Exploring Religion And Diversity In Canada PDF Download

"Schools have long been entrusted with a unique mandate, that of socializing society's children. In the Canadian context, this has given rise to a number of litigated cases on the place of religion in public schools. This thesis explores three case studies that challenge the place of religious diversity in public schools, and concurrently, constitute a narrative through which to understand broader discourses about belonging and tolerance. Drawing on legal stories to bring context to how children are discussed, spoken about and spoken to, as well as how they respond, when faced with questions about their community of belonging in the context of schools, the three case studies revolve around: (1) a teacher who seeks to use additional educational resources for kindergarten and pre-kindergarten students to provide more inclusive stories about families; (2) a Sikh student's right to carry his kirpan, a ceremonial dagger, after an incident in his school courtyard; and (3) a student and his parents who wish to be exempt from an ethics and religious culture program. Indeed, although all three of these stories differ in terms of litigious content - books, kirpan and school curriculum - crosscurrent themes are present and engender an important narrative on religion and public education in Canada. The thesis begins by reviewing the legal regulation of public schools to highlight their capacity as sites of law making. A careful analysis reinforces the mutually constitutive role that law and space play on each other in the context of public schools, as played out through notions of tolerance and belonging. Law's understanding of religion in education is set out in the Canadian context and explores education's uneasy mandate, as agent of socialization, with the subject of religion (education, instruction and beliefs). Second, the presence or absence of children's voices is examined in litigation involving the place of religion in public schools. Legal storytelling can provide an important vehicle by which to discuss these nuanced stories about religion and education. An examination of the jurisprudence and an extensive review of the court records and legal proceedings reveal that formal law and litigation are rarely sufficient to engage in discussions of religious diversity in public schools. Indeed, within the context of these legal disputes, children's voices are oftentimes subdued or non-existent. Third, this dissertation maintains that internal decisions in school contexts, prior to litigation, reveal greater attentiveness to religious diversity and children's voices through their administrative make-up, organizational politics and internal codes of conduct. Schools represent microsystems worthy of their own consideration, and constitutive of their own rules and relationships. Accordingly, we can understand and engage with schools in terms of what this dissertation refers to as "complex constitutions". Within this framing, this dissertation argues that schools as 'complex constitutions' provide a deeply relational approach to rule- and decision-making, built on the power of relationships. This work proposes that schools as constituting complex constitutions underscores that the issue of diversity in schools needs to be taken more seriously as sites of decision-making rather than spaces of accommodation." --