Creating New Resources
02 April, 2024, Hayley Curtis
In this blog, Hayley discusses how her school approaches facilitating challenging current affairs conversations in the RE classroom.
As a department, we are passionate about providing our students with opportunities for informed and honest dialogue about religion, ethics and life. Recently our Year 10 students specifically requested, through a Form Captain meeting with the Head, information about the current Israel- Gaza conflict. They wanted to better understand the history and the terminology they were being exposed to through the media. We felt this request for information should be honoured by teachers, and set about the uncertain and time-consuming task of designing a new resource.
We felt it was extremely important to give an opportunity for students to have this knowledge as well as tackling issues such as misinformation. This current crisis is very present in our students’ concerns, but we respond to other global or sensitive issues in the same way as educators; we agree that students must have the information they need to make sense of the world. In previous years we have developed lessons about the Holocaust for a KS3 scheme of work. Rather than avoiding painful, emotionally-charged topics, we have learnt that staff and students are best supported when they have well-designed, accurate information, as well as different ways of seeing the information, to explore, discuss and come to a conclusion of their own.
Therefore, we created a resource which both delivered information as well as allowed students (and staff) to view the information from different perspectives. The resource begins with an exploration of the meaning of the word ‘conflict’ and moves to the historical roots of conflict between Israel and Palestine, the emergence of Hamas and the role this group plays in the situation. We termed this process ‘looking at’; seeing historical information from different points of view. This is such a valuable process in itself for teenagers as they learn to make sense of the world, whatever the topic. Then we encouraged students to ‘look beyond’ the current conflict and potential resolution through words. The words used came from two sources; interviews with a Rabbi and Imam.
We took very seriously the need to avoid a sense that anyone was ‘taking sides’, or taking a biased stance, in the terminology of the recent DfE guidance1. We are aware of powerful currents of pain, shock and fear in our students’ communities. After consulting with senior management, we took the decision to explore this resource in the classroom as part of the fortnightly Core Ethics programme for KS4. Teaching staff were briefed and given the options to take part or all of the lesson to deliver. After the lessons we completed a debrief and feedback session with staff.
We found that each lesson varied due to the shape of the questions students asked and the ensuing discussion. Generally, students were very keen to understand the history of Israel and Palestine especially as they had previously studied the region in a KS3 unit on Jesus and early Christianity. Teachers found that this process of simply understanding the current crisis led to discussion reflecting students’ concerns about others’ perceptions. It was interesting to see that this was as much of a issue to students as a desire to gain knowledge. Teachers also found that groups spent time discussing ideas around conflict resolution.
We plan to introduce the resource to Year 9 with a wider set of voices considered as part of the ‘looking beyond’ section. We have shared this resource with our local RE network. A member of staff will be running a workshop for teachers in the wider network before they bring the resource to their students. This model has shown us that schools can provide a space for students to make sense of some of the planet’s most urgent conflicts, where the suffering seems incomprehensible, when staff work together, take responsibility for identifying accurate information, and are also able to explore the information from different perspectives. It is surely our job as teachers to help our young people make sense of the world.