Embedding Enterprise Skills into Religious Education – Frances Lane

At first glance, Religious Education and Enterprise might be unlikely learning partners. However, the skills afforded by the enterprise curriculum can greatly enhance student engagement in religious education.  Below I have detailed a number of activities that have been successfully planned with an enterprise specialism in mind and have been actively engaged with by students.

Enterprising Projects

Two assessment projects that have incorporated a business theme have been for the topics of Relationships and Pilgrimage. Firstly, students have developed wedding planning companies in order to show the important features of marriages and wedding ceremonies. Secondly, students became travel agents encouraging pilgrims to take a special religious journey and engagingly covering the features of pilgrimage as well as the impact of religious journeys on believers. Issues of having concern for others, particularly in Islam, with the duty of Zakah, can lend itself to the creation of banks or financial advisors aimed at the better understanding of financial duties. Similarly, the concepts of law and justice can be explored through the medium of a courtroom or by taking on the roles of advocates in the legal process. In smaller ways, students could take on the skills of independent learners by become photographers, journalists or ‘Dragon’s Den’ judges in their local community to understand diversity.

Presentation skills

Individual and group presentations lie at the heart of enterprise skills. Whilst interrogating the concept of religious leaders, students might like to present about their role models, who have shown leadership skills (again embodying the spirit of enterprise). Students can peer assess their class members by making the National Curriculum Levels applicable to that particular assessment in ‘pupil speak’. An exciting way of making peer assessment engaging is to laminate the levels, which students can hold up. ‘Balloon Debates’, ‘hot-seating’ and playing the conscience of characters in a story can allow students to take risks whilst developing empathy skills.

Planning and risk taking

Engagement in RE can be highlighted through collaboration with students to develop their learning. Allowing students to design ethical scenarios for their peers to encounter will help greater awareness of the topics. Furthermore, presenting students with a concept (e.g. charity, sin or community), but removing all other elements of the lesson and enabling students to develop the learning for one another, or create questions or debates based on the issues, can allow greater engagement with key concepts.  Designing charity lessons with risk-taking in mind can help support the enterprise curriculum.  For example, presenting students with a simulated relief effort after a natural disaster or pitching for fundraising for the school charity, can allow students to more actively engage with the curriculum (especially where GCSE boards ask for knowledge of charities). This idea can even be extended to profiling celebrities according to certain RE themes e.g. concern for environmental issues or contribution to charity.

By prioritising Enterprise skills, engaging strategies can be created to explore challenging and relevant concepts within religions in realistic and cross-curricular ways.

Frances Lane