Can We Make Use of Students’ Religious Literacy for their Digital Literacy? – Katie Clemmey

Using Online Talk as an Additional Learning Space for RE.

As an RE teacher I have often been frustrated by the lack of impact that IT has had in the classroom. My previous job working in IT had left me fairly technically literate and yet I struggled to find the time to implement technology into my lessons in a way that positively impacted on the students learning in RE. Yes, I had an interactive whiteboard in some of the rooms I taught in and I had occasional access to computer labs, but mostly I used PowerPoint presentations and clips from online sources. That was the mainstay of my use of IT. Over the years I experimented with CD ROMs like Kartouche and ‘jazzed’ up my presentations but mostly I failed to make use of IT in a way that I would conclude significantly affected learning. Now I know there are some remarkable teachers who have invested the time and energy into applying IT in much more inventive ways but I am sad to say that was not how I did it. I had other worries and my main one was lack of time in lessons. Working in a comprehensive school and trying to deliver high quality RE in one hour a week for full course GCSE, and with even less for KS3, left me concerned that students were just not getting enough time to really develop their thinking. My lessons were fast paced, rattling through the content, packing in lots of activities and challenges but I realised that there was not much time for students to actually ponder the issues, to share their ideas with others and engage in meaningful dialogue to develop and refine those initial thoughts into a more informed and intelligent response.

Completing a Masters in RE at Kings’ College London provided me with some time to sit back and consider my approach to teaching RE. Sessions delivered by Andy Wright convinced me that I needed to find a way to allow students to discuss more in order to learn more. I was inspired to implement Critical Religious Education (CRE), taking seriously the need to provide classroom experiences in which students could explore bigger questions, engage with a variety of responses to them and arrive at their own critical and rational judgements. The frustration was that this was a tall order in the time available.

This is where I started to consider the use of IT and specifically the use of online forms of ‘talk’. Being a user of social media myself I was well aware of how I used these forms of technology to chat to people and that it was an effective way to do so when pushed for time. When the school I worked in implemented a VLE that offered a chat facility this provided me with my first steps in trying out online talk and it is this that I now continue to research for a PhD at Canterbury Christ Church University.

My research question aims to explore the quality of the talk we can achieve online in RE and whether this might therefore be a useful tool for our subject. I’ve developed my understanding of ‘talk’ by looking at the work of Neil Mercer at Cambridge University who has coined the term ‘exploratory talk’ to describe the most productive form of discussion that we can encourage and promote in our classrooms. Mercer’s idea of exploratory talk relates to the types of conversations in which students take others’ ideas and build on them, where they think aloud and where they explain their reasoning on issues. To me, this seemed exactly the kind of talk I was looking for when implementing CRE in my lessons. Of course, this is not guaranteed in lessons and so my research combines looking at the talk within the classroom alongside the talk we can generate online.

I’ve completed a pilot study so far with a year 7 group. They were taught a unit on Philosophy using the CRE approach. Interwoven in the lessons were activities designed to improve their quality of talk face-to-face, alongside the introduction of online opportunities to talk both within and outside of lessons. To do this I made use of the Edmodo platform freely available on the web which looks like Facebook but is specifically designed for use in Education. The students were given login details and introduced to the software within lessons. This interface allowed them to effectively ‘talk’ to each other just as they might do in groups in class. They were given questions related to lesson content and asked to ‘discuss online’ freely. We made use of the software both in class – on PCS and using mobile phones – and as homework. I was able to monitor their chats throughout and to even interject where necessary – usually where they needed some more prompting although over time they began to do this for themselves. The screen shots show both an example of my own questions and some of the students’ responses.

It’s still early days for my own research project but so far there are definitely some positive signs emerging from the data I collected:

• Students definitely seem to take well to ‘talking’ online and quickly become used to the software
• There seems to be a link between quality of classroom talk and the quality of talk online
• Students, even in year 7 with only a few weeks of practice, begin to spontaneously engage in exploratory forms of discussion online

There are issues of course with using technology: in learning to use it yourself; teaching students to do so and the expected issues with access and speed from time to time when working in schools. The Edmodo software I used is available as a mobile app which certainly helped with these issues as I was able to walk around the classroom engaging with students that way and could also easily monitor and administrate discussions using my phone outside of school. But I was encouraged by the fact that by the end of the unit students were asking for the online option to be included in tasks and by the focus they showed when undertaking them.

One quite clear additional bonus to this form of discussion is that they are preserved – you can view them, respond to them and assess them as you would any other piece of written work. This certainly strikes me as a strength for this as a method of discussion. It offers a way of capturing the dialogue between students so that you, as the teacher, can see what has been going on within your groups much more so than you can when moving between groups in lessons. You are also able to interact with them – the students seemed to enjoy my occasional interruptions! And in looking over the responses and talking to the students about their use of the software they found that they thought that the quality of their responses was improved. They noted particularly that they are able to go back to re-read the question under discussion, to talk at the same time as others without waiting a ‘turn’, to edit answers and to think a bit more without feeling pressured to respond. They did also note that it could easily become quite tricky to keep up when other students were responding too quickly for them. So there are issues with it too. As there are for any method.

My plan is to review my current data in full and to build on my findings but gathering another set of data to look at. I am keen to continue to make use of CRE in the classroom and to consider ways to make this a more practical and accessible approach to RE that promotes some serious thinking amongst our students. My belief is that central to this is the need to promote quality talk amongst students even within the limited timeframes many of us experience and that making use of online discussion to do this might just be useful.

Please do feel free to email me if you have any comments of questions about the project at: katie.clemmey@canterbury.ac.uk or via twitter @katieclemmey