Good teaching about religious texts: lessons from research about how to engage pupils

I wasn’t surprised that last September’s REChat on research raised the issue of effective teaching, and how research can be used to strengthen RE’s position as an academic subject. Currently much attention is being given to how to teach effectively about religious texts and what academic research tells us about this. I’ll go back to a 2012 article to draw out some useful pointers. [i]

The research was carried out in a variety of English schools, finding that primary teachers used the Bible more positively than did secondary ones. In secondary schools, teachers and pupils often expressed negativity about the use of books! Primary teachers seemed better equipped and more determined to help pupils to develop a love of reading.

Here are some key findings of the research:

• Good primary teachers present Bible stories as representing realities that may be different from those of their pupils, and to ask them to think about what is strange or puzzling.
• Secondary teachers could build on this unsettling process. In teaching e.g. Shakespeare they do so. In RE, pupils should be open to possible different meanings or puzzles, expanding their horizons. Secondary RE teachers might try to build on the successes of good primary practice.
  • This would include presenting stories ‘whole’, with attention to their original context, and encouraging pupils to be patient and imaginative whilst reading and thinking about them.
  • Pupils should consider different possible interpretations of stories, the perspectives and roles of different characters in stories and the questions and issues raised, including why the stories may be unsettling.

How might a good lesson look? Those of you teaching AQA GCSE specification A (Theme H: St Mark’s Gospel as a source of religious, moral and spiritual truths) will be grappling with the Parable of the Sower, and others might do so as part of general work on Christianity. There is no problem in presenting the parable as a puzzle: it already is, as Jesus indicates when quoting Isaiah at Mark 4:12, suggesting that anyone who wants to understand the parable should have to transform himself or herself first. But you could introduce the parable to the class as a puzzle or series of puzzles to solve. First read it aloud to them, perhaps, inviting any questions or comments straight afterwards and taking time to discuss these. Then get them to form groups, tasked to analyse the parable, of which they should have printed copies (a good idea is to print in the centre of an A3 sheet, leaving plenty of room to annotate around). Stress that their analysis should involve repeated reading of the parable and discussion of different possible answers to questions displayed on the IWB, including:

• Why has the crowd gathered? What do they want? How do they feel? How would you describe the atmosphere? Are they satisfied at the end?
• Imagine yourself in the farmer’s role. What does he learn from the experience of sowing the seeds in the different conditions?
• Imagine yourself in the roles of those ‘outside’ (the crowd on the shore) and then ‘inside’ (the disciples): how does each understand the parable? What is the difference?
• What about Jesus’s perspective? What is he trying to communicate? Why does he reveal this to those ‘inside’, leaving those ‘outside’ to struggle with the parable?
• What is strange or puzzling about the story as a whole (situation and parable)?

They might not have time to deal meaningfully with all of this! One option is to divide the class into five groups, give one of the above questions or question sets to each group, and let each in turn present their views in a plenary after say 20 minutes of discussion and analysis time. Another is to let each group choose one or two questions on which to focus their analysis.

The enquiry-led approach doesn’t rule out the use of teacher explanation at a different stage, or in response to pupils’ questions. An account of the background and different interpretations of the Parable of the Sower can be found at https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/passages/main-articles/parable-of-the-sower . In the end, it stresses how the fertility of the soil should be compared to the receptivity of those who respond to Jesus’s message.

[i] We have reported this at Using the Bible – what secondary teachers can learn from primary teachers