it is to be caring towards others at home.
So generally they’re quite supportive, but sometimes when they’re not it’s because they feel like this, they may feel like the students here at the school try and get the best results possible, I’d say, and I think it’s important for parents to always remember that the main reason why they’re at the school is to show that you and is to show compassion and is to really, really take care of their own lives, I think. And certainly my experience is maybe having to go to a senior member of staff to discuss the student’s behavior with that student. Alongside me, I’ve always found that senior members of staff really, really encourage the role of virtue and the role of being a good person over, for instance, trying to cater for maybe a student who is perhaps entitled because their parents sent them to a school where they have to pay a lot of money. I feel like those senior members of staff who say, “We’re actually not here just because your parents pay a lot of money. You’re here to try and grow as an individual and as a person.” That’s kind of been the guiding influence and theme of the discussions that I’ve had with the senior members of staff and with the students. If there’s ever a conflict between me and them.
That’s great because the school is trying to do a lot with these large sets of values. Right. And one of the first questions I had was, especially the students who are 10 to 13 [years old], they’re in a stage where they’re going to question a lot of things that are put towards them, right? So maybe someone’s not proposing, but also not buying into what is being given to them.
Nice.
So have you had those experiences where students have questioned what they’re being taught, especially in RE, which is a subject that always gets that focus, right? And how do you personally approach it? What do you think the institution’s approach is? And is there anything that can be improved on that end?
No, certainly it’s happened to me quite a lot. I think for the reasons that you say, I think we’re kind of getting to that stage in life where they’re changing everything and boundaries are kind of being broken down. I remember one of my students was saying to me the other day that he met, it was at Winchester College, and he was saying he met a student there in the interviews who also thought that religious studies wasn’t particularly important because, you know, what was the point of religion if you don’t believe in it? And that’s kind of the thing that I really try to oppose in my RE classes if I can. But I don’t, I’m never really very confrontational or direct about it. I rarely try and answer students’ concerns intellectually unless they put them forward towards me in a very, very intellectual manner, in which case I kind of feel like it’s, they’re really asking me for an intellectual response.
I really, genuinely want to know what the reason is behind, I don’t know why so many people believed in Christianity when it first started, even though it just seems, I don’t know, even though there are many other religions at the time. I think I try and counteract that myself [through] my lessons again by that sense of wonder and saying, “Well, look, this is maybe what you think religious studies is about based on your previous experience going through the school in earlier years. But actually, now that we’re in the upper school, and going through the years six to eight, we get to think about slightly different things. Like, for instance, you’re maybe all familiar with the crucifixion of Jesus, as we discussed in class the other day. But actually it’s not quite as simple or as easy as you think it was. It wasn’t a peaceful or a pleasant process. It was extremely violent, for instance.”
And one of the things that makes studying Christianity, for instance, unique is the fact that God, who’s this infinite transcendent being, comes down to earth and is killed horrifically. That would have been unthinkable from any other religious perspective. So he’s kind of trying to take things that they know, turn the tables around a little bit and make them realize, actually, you’re not entirely 100% certain about what that something or what that issue is. So, again, kind of instilling that sense of wonder and saying when you go out into wider society, there are many, many religious people out there. And, you know, it actually forms a strong part of society.
Maybe also as well, when we look at topics like the image of God, which is a really, really important concept for Western society as a whole. So we might say, for instance, you have human rights or you have democracy because of this Jewish idea that you’re made of the image and likeness of God in Genesis. I wouldn’t obviously put it as directly as that, but if we looked at the story of Genesis and we looked at the idea of being made in the image and likeness of God, we might eventually make it into the idea of democracy and make it into human rights and say, look, look at society, you can see how society comes from all of these fascinating and all of these interesting ideas that are discussed in Genesis and yeah, things like that.
And a final set of questions here. So just around the JPP, have you personally faced any or personally thought of any drawbacks or limitations that you can see in its implementation?
I think probably just the one that I said earlier about it being a body, being more difficult for it to be consistently used from class to class or sometimes students, sometimes as they raise, the students can say, "This teacher is going to give me a lot of TYEs, therefore I can try to be extra virtuous and innocent. This teacher is not going to give me any TYEs so I know we’re going to try very hard in their lesson." Uh, I don’t think so. I think it’s really, really useful because the virtues, the values and the virtues are so broad, I think that’s a great advantage to it. I can’t think of any drawbacks or disadvantages to it. I think it’s a great thing to have and I don’t feel like there are many. If you see a student behaving well or behaving good, there’s always a way in which you can fit that into the JPP, because it always aligns with one particular virtue of values so no, I don’t think so.
So that’s great. And my last question is how do you think the institution fosters lifelong learning? And do you personally, with regards to RE, collaborate with other teachers out there so that there can be some alignment in terms of what they’re learning here and then they go to that class or another subject, right?
Yeah, I do, too. With regards to the second one, yeah, absolutely. I work with history, for instance, and we have a look at the Reformation together, for instance, which is fascinating and is a fun one. So I usually try and build upon knowledge that students have from other subjects, especially humanities. But I’m trying to work a little bit with the sciences as well, which I think is a bit more difficult. But I’m trying to get there. We’re looking at figures like George Lemaitre, Gregor Mendel, people such as that. So predominantly, yes, especially when it comes to dealing with the humanities as a place, a big emphasis on kind of crossing over and not having curriculums as being, not having different departments as being quite set in their ways.
Because I feel like it’s important for students to realize that actually, especially when it comes to the humanities, everything that they study relates to one another. That’s why you have so many beautiful artworks focused on the resurrection of Jesus is because religion has inspired art and vice versa. The two have got a big set of links going on between them, and religion is kind of the driving force behind art or music or whatnot, I think. And in terms of, you should put your first question, how does the school sort of encourage students to grow in their virtues?
Being lifelong learning.
Being a lifelong learner, absolutely. I think especially with many members of senior staff, what they try and do when it comes to assemblies is they’ll try to link in concepts with stories from their own life. And so, for instance, they’ll always make sure to emphasize the fact that grown-ups and adults don’t hold all the answers in life. And therefore, when students become adults, they also won’t have all of the answers in life, and therefore they should have a mindset that’s always focused on questioning and finding out new things about the world, as it’s always encouraged among staff to say, “If you don’t know the answer to the question, say, ‘I don’t know.’” There’s no kind of this model of, teacher-people model of being kind of, like, an osmotic transmission of knowledge from the teacher to the student. It’s okay to say, as and as a member of staff, you don’t know, you don’t understand. There’s something you’re not really sure about. Or maybe when it comes to something like the Trinity, it’s still a mystery. And there’s still so much that many grown adults don’t know or don’t understand about it. And it’s going to be you. And your grown-up is still not going to be familiar with everything that you study and everything that you’ve looked at and everything that you’ve known.
Yeah. Perfect. Thank you so much for your time.
You’re very welcome.
