Teacher Fellowship Programme

When the RE:Connect Teacher Fellowship Programme was promoted on Twitter it immediately caught my eye. Combining two of my great passions – RE and the climate emergency – I felt drawn towards the project, which aims to support teachers in connecting RE teaching to the environmental crisis.

I have been teaching RE for 19 years. While I have kept up with new ideas and research, I was not actively looking to embark on a new project. However this project offered me an opportunity to gain high quality CPD in an area I am deeply passionate about. I applied and was accepted onto the programme.

From October 2021 to June 2022 the Fellowship group met for 7 online evening sessions and 2- day gatherings, including a final celebration day. I was exposed to people and ideas that inspired and challenged me; including a climate scientist, religious environmental activists, researchers and experts in RE pedagogy and practitioners who are at the forefront of climate education in RE. Each valuable session opened up new ways of thinking about scholarship, lived experience and my own teaching practice.

I have taught a unit on ‘Creation Stories and the Natural World’ for some years. Through the programme I came to realise that this unit did not reflect the lived experience of the religious activists I met, nor allowed students to engage personally or deeply with the reality of climate justice. This inspired a re-design of the unit to put my new learning into practice, built around the idea of story.

Now my students engage with images, graphs, maps and the stories of real people impacted by a changing climate. This is the ‘Earth’s story’. We explore both Judeo-Christian creation accounts and the Big Bang, the ‘stories of origin’, through scriptural reasoning, introduced by Professor Nick Adams. The students engage with the texts and consider how they could influence religious and non-religious attitudes towards climate justice. We then explore real-life activists from faith and non-faith backgrounds. These are ‘inspiring stories’. Finally students tell their own ‘climate story’ using creative media to respond to and reflect on their learning.

The engagement from students was excellent. My learning from the Fellowship sessions invigorated my planning and allowed students to encounter real voices. I am looking forward greatly to sharing my findings with my department and beyond in the years ahead.

I would recommend participating in a Fellowship programme to any RE colleague, whatever stage of their teaching career. My investment in terms of time and effort is far outweighed by the impact on my own practice, as well as the shared benefits I bring to my team. I have not just ticked a CPD box, I have journeyed with a community of like-minded teachers, been exposed to new ideas and inspirations and been challenged to take my responsibilities to the environment seriously. Bill McKibben, a leading USA climate justice campaigner, says that if we are to save the planet, the whole world, every country, needs to ‘play the perfect game’ for the next decade (McKibben, 2020). I aim to ‘play the perfect game’ in encouraging the next generation of citizens to consider where they stand in relation to climate justice.

Information about the project

Bill McKibben (2020) Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play itself Out? Holt Paperbacks