Ways of Knowing: Trying out Islam as a Worldview

I have been listening with interest to conversations about the shift to Worldviews. I have long wondered how far my teaching reinforces for my mostly white, largely atheist students, the impression that all followers of a religion think and do the same thing. And moreover that religious beliefs and actions exist in a place distant to my students’ lives and concerns. Worldviews thinking seemed to respond to my concern. I wanted to move away from my comfortable World Religions focus on the holy building, the holy book, the core beliefs, but how?

I have been proactive in using and emphasising a multidisciplinary approach. I have explicitly tried to achieve a balance of theology, philosophy & social sciences in my planning – using lots of the RE: Online, NATRE & RE Today CPD and resources (I’m starting to feel like Lat Blaylock’s stalker!). Awareness of these different lenses has allowed me to clarify my aims when engaged in the constant and almost overwhelming process of selection, omission and deciding, from everything that could/should/ would be great to cover, what will actually make it into each precious little lesson.  I wanted to introduce more reality, more diversity, more challenge and a nuanced understanding at KS3 but with only a 50- minute lesson a week and largely religiously illiterate (and many uninterested) young people I wasn’t sure where to start.

Into this overloaded head space came Islam as a Worldview. What caught my eye was not just the level of research and detail, but the emphasis on the personal, lived experience of different Muslims across history. This was just what I needed. I chose the Malala Yousafzai resources for Year 8 who were already looking at Islam. I had looked at Malala for a previous ‘inspirational religious people’ unit but it had felt trite and superficial. The Islam as a Worldview on the other hand really resonated with what I was looking for. It was my first attempt in exploring wider political and geographical contexts in lessons and I was keen to try!

We began with the context & background to Pashtun life- I never knew Malala’s father was such a great example. Then we moved to fundamentalism and why the Taliban gained support.  Many students commented that it challenged their ideas to consider that terrorists weren’t necessarily ‘all bad’.  My favourite lesson was looking at what Islam taught about education and the events leading up to Malala’s shooting as a ‘what would you do?’ style activity – most of us were considerably less courageous than Malala!  We rounded off with a reflection, debrief and a ‘what Malala did next’ lesson.  I really enjoyed teaching the whole unit and felt it had been a much more thorough and engaging way to cover the tricky question of religion and terrorism. The student’s feedback was overwhelmingly positive and there were many interesting questions and conversations in the classroom.

It is exciting to trial a multidisciplinary Worldviews approach. It has given me an insight into the value of real-life contextualised ‘stories’ and a way to tackle tricky, messy questions like who is a ‘real’ believer. This process illustrated to me particularly the importance of not just telling students there is religious diversity, but of really showing them the massively wide spectrum of belief and thinking (of which religion is just one strand) that can see Malala and the Taliban striving to be ‘good Muslims’ in such different ways.

Samantha Keddie has been a Secondary teacher of RE for 15 years, firstly in South London and now East Sussex.