The power of exemplarity in religious education

Calls for reframing the subject matter of Religious Education in schools include the tricky question of how to select from a world of potentially interesting and relevant material. Pedagogues have long questioned the educational logic that takes so-called substantive knowledge as its starting point and imagines education to follow a linear path from simple to complex. Scholars of Religious Studies have addressed similar questions of how to bring the subject matter to life through taking a more disciplinary orientation, though this approach is problematized by RE’s multi-disciplinary foundations This paper brings together pedagogical and disciplinary perspectives to the question of exemplification in the production of curricular subject matter. Taking as its context RE in schools, the paper assumes the didactic principle that there is considerable difference between putative disciplinary knowledge and school subject matter and that the production of school subject matter requires considered processes of pedagogical transformation and reduction. The paper explores the logic governing this transformation by drawing on the pedagogical analysis of exemplarity offered by Martin Wagenschein alongside the more disciplinary analyses of the place of examples from Jonathan Z. Smith.