I’ll start this post by reflecting briefly on the two situations in which students I was working with (in my capacity as Writing Tutor) were exploring themes connected to faith. In both cases, I struggled to support students in terms of the references I could provide, but I made an effort to speak sensitively and affirmatively.

In the first, a Y1 student who I had met only once before for a tutorial, shared the first draft of an essay with me that explored the concept of divine inspiration and its role in shaping work that she was considering ‘successful’. I struggled with the tone of objectivity in the essay, and I questioned whether the notion of divine inspiration could be problematised. However, to proactively develop this draft, my suggestions centred on how the student could perform a more detailed comparative analysis of the artworks which would both justify her selection of the works and manage the tone of objectivity, as I tried to gently outline how an objective tone in any essay can detract from a generative and comprehensive enquiry. The key reflection at the time was that this was a learning opportunity, as it made me realise something I needed to try to communicate to all students during group sessions, whether they were writing about faith or not. 

The second experience happened recently, and this involved a Y3 student who was unsure of what to explore for the writing component of her submission. We brainstormed what her interests were by exploring artists she liked, the conceptual and material processes/decisions in her practice as well as conversations she was having with friends and family. This latter exercise was integral. What had initially seemed quite daunting to the student was made an inspiring and positive experience when we landed upon the fact that she could write about her journey into practising Islam and frame this through a research question. This seemed an important lesson for me too, and felt like something I could develop into a workshop on autoethnography or autobiography as research.

It was with this context in mind that I was intrigued to engage with the recommended material for this post. They helped me reflect on these experiences whilst also enabling me to consider potential new resources to support students. 

My first point of reflection is something that also intersects with the below, which is the tendency, masked by non-belief, to assume things of religious people. This is perhaps exemplified in a question posed by Andrew Brown to Kwame Anthony Appiah in his recorded lecture on Creed for the BBC in 2016 – ‘If people don’t believe that the truths to which religious practices give them access are eternal, unchanging and supremely important, they’re not going to bother’ yet ‘religions are contingent, they’re changing and they have to be (…) so how do you stick these two understandings together?’

What is apparent in this statement is that non-believers are far less comfortable with what is described by Appiah as a ‘contradiction’ (2016). This element of complexity, which is integral to the shape of our societies and our spaces, is erased in non-belief, and is something that I feel is particularly pertinent to how I engage students with the task of writing. Reflecting on the first of the above experiences, I feel my anxiety around the potentially problematic nature of divine inspiration could have been reframed through an engagement with the complexity of the concept and the student’s attachment to it. Such a reframing could have enabled me to positively encourage the student to describe why the concept was important to her, given how rare she said it was and how much of a difference it made to the value of artwork, in her eyes.

The second key learning from the resources is the lack of what Modood calls ‘religious literacy’ amongst university staff and in the running of universities (2015, p. 12). Faith perspectives ought to be viewed as a rich learning resource beyond an engagement with themes connected to faith, through both ontological and intersectional lenses. On the one hand, Modood argues that ‘higher education and its leaders… do not understand the importance that religion has for some individuals and groups, in terms of a sense of the spiritual and/or in the structure of their family and social lives, and as a source of ethical orientation and/or community membership, or solidarity with groups in other parts of the world’ (2015, p. 12). On the other hand, they lack an engagement with the histories of universities and their entanglement with religious organisations (Calhoun, 2015). Both points not only emphasise what Shades of Noir outline in their recommendations to staff for ‘foster[ing] a spirit of mutual respect’ (2015, p.18), but also provide an important apparatus for communicating to students that the institution is also learning, that works such as the students’ I mentioned above, are not only personal but political.

The balance is in not burdening students for whom faith is an important part of their lives and practices. A workshop format or online resource, that could be shared with all students and continually built on in collaboration with students, may perform this function in the spirit of universal design of learning. 

Two references come to mind as resources for a workshop or online resource which articulates faith as a central facet for widening our understanding of art practices, in the context of environmental justice and ecology. The first is the granting of legal personhood to natural entities such as rivers and forests. An integral part of wildlife conservation as well as a completely radical re-imagining of the law, Jolly and Roshan Menon (2021) have written of the indigenous religious practices that have led to this legislation emerging. This could be an inspiring framework for exploring with students the role of faith in widening our imaginations and reforming our institutions for the health of people and our planet. Connected to this is a second resource – Capra (1975), for example, has mapped how ideas within modern theoretical physics, such as the behaviours of subatomic particles, have been described in a number of ways in Hinduism, Buddhism and East Asian religious beliefs for thousands of years.

A final point is the necessarily iterative nature of a resource like this. Perhaps as integral as providing points of reference and reflection for the importance of faith at both personal and political levels is the sense of community that can arise across cohorts or even generations of students? This is not only about a platform for references that is continually built by students, but also about effectively archiving and re-presenting past students’ works, which might make those contributing to the new resource feel like a part of an important and ongoing history.

Appiah, K. A. (2016) Creed. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07z43ds#:~:text=Philosopher%20and%20cultural%20theorist%20Kwame%20Anthony%20Appiah%20argues%20that%20when,and%20a%20Ghanaian%20Methodist%20father (Accessed: 01/06/23).

Capra, F. (1975) The Tao of Physics: An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. US: Shambhala Publications.

Calhoun, C. (2015) ‘Religion, the public sphere and higher education’, in Calhoun, C. and Modood, T. (eds) Religion in Britain: Challenges for Higher Education. London: Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, pp. 14-22.

Jolly, S. and Menon, K.S.R. (2021) ‘Of Ebbs and Flows: Understanding the Legal Consequences of Granting Personhood to Natural Entities in India’, Transnational Environmental Law, 10 (3), pp. 467–492.

Modood, T. (2015) ‘‘We don’t do God’? the changing nature of public religion’ in Calhoun, C. and Modood, T. (eds) Religion in Britain: Challenges for Higher Education. London: Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, pp. 04-13.

Shades of Noir (2015) Higher Power: Religion, Faith, Spirituality and Belief. Available at: https://shadesofnoir.org.uk/journals/higher-power-religion-faith-spirituality-belief/ (Accessed: 01/06/23).