Big Ideas for RE

The Big Ideas for Religious Education project was inspired by the work of US curriculum experts Wiggins and McTighe.

Barbara considered the arguments they made about the curriculum also applied to RE. In 2016 she convened a group to explore this, chosen for the breadth of their academic and professional expertise within RE. The group benefited from the chairing of Michael Reiss, a member of the ‘Big Ideas for Science’ group. The publication was received positively and attracted interest around the world.

The development group identified six ‘Big Ideas’ which focus on what is most important for pupils to grasp in RE. They seek to provide criteria for curriculum content selection, have in-built progression and knowledge transferable to life outside the classroom.

We were concerned that RE curricula no longer reflected society. RE continued to focus on ‘six world religions’ while over 50% of the adult population and a considerably higher proportion of young people no longer held any affiliation to organised religion. Moreover, research had established that these ‘Nones’ were particularly disenchanted with the very aspects of religion that occupied so much space in the RE curriculum, such as organised religion and liturgical worship.

So it was obvious that worldviews other than ‘religious’ ones should feature in the curriculum. Religions have a direct or indirect impact on the lives of most people in Britain, whether they are religious or not. Big Ideas is a curriculum which reflects the world young people experience, and seeks to provide the means for them to make sense of it.

The Big Ideas that emerged were:

• Continuity, Change and Diversity (within and across traditions, through time and places)
• Words and Beyond (expression/interpretation through texts and creative arts)
• A Good Life (being a good person, living a good life, ethics)
• Making Sense of Life’s Experiences (life experience, religious experience, ritual)
• Influence and Power (social, cultural, political influences and interactions)
• The Big Picture (overall account of life/universe/everything).

The Big Ideas project very much fits with a Religion and Worldviews approach. It was developed alongside the REC’s Commission on Religious Education (2016-18), which suggested renaming the subject ‘Religion and Worldviews’. Some of the Big Ideas team were involved the Commission, and in the REC’s subsequent ‘Religion and Worldviews’ Project. There has been synergy and mutual influence between the two projects.

Big Ideas now has a website https://bigideasforre.org aimed at both curriculum developers and individual teachers. The website offers guidance for developing Big Ideas curricula for pupils aged 3-18 and growing number of exemplar units of work, written by a team of teachers and other specialists ­(27 to date).

As well as developing new teaching material the Big Ideas project is currently trialling and evaluating units of work with a team of 13 teachers in a variety of classroom contexts. Four West Yorkshire Local Authorities (Leeds, Bradford, Kirklees and Calderdale) have drawn extensively upon the Big Ideas project in developing their latest Agreed Syllabus. In an exciting development, the team behind this, Pennine Learning, is also adapting this curriculum for the primary section of the Oak Academy RE curriculum.

We hope teachers will feel confident to check out the Big Ideas. We recommend starting here: https://bigideasforre.org/the-essential-guide-to-big-ideas- for-re/

Teachers might find it takes time to move from a curriculum driven by content to a curriculum focusing on the Big Ideas. At KS3, for example, where a teacher might have taught ‘rites of passage’, the Big Ideas approach suggests that students explore how ‘experience of religious rituals… helps people make a connection with God or gods and with each other, or with what is most important to them.’ This would be Big Idea 4, allowing pupils to consider how such experiences allow connection, meaning and wisdom. Here you can see a richer, deeper encounter with the complexity of our subject. It is well worth the effort.

Further reading

The full narratives for each age group are found here: https://bigideasforre.org/what-are-big-ideas-for-re/

Wiggins, G. McTighe, J. (2005) Understanding by Design (2nd ed). Alexandria VA. ASCD.

The original 2017 publication, along with later publications, can be found here: https://bigideasforre.org/Big-Ideas-Publications/