Article

International Journal of Christianity &

Education
The place of love in the 2016, Vol. 20(2) 119–132
! The Author(s) 2016

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Education classroom DOI: 10.1177/2056997116631556

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Kaye Chalwell
Youthworks (Sydney Anglican Diocese), Sydney, Australia

Abstract
Special Religious Education is faith-based single tradition religious education taught in
many Australian public schools by volunteer teachers who are adherents of the faith
they are teaching. This paper derives from a qualitative study of the pedagogy of
Christian Special Religious Education teachers that took place between 2010 and
2014. Love is at the heart of these Christian teachers’ pedagogy. It guides their peda-
gogical decisions and sustains and compels them to continue regardless of the chal-
lenges they experience. This paper discusses the place of philia, eros and agape love in
SRE pedagogy and uses Buber’s concept of I-It and I-Thou relations to further explicate
the nature of love in Special Religious Education.

Keywords
Religious education, pedagogy, love, Special Religious Education

Introduction
In several states of Australia, parents who enrol their children in government
schools can nominate for them to participate in Special Religious Education
(SRE). SRE is faith-based single tradition religious education that focuses on the
distinctive religious tenets and beliefs of the particular religion being taught. At the
time of writing there were over thirty five authorised providers of SRE in New
South Wales representing a range of religions and religious denominations. In New
South Wales it is taught within the school timetable by visiting volunteer teachers
who are adherents of the religion they are teaching. While SRE is timetabled in
school hours it is not part of the school curriculum and, at any time parents have
the right to choose whether their children continue to participate in SRE classes.
SRE teachers are motivated to teach by their love of God and their love of

Corresponding author:
Kaye Chalwell, PO Box A287 Sydney South, NSW 1235, Australia.
Email: kaye.chalwell@youthworks.net

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120 International Journal of Christianity & Education 20(2)

children. Their motivation and the particular context of SRE lead to a distinctive
pedagogy that also shows similarities to other faith-based religious education
pedagogy.
The place of love in the classroom is one significant aspect of SRE pedagogy
that sustains and compels SRE teachers. It is their love for God and the belief that
he loves them; their belief that they should represent God’s love in the classroom;
and their love for the children that they teach that gives them the determination to
continue regardless of the challenges that they experience. An understanding of the
nature of this love and how it is worked out in the classroom can help SRE teachers
find their pedagogical voice in the classrooms where they teach, and guide the way
they are trained and supported. It may also have relevance for religious education
teachers in other contexts.
In his discussion on the relationship between pedagogy and love, Halpin (2009)
notes that love is rarely mentioned in academic articles and books about education.
Similarly, Martin (2004: 28) regretfully points out that ‘love is missing today from
public discourse about education in general and schooling in particular’. Halpin
expresses his surprise at this because the overlap between love and education ‘seems
obvious to me’ (89). Perhaps this is because he is not completely correct. As Cho
(2005: 79) points out, ‘From the beginning, philosophers as different as Plato and
Paulo Freire have claimed that love plays an integral part in education and peda-
gogy’. And in their day to day language of teaching, teachers often describe the
place of love in their teaching (see for example, Game and Metcalfe, 2006; Day,
2004; Metcalfe and Game, 2006). Liston and Garrison (2004: 1) capture the cen-
trality of love in teaching in their introduction to Teaching, Learning and Loving:
Reclaiming Passion in Educational Practice when they state that

Love binds us to the abode of life and everything in it we call good or beautiful. Those
who feel the call to teach, who sense teaching is a profoundly meaningful part of their
life, have a passion for teaching. . . we think they are in love; they are in love with some
aspect of teaching; perhaps they are in love with everything about it.

Love is a multifaceted concept that means many different things to different people.
As Clough (2006: 23) points out, love can refer to the attraction someone feels; it
can be for animate and inanimate things, or for concepts or activities; it can be
directed to God; and it can be intentional or unintentional. He concludes that ‘love
is a good example of the inadequacy of words: It is greater than the sum of its
parts’. Halpin (2009) and others (for example, Gregory, 2002; Sameshima and
Leggo., 2010; hooks, 1994) draw on one or more of three ‘different ancient
conceptions’ (Halpin, 2009: 93) of the nature of love to try to deal with this inad-
equacy: eros, ‘love as a form of passionate yearning’ (92); philia, ‘a fondness and
appreciation of other’ (92); and agape, ‘a charitable notion of love’ (92). Halpin
believes that these three conceptions of love ‘work in harmony in significant ways’
(92) in teaching. While these three ways of understanding love all play a role in

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Chalwell 121

SRE pedagogy, agape is the most significant and is more fully discussed in
this article.
While many researchers may not use the word ‘love’ to describe teaching, they
allude to love as they discuss the importance of teachers’ positive caring relation-
ships with their students. As van Manen points out ‘Teachers always stand in a
certain relation to the students they teach. The very term pedagogy always brings
out the relational quality between teacher and student’ (1994: 140-141). Similarly,
Rodgers and Raider-Roth (2006: 266) describe the relationship between a teacher
and his/her student as the ‘keystone to student achievement, motivation and
engagement’. Love and caring are often connected in educational literature. For
example, Loui (2006: 285) answers his own question ‘What do I mean by a love of
our students?’ by explaining that ‘a love for students is a kind of caring – a loyal,
attentive nurturing of their intellectual and personal development’.
Nel Noddings, who has been at the forefront of research in educational caring,
believes that students need and want teachers to care for them as people and ‘to
convey this caring through listening and responding to their expressions of con-
cern’ (Noddings, 2005: 147). Interestingly, although Noddings argues that an ethic
of care should be at the heart of education she firmly asserts that ‘There is no
command to love nor, indeed any God to make the commandment’ (Noddings,
1984: 28–29) . By making this distinction, Noddings’ understanding of caring in
teaching sets itself apart from that of the love that is described in this article where
there is a strong belief by SRE teachers in the command to love and the God who
makes the commandment to love him and to love others (Matthew 22:37-38). This
is in accord with Pazmino (2008: 44) who points out that Jesus’ ‘commandment to
love is overwhelming and yet foundational for all interpersonal interactions in
Christian education’.

Research methodology
My developing understanding of love in SRE pedagogy draws from the larger
research project in my 2010 to 2014 doctoral work on the pedagogy of Christian
SRE teachers in two states of Australia, New South Wales and Victoria. A
qualitative paradigm and the use of constructivist grounded theory methodology
based on the work of Charmaz (2009) were chosen for this research project.
Constructivist grounded theory provides a set of principles and practices that
consist of systematic, heuristic and flexible guidelines for the collection and analysis
of data. It emphasises the emergence of meaning which is co-constructed in an
interplay between the researcher, participants and data. Rather than testing and
conforming a research hypothesis, constructivist grounded theory uses a process of
inductive data collection from the ‘ground up’ to construct theory. Constructivist
grounded theory was chosen for the research project because it is particularly
suited to research in an area where there is limited existing research (which is the
case in SRE), and because it is a methodology that allows the voices of different

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122 International Journal of Christianity & Education 20(2)

people to be heard and valued. This was important for understanding SRE
teachers’ pedagogy because what teachers think about education ‘is embedded in
the stories they tell’ (Korthagen, 2004: 81).
The data for the doctoral research and for understanding the place of love in the
SRE classroom came from semi-structured interviews with twenty three SRE
teachers and the reflective teaching journals written by sixteen of these SRE tea-
chers. Data collection flowed from my doctoral research question: How do SRE
teachers’ beliefs and experiences influence how they embody their pedagogy? The
participants in the study were a heterogeneous group of people whose commonality
was their Christian belief and their experience as primary school SRE teachers. As
a group, their SRE teaching experience ranged from one to forty three years (with
an average of nine years teaching) and their professional qualifications ranged from
no qualifications to both education and theological qualifications. They taught
between one and twelve classes a week; in cities, regional and rural towns; with
class sizes from four to seventy students; and eighteen of them were female and five
were male. This unequal weighting between female and male participants in the
study is reflective of the unequal numbers of female and male SRE teachers.
All data were manually transcribed and coded; while time consuming, this pro-
cess allowed me to stay close to the data. Coding establishes a relationship between
the data and the participants by looking at commonalities within an individual
participant’s data and across all participants’ data. In so doing, it moves from an
individual SRE teacher’s experiences and beliefs to viewing all the SRE teachers’
experiences and beliefs together. It is an inferential process that leads to an under-
standing of patterns that can be captured in conceptual and theoretical terms. This
coding moves from line-by-line coding where each line of data is labelled to ‘sim-
ultaneously summarise and account for each piece of data’ (Charmaz, 2006: 43), to
focused coding where the most significant initial codes are sorted into common
patterns and ideas to make analytic sense of the data. This time consuming, itera-
tive process allowed me to dwell in the SRE teachers’ words and to identify pat-
terns and construct themes from their words.
To capture the complexity of the SRE teachers’ experiences and to work with
such a large amount of data (the interviews and teaching journals resulted in 1762
minutes of recorded data and over 25,000 words of journal entries), I constructed
conversations using the words from each of the teacher’s data to further analyse
their experiences. These conversations were constructed by taking the data from a
conceptual category identified in the analysis and weaving it together in an ima-
gined conversation between all the SRE teachers in the study. This was an import-
ant aspect of the analysis because it gave structure and insight into the themes that
were being constructed from the data. This process of coding and analysis resulted
in nine final conceptual categories: (1) being a guest, (2) being called by God, (3)
developing relationships with children, (4) engaging kids, (5) managing students
and the learning environment, (6) sowing seeds, (7) teaching the truth, (8) using
available resources, and (9) walking with God. At this stage, I referred to extant
literature to deepen and enrich understanding of the SRE teachers’ experiences and

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Chalwell 123

understanding of their pedagogy which ultimately led to the construction of the

final four conceptual categories of (i) guest and host, (ii) vulnerability and
authority, (iii) truth and hope, and (iv) relational teaching; and to the development
of a multilayered model of SRE pedagogy called the SRE Pedagogy Lotus
(Chalwell, 2014) where each of these categories form one of the layers of the
pedagogy lotus. The SRE Pedagogy Lotus is a model of SRE pedagogy that was
constructed from the coding and analysis of the data and interaction with the
extant literature. In the inductive reasoning of constructivist grounded theory the
use of extant literature only takes place after the detailed work of iterative coding
and analysis. The final construction of the four conceptual categories that consti-
tute the SRE Pedagogy Lotus is therefore a product of extensive inductive coding
and analysis, the construction of conversations from the data, and interaction with
extant literature.
The place of love in the SRE classroom is of particular significance in
Relational Teaching, the inner most layer of the model. This is at the heart
of SRE. Relational Teaching refers to the many relationships at play in SRE
that include the teachers’ relationships with God; their relationships with the
schools where they teach, and with the classroom teachers who often sit in on
their lessons; the relationships they want to develop with the children they
teach; and finally their hope that as they relate to these children, they will
witness to the relational nature of God. Although it may seem more appropriate
to describe these children using the term ‘students’, as the SRE teachers never
refer to them as students, always preferring the more relational term of ‘chil-
dren’, I have chosen to use the term ‘children’ in this article. All names in this
article are pseudonyms chosen by the participant.
Relational Teaching bears a special significance in SRE because of both the
context and content of SRE. The particular context of SRE means that developing
positive relationships with the children in their class is especially important to SRE
teachers. SRE is a subject that does not have the same academic standing as other
subjects; and although SRE is timetabled in the school day, it is a school subject
where children are always free, with their parents’ permission, to choose to stop
attending. The context of SRE also means that SRE teachers do not have the same
professional standing as the classroom teachers in the schools where they teach,
which can result in a lack of respect by both students and staff of the school. These
two issues raise the stakes for SRE teachers, as they believe that the nature of their
relationships with the children is one of the determining factors for whether a child
continues to attend their classes.
In addition, Relational Teaching is also important in SRE because of the nature
of the content being taught. SRE teachers do not just want their children to object-
ively know about God, they also hope that in the future they will relationally know
God. For the SRE teachers, God is not a distant other, but close by as they teach
and as they relate to their children. It is this relational quality of God that the SRE
teachers want to help their children to understand. The SRE teachers believe that
the nature of the relationships they have with the children in their classes will help

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124 International Journal of Christianity & Education 20(2)

to illustrate the relational aspect of God. This is captured well by Beth, one of the
participants in my study who explained that:

I’m not teaching maths, I’m not teaching grammar. I’m trying to present a relation-
ship, a living, loving, caring, forgiving, hope bringing, peace bringing relationship.

It is therefore the particular context and content of SRE that makes love so sig-
nificant in the SRE classroom. SRE teachers are not simply teaching a set of
objective facts about a particular religion, as in the General Religious Education
(GRE) taught in public schools by classroom teachers; they are teaching their
religion from a position of faith where they are interested in helping children
understand the relational nature of God, his love and why it is important. They
believe that they do this by teaching with the same love that they understand God
has for them; by being appropriately open about the nature of their own relation-
ship with God; and by explicitly teaching how this love is practically expressed both
in God’s actions revealed in the biblical stories, in the way they treat others, and in
their personal relationship with God. While other teachers may be motivated to
love their students for similar or other reasons, it is the combination of this unique
context and content that compels many SRE teachers to ground their pedagogy in
a particular kind of love as they teach their students.

Love in SRE
It is to the particularity of this love that I now turn. Although it is somewhat of a
cliché to suggest that love is both a feeling and an action, this is borne out in the
words of the SRE teachers I interviewed. Love as feeling is evident in the way they
describe how they feel about God and the children. It is also evident when
they describe loving what they do. Ideas of philia and eros love capture love as
feeling. Love as action is reflected in their descriptions of how they try to relate to
the children they teach. It is a love that goes beyond the classroom to when they
meet these children in the playgrounds and out into the community. It is love
expressed as agape. While both love as action and love as feeling are closely knitted
together to form an integral aspect of the SRE teachers’ pedagogy, agape is par-
ticular significant to the SRE teachers because of its unconditional nature.
Love as feeling is expressed in both the SRE teachers’ philia and eros love. Philia
is the love of friendship, family and community. While SRE teachers are quick to
differentiate between notions of friendship and being a teacher, philia love is an
aspect of love in SRE pedagogy. For example, Lisa makes this clear when she
explains that she is not there to be their friend, but to be a teacher. Stephen says
something similar when he states that:

I’m not their friend, I know that. But I’m there to love them within the boundaries of a
teacher/student relationship.

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Chalwell 125

It is this appropriately ‘boundaried’ love that may be expressed as philia, or affec-

tionate, love. It is philia that compels some of the SRE teachers to spend time
talking with their students in the playground. For example, Eleanor explains that
she enjoys having:

. . . time to spend one on one with children and listen to them. . . I used to have classes
over recess, and I’d go out into the playground and the children would come up to me
and chat.

It is also this philia love that gives Eleanor ‘empathy for the sea of faces’ and Nicole
the desire to let the ‘hungry, little hearts’ that she teaches ‘know they are special
and they are loved.’
In addition to philia love, eros love is also evident in the SRE classroom.
Although eros is often understood in sexual terms, which would render it inappro-
priate for a classroom, eros is a kind of love that is associated with passion, desire
and intense longing. It is the love that writers such as Sameshima and Leggo (2010)
and Hooks (1994) emphasise in their discussions of pedagogy. Pedagogical eros is
embodied in a teacher’s passionate desire to share his/her love for a subject with
his/her students. It is captured in hook’s conclusion to her chapter, Eros, Eroticism
and the Pedagogy Process (1994: n.p.) where she says:

To restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never

been, we must find again the place of eros within ourselves and together allow the
mind and body to feel and know and desire.

While the SRE teachers in my study do not use the term eros in their discussion of
SRE, they continually tell stories that exude a passionate love for the subject they
teach, the children they teach and the work of teaching. It is a love for the subject
that is evident in Joshua’s statement that ‘I’m there because I love Jesus and I want
to tell the whole world about it’. It is love for the children that Eleanor quietly
describes when she says:

I still step in [to the classroom] with my heart in my mouth each week, but I just really
love children and so whenever I have the possibility of having contact with children in
that sort of way, I just feel drawn to it.

And finally it is a love for teaching that Nerida is talking about when she describes
herself as having ‘A real passion for teaching’, or that Eleanor describes after a
successful lesson:

I come out and things have gone well and I think ‘‘I just love that’’. I just feel really
excited that so many have engaged with the lesson and engaged with me, it’s a real
high.

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126 International Journal of Christianity & Education 20(2)

In almost identical words, Jane describes her feelings when a class goes well:

I feel fantastic, I’m saying ‘praise God’ to myself. I always feel good because I feel a
sense of knowing that kids have taken on board the love of Jesus. A feeling that is just
joy – certainly joy that it is over, but that’s a stress I place on myself, and just the joy
of teaching. But there’s the joy of teaching even when it doesn’t go well.

Their passion does not necessarily make the task of teaching SRE easier, but it does
give them the motivation to continue teaching. So while both Jane and Eleanor
comment on their lack of teaching skills, it is their love for what they are doing that
both encourages them to continue and ensures their ongoing commitment to SRE.

Agape
It is the unconditional love of agape which captures love as action in SRE teaching.
Agape is an unconditional love that conjures images of ‘compassion and kindness’
(Wivestad, 2006: 316) and ‘unselfishness, equality, creativity and stability’ (Halpin,
2009: 93) to all students regardless of who they are or what they are like. Halpin
(2009: 92-93) describes it as

A charitable notion of love, one which is freely given to all, irrespective of their
evident failings and inadequacies, and the necessity of receiving anything in return. . .
[It is a] rendering of love, according to which a person’s love of God is realised in his
[sic] love for God’s creation – chiefly for other people, and without distinction or
discrimination between them.

Agape is the love that the SRE teachers believe they receive from God that they in
turn want to show to their students. It is their understanding of God’s uncondi-
tional love for them that guides the SRE teachers in the way they teach the chil-
dren. This can be seen in Michelle’s explanation of why she teaches SRE:

I want them to know that God loves them. . . that they are treasured by the creator
that I believe is God . . .And I probably love them differently to what the world does,
it’s an unconditional love, I want them to know that no matter what they do in their
life, or how ever bad they think they are, there is always a God who loves them who
loves and forgives.

For Michelle and other SRE teachers, their hope is that the way they show love in
the classroom will illustrate God’s love to the children. Like Michelle, it provides
Stephen with his reason for teaching:

I am there to love the students because God has loved me and that is God’s command
to me . . . I believe God’s love is unconditional to every person he’s created so

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therefore, I am motivated to work at having unconditional love and acceptance and

care to every student there.

Agape and I-Thou relations

A helpful way to understand agape in SRE teaching is to consider Buber’s (1958)
I-Thou and I-It relations. Like agape, an I-Thou relation is ‘an intimate, caring
relation which accepts another person’ (Charme, 1977, p. 162) regardless of who s/
he is. In contrast, an I-It relation is something that is ‘finite and bounded, a thing,
defined by a border between self and other, subject and object’ (Metcalfe and
Game, 2013: 176). In I-Thou teacher-student relationships, the teacher sees stu-
dents as people that they do something with and not as objects that they do some-
thing to. When a teacher looks at a child through the lens of an I-Thou relation it
impacts his/her pedagogy; s/he sees a person who should be interacted with rela-
tionally, as a ‘real person’, as a ‘subject’ rather than an object. It gives the teacher
permission to slow down and relate to the child beyond the subject s/he is trying to
teach. This is captured beautifully by Shirley when she explains her decision to slow
down and teach a lesson over two weeks:

You can relax, you can actually look at the children as real people, not just as objects of
your teaching and find out where they’re at. By taking the time constraint away, instead of
teaching SRE you are teaching children. And it becomes far less didactic. You can interact.

Groome (1994) emphasises that students should be treated as subjects who are ‘co-
learners with us on their spiritual journey’ (p. 15) rather than the objects of an I-It
relation, that need to be formed into good Christians. This is what Eleanor seems
to be getting at when she emphasises not treating her students as objects. She
explains that it is not acceptable to say:

look you need to believe in Jesus, 1 2 3 here you go’. We can just share stories about
Jesus and the values He espoused and lived out and we try to follow. And hopefully
some of that spark will start to catch.

When SRE teachers have an I-Thou relationship with the children they acknowledge
that the children are different to them and they are able to, as Buber (1958: 11) describes,
‘accept what I thus see, so that in full earnestness I can direct what I say to him [sic] as
the person he is’. For SRE teachers this is manifest in a caring, agape based relationship
that takes place both inside and outside the classroom. Joshua’s description of
getting beside a quiet boy in his class captures the nature of such a relationship:

He was working in his Student Book and I went and had a talk to him and I said
something about a father and he said ‘I didn’t have a father’ and I said ‘I understand
that because I didn’t have a father either’ and of course we struck a bond there.

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128 International Journal of Christianity & Education 20(2)

Agape in SRE emphasises that students are not objects to be taught a body of
content. Rather, they are individuals who have value because of God’s uncondi-
tional love for them, regardless of what they believe. It is within a relationship
based on agape that the SRE teachers appropriately share with their students and
relational connections take place. These relational connections occur when teachers
make a commitment to each student, and shift their focus from self to the student
and ‘look at each student in each situation in a special way’ (Owens and Ennis,
2012: 395). Such a demonstration of love by SRE teachers can move their pedagogy
away from content transmission. When this takes place, SRE teachers are able to
slow down and take the time to let their students explore what is being taught. In so
doing they can shift from a narrowly cognitive learning experience to a more
engaging and affective learning experience for their students. This is important
because cognitive, affective and spiritual dimensions of learning need to part of
the educational process if ‘learning is to ‘‘go beyond the surface’’ and be experi-
enced as transformative’ (Buchanan and Hyde, 2008:310).
I-Thou and I-It relations are not mutually exclusive, SRE teachers see the chil-
dren they teach in both ways. There are times when they will deal with them as
objects, for example when they are dealing with difficult behaviour or when they
are trying to get through their lesson because they are running out of time. But
their desire to develop relationships with the children they teach is incumbent on
seeing their students in terms of I-Thou. These relationships are also not one-sided,
both the SRE teachers and the children benefit from the relationship. This is
illustrated in Patricia’s statement that ‘I love participating with the kids and find
it a real joy to be in the classroom’. Renee also emphasises both the importance of
taking time to develop relationships with her students, and the mutual nature of
these relationships when she says that SRE teachers should:

. . .enjoy it. And enjoy the children. It’s OK not to teach . . . everything that you’ve got
in your hand. Sometimes as Christians the best way to teach them is to love them.
Don’t feel like you have to rush the class.

This relationship is not just about the relational work that takes place between the
teachers and their students. It is also connected to the SRE teachers’ relationship
with God and their belief that he is present in the room when they teach. This is
evident in Beth’s statement about what she does in her classroom:

I’m sitting there letting them talk and all the while I’m praying, asking God what
should I do about this, what do I say about this?

It is also what Nerida captures when she observes that ‘because of the nature of
what you are teaching’ in SRE, SRE teachers are ‘immediately stepping into some-
thing that is really intimate’. That is, some of the relational quality of her teaching
lies in the fact that she is teaching about a personal faith as well as because she is
working hard to develop loving relationships with the students.

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Chalwell 129

The emotional and spiritual labour of SRE teaching

Sharing love with all the students in a classroom is not necessarily easy for the SRE
teachers. Loving children unconditionally takes emotional labour by the SRE tea-
chers because there are times when children’s actions in the classroom make them
difficult to love. The emotional labour of SRE teaching is also intimately connected
with the SRE teachers’ understanding of God’s love and the need for them to reflect
His love in the way they treat the children. For example, while Beth believes that
teaching a difficult class requires the love, forgiveness and kindness that God has
offered her, she does not always find that easy. She struggles with this because she:

. . . can’t see how I can help them understand about God and Jesus and loving one
another or being kind and forgiving if I’m glad to get out of the room.

Similarly, Ruby explains that she wants to discipline her students ‘in love and
caring’ but there are times when she surprises herself because she is ‘actually getting
angry at a child and not wanting them to be there’. This illustrates a challenge for
SRE teachers as they manage their classrooms. While they want to exemplify God’s
gracious love in the way they treat their students, there are times when the chal-
lenges they face limit their ability to do this. This is the heart of agape, as Wivestad
(2006: 321) points out, agape challenges a teacher to acknowledge that God loves
the ‘difficult, disruptive, dangerous child. . . absolutely without conditions’. Such an
understanding compels Michelle to help the children she teaches to know that:

God loves them. . . differently to how the world does, it’s an unconditional love. I want
them to know that no matter what they do in their life, or how ever bad they think
they are, there is always a God who loves and forgives.

If teachers do not do this, for example, by losing their temper rather than respond-
ing with agape love, there is a risk of negating the relationship between students
and their teacher.
The emotional labour of SRE teaching is also due to the context of SRE; that is,
SRE teachers only come in once a week to teach classes that children voluntarily
attend and that may not be valued within the school community. SRE teachers do
not have the same relationship with the students as classroom teachers, and may
not receive the same support as other teachers. Bart, an experienced classroom
teacher captures this when he states that:

You have to teach with love, that doesn’t mean you don’t teach with boundaries or a
management structure, but you have to do it with a smile and a lightness of heart
because the consequences you can bring are not nearly as great as the school can bring.

Michelle is a retired school principal with years of teaching experience. She explains
that ‘I have no doubt in my mind that I can teach kids at school, but it is very

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130 International Journal of Christianity & Education 20(2)

different teaching SRE’. Due to this difference, teaching SRE requires more emo-
tional labour than any other teaching she has done because of the content of SRE.

I’m suddenly aware of what I am teaching and getting it right, making sure it’s right.
Because this is about eternity and God and this is what I’m called to do. I always want
to get my teaching right but it is such a big responsibility knowing that you are
presenting your belief and your faith in such a way that people are listening to it.

For Michelle, the emotional labour of teaching SRE is mitigated by her under-
standing of God’s love for her and her desire that the children she teaches under-
stand that love. She explains that:

I do not feel scared, but overwhelmed that God has given this to me, and what a great
gift and how much he must love me to allow me to do that for him. . . It’s spooky in
some ways, scary in some ways. That’s my connection to God, my passion is there
because I know what it is, and how good it can be and save them a whole lot of pain
and angst, so I better get it right. It’s a humbling thing.

The ‘connection to God’ Michelle describes also points to the ‘spiritual labour’ of
SRE teaching. That is, SRE teachers believe they must spend time on their own
relationship with God if they are going to be able to meaningfully share their beliefs
with the students in their classrooms. Part of this spiritual labour is to be open to
students about their own faith and in so doing reveal more of themselves to their
students. It is this spiritual labour that connects the philia, eros and agape love of
SRE pedagogy. As Nicole explains, an SRE teacher needs to have:

. . .empathy with the kids, a love first of all for God, knowing God. I think you’ve got
to know God personally, because you can’t go there and teach about a relationship
that you don’t know about. I think it comes through. The kids quite often challenge
me, they ask me have I read the bible all the way through, do you really believe this
stuff, do I pray. You have to be real to start with. You have to have the desire to really
want to impact that child’s live with the knowledge of God’s love.

Ultimately, it is love that enables the SRE teachers to weather the emotional and
spiritual labour of teaching SRE. While the context can be challenging and the
content is deeply important to them, their love for God, their understanding of his
love for them support and drive them to show love in the SRE classroom.

Conclusion
Love plays a significant role in these SRE teachers’ pedagogy. It is their passion for
the subject, the students and for teaching that motivates and encourages them; and
it is their understanding of God’s unconditional love for them that guides their
relationships in the classroom and influences their pedagogical decisions.

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Chalwell 131

Understanding the importance these SRE teachers place on love provides insight
into how they can be supported in their role.
SRE teachers need to be encouraged in their expression of love. Firstly, SRE
teachers should be encouraged to spend relational time with God through prayer
and bible reading as this nurtures their passion for SRE. Spending time with God
also serves as a reminder of his unconditional love for them that in turn reminds
them of how they want to teach. It is also important to encourage SRE teachers
to allocate the necessary time for developing appropriate teacher/student rela-
tionships with their students. SRE teachers need to be given permission to slow
down and take the necessary time to get to know their students. This permission
can be given through developing teaching resources that provide time for rela-
tionship development and helping SRE teachers not to see their students as
objects to be filled with religious knowledge but as students who are sharing in
the learning experience. SRE teachers would also benefit from considering how
they view their students and the nature of both I-Thou and I-It relations. In
particular it may be helpful to develop classroom management strategies that
reflect their understanding of God’s love and forgiveness. Finally, SRE teachers
can be encouraged to be open about the nature of their own relationship with
God and helped to appropriately talk about their personal experiences of faith
with the children they teach. SRE teachers are not all professionally trained and
their teaching takes place in an unusual context, however, they are able to bring
something important to the classrooms as they share a relationship with God that
is deeply important to them.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

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