Embodying values and socio-religious difference: new markets of moral learning in Christian and Muslim schools in urban Tanzania

Abstract

Schools are institutionalized spaces of learning where children and young people are trained to become morally and ethically responsible members of society. Cultural ideas and values relating to friendship, social status and the nation, but also regarding one's own body, dress and emotional, verbal or gestural expression, are learned and performed by young people on an everyday basis. In this article, I build on ethnographic research on the ‘new’ generation of Christian and Muslim schools in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (2008–10), and I show that particular ways of learning and performing values can be understood as a form of embodied morality that orients students and teachers in relation to their educational and socio-urban environments. I argue that schools do not represent monolithic ethical or moral frameworks or that the actors in these educational settings learn or embody those frameworks in uniform ways. Rather, the processes of ethical and moral (self-)formation are often highly fragmented due to the diverse (social, religious and economic) backgrounds of students and teachers as well as the logics of class formation in the neoliberal market, which causes a high degree of fluctuation across the (equally fragmented) educational landscape of Dar es Salaam. I therefore define ‘embodied morality’ as a partial and discontinuous practice whose specific forms and experience are inseparably entwined with the specific ideological, social and institutional environments of particular educational settings.

Losing or securing futures? Looking beyond ‘proper’ education to decision-making processes about young people’s education in Africa – an introduction

“…In decisions about schooling, parents and schoolchildren may also ask about the quality of schools, the safety of the school environment and whether schools are spaces to 'lose' or 'save' time, values, and morality (Dilger 2017). School may be regarded with suspicion as a place where girls meet lovers (including predatory teachers) and lose their chances for a respectable marriage (Davidson 2015), or where young people will be converted to a different religion, or become emboldened to challenge their parents.…”

Affective Trajectories

“…4. Only recently has more attention been paid to the explicit study of religious diversity in rural and urban Africa, most notably with regard to the dynamics of Christian-Muslim encounters (see Soares 2006;Janson and Meyer 2016; Dilger and Schulz 2013; for urban contexts, see Dilger 2014Dilger , 2017.…”

Teachers’ Sleep, Religious Tasks, and Suicidal Thoughts: A Preliminary Assessment

“…But there are a few that this study considered for the sake of argument and basis. According to a research article, it proposed that the ethical and moral formation are fragmented due to diverse background (social, religious, and economic) aspects of teachers as well as other factors (Dilger, 2017). Thus, this means that religious tasks prompt the ethical and moral formations of teachers.…”