Meeting the sup

Finally had that meeting with my supervisor today.  Really interesting discussion, almost disturbing because of the way he was challenging my assumptions underlying my proposed research on the impact of religious educators’ epistemological, pedagogical, and religious beliefs on their teaching practice.

To wit:

* Does epistemology have anything to do with their teaching practice?  Applying Ockam’s notoriour razor, he says maybe it’s just their way of teaching.

Catholic guilt

I spent the day in a mall reading journal articles on Catholic education.  Most of them came from this new journal called International Studies in Catholic Education, but the most provocative one I read today was written by Michael Hand. Some very interesting stuff came up that are relevant to both my research and practice:

A whole bunch of the articles dealt with challenges faced by Catholic education–such as globalization, the ideology of secularism and the decline of “strategic subsidy” due to the lack of religious vocations. 

One registered and intrigued researcher

Officially registered as a research student

Yesterday I braved the English cold, took the London tube, and found my way to the Institute of Education to register, get an ID, and have my computer accounts for the internet and library access all set up. I was able to find some of the journals I couldn’t access from Singapore–and this morning I finished reading one article written by Michael Hand with a deceptively simple title, “Religious Education.”

Really, really interesting! At first blush, it seems quite irrelevant to my research and to our work back home since it talks about the different justifications of Religious Education in the U.K. Of course the situation in the U.K. is so different from ours in Manila–most especially in Catholic schools run by religious congregations. Whereas the UK RE has moved to what is called the phenomenological approach which tackles different world religions, ours has remained quite confessional in nature and its purpose socialization into Catholic beliefs and practices still.