Lonely drifters and educators. Experiences of teachers of orthodox religious education on their work from the 1950s to the present

Authors

• Elisa Hyvärinen
• Pekka Metso Itä-Suomen yliopisto

Keywords:

religious education, teachers of religious education, minority, orthodoxy

Abstract

This article examines the experiences of Finnish teachers of Orthodox religious education on their work from the mid-1950s to the early 2000s. This article focuses, firstly, on arrangements of the subject and, secondly, how teachers have seen their role as a supporter of the pupil's religious identity. The source material consists of 15 individual interviews with retired teachers of religious education, collected during 2004-2005. By analysing and grouping the sources through close reading, this article gives an illustration of Orthodox religious education as experienced by those who have taught it. This article relates to oral history research with the aim to make meanings given to the past heard and understood. The results of the research can be summed up into four main observations: Firstly, difficult teaching arrangements, tensions arising from the attitudes towards the subject, and the minority-majority dynamics are features that are common to the work of teachers of Orthodox religious education across different times. Secondly, the teachers' stories depict Orthodox religious education as a marginal subject, the place and justification of which teachers had to defend. Thirdly, the teachers' experiences of the school as a work community were largely positive, although the interviews revealed a lot of disadvantages. Fourthly, teachers felt that they best supported a student's identity by being their genuine selves and thus providing students with an example of being an Orthodox.