Skills-based Religious Education for the Future – Rae Hancock

Rae Hancock, teacher of RS at The Cherwell School, Oxford

In order for RE to continue to claim a place in the curriculum and serve pupils well it needs to change; to save our subject there needs to be less of it!

A bold claim/ a risky proposition perhaps, but if you indulge me I will outline why I believe this to be a necessary change and make a few suggestions as to how this new skills-based RE might be developed.

The purpose of education is to nurture within young people that which is useful beyond the parameters of school. Part of this is a responsibility, I believe, to build a programme of studies that does the very best to equip young people for the religious future, for the unknown. For example, it is easily forgotten how different the religious landscape was before 11^th September 2001. As practitioners it is worth asking ourselves “how much of what we teach prepares young people to deal with such an unpredictable and world-altering event?”  It is understood by most in education that we are preparing our young people for jobs that do not yet exist; it is also time to begin preparing them for a religious landscape that does not yet exist.

The flexibility that comes with having a Non-Statutory framework can allow schools to respond to their particular faith demographic. However, from this can come a tendency to assume that what pupils need in order to understand each other is more subject knowledge. It is very tempting to see the solution to intolerance and misunderstanding as information; if we are less ignorant about someone’s faith, hopefully we will be less fearful of difference. However, intolerance is rooted in beliefs and these cannot be changed through information alone. To view RE as necessarily subject knowledge-heavy leads, I believe, to an emphasis on breadth rather than depth. In turn the subject becomes a rigid list of things to ‘know’ rather than ways to ‘understand’ and is rendered useless when the religious landscape shifts or develops.  I believe that in order to equip young people for this unknown landscape they must have a religious education that gives them the skills to adapt to new phenomena and deal with uncertainty.

Fundamentally though I believe that such an approach is inclusive and every child has something to gain by learning to approach the unknown. Skills-based RE with its emphasis on an uncertain future, allows pupils of all, non and changing faith backgrounds to access it. It does this by teaching useful critical skills that can be used by all and has the capacity to adapt to current and future pupil needs and the changing religious horizons.

Focusing on building skills when planning RE has many positive outcomes. Your materials can be flexible and frequently renewed in the face of changing religious climate.

It is academically rigorous when the skill is used to focus and drive the lesson. For example learning the skill of investigation can be done through taking single feature, passage, speech, action, story, or material culture and scrutinizing it.  Or empathy can be explored through a single person or situation. In this fashion the lessons remain content-light but each religious source is dealt with in depth.

Having a single religious feature for each lesson (e.g. a parable), which is then approached in a variety of ways in order to practice the skill (e.g. empathy), allows for over-learning, pre-learning, scaffolding and modelling opportunities. Thus skills-based RE supports pupils with Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) through its rigour and structure. Their time in the classroom becomes about preparation for and application of action rather than simple knowledge retention and as such can be comprehensively supported by those who are SEND but not subject specialists.

Depending on your own context there are opportunities to link explicitly to the school ethos, thus rooting RE as immediate and relevant. For example, inspired by my own school’s Skills for Life, ‘reflection’, ‘empathising and listening’ or ‘learning from others’ have often become the focus for a lesson or sequence of lessons.

Finally there is the option to present skills as used by or applicable across religions/non-religious worldviews (NRWs) or as a point of contact between or within religions/NRWs. The following examples are skills as a feature of a religion. This is different from using skills to examine religion, the bulk of my article, but is an interesting and valid variation of skills-based RE. It also presents a religious reality; people agree on some things but will always disagree on others. For example, it would be possible to show unity by teaching the skill of ‘resilience’ through the experiences of persecuted peoples (e.g. minority religious groups through history). Or to show contention or competing truth claims by teaching the skill of ‘communication’ (e.g. issues of contested authority in sacred texts or whether Jesus is prophet or Messiah).

So how do we go about developing a skills-based RE that hopes to prepare young people as best as possible for an unknown future?

1. Strip down the content we cover so there is an emphasis on depth of subject knowledge and understanding rather than breadth.

2. Teach skills through the analysis of the remaining religious and philosophical material.

3. Be continuously willing to adjust/switch/cut skills or materials as the demands of the religious and cultural climate change.

4. Look to assessment through application of skills rather than regurgitation of subject knowledge.

By doing these we can both defend the continued existence of the subject and its boundaries and gain a slimmed down curriculum with subject depth that has current and future applications. In the face of the internet and global community, schools can no longer claim to be sole providers of information. In adapting to this schools need to shift the emphasis from teaching information to teaching how to interact with information. They are ideally suited to provide young people with the ability to analyse and deconstruct the information available from such varied sources.

My vision of skills-based RE for the future is borne out of a concern for the changing nature of the now. Each young person is on a personal path that may lead them in and out of the spiritual sphere, through periods of both religiosity and atheism. This personal journey is set then against a backdrop of a continually changing cultural, political and religious landscape that periodically shifts in ways so monumental as to defy prediction. It also acknowledges the need for inclusion and a process of learning through application that allows both, day-to-day measurable progress and relevance, and a bank of skills to be drawn on long into adulthood. It is only through a move away from content-overload and toward skills that I believe RE can survive as a viable subject preparing young people for an uncertain future.