Introducing Culham St Gabriel’s Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB) course

“What would it feel like if someone restricted how I chose to celebrate my favourite religious festival?”

“How has the faith and belief make-up of my local area changed over time? Why?”

“Can I work to make my school community more welcoming to people who have a different faith or belief to me? What about the area where I live?”

These are the kinds of questions which children have come up with and explored as part of our Primary Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB) Project which now includes an e-Learning course.

Over the last three years, we have been working with RE teachers to think about how learning about FoRB can enrich the teaching of RE.

Speaking as a non-teacher, it was fascinating working with the talented teachers, who we supported to test out approaches in their classrooms to help their children engage with this unfamiliar topic. As part of that process, we produced two reports which you can read here and here and which have formed the basis of the new e-Learning course.

Importantly, teachers found that with some support and using the tools which we produced, that they could develop what we call a ‘FoRB lens’. This lens could then be applied to existing units of work. In other words, it was not necessary to develop whole new units and lesson plans. Rather, using the learning outcomes documents which we developed, they could generate stimulus questions for their children to generate classroom discussion and learning.

We have now turned the learning from those reports into an free, e-Learning course which you can find here. The course provides an introduction to FoRB, and how one might teach this concept in lessons for primary age pupils. Through the course, you learners consider what is meant by FoRB, some principles and recommendations for teaching FoRB in RE and what this might look like in the classroom using the experiences of other primary teachers. Learners will also look at learning outcomes for pupils.
Fundamentally, using a ‘FoRB Lens’ is not about adding lots of new content but instead taking opportunities to look at existing content in RE through a different lens.

We really hope that you enjoy using this course and that you let us know how you get on! It would be fantastic to hear about how you embed the lessons and approaches in your teaching and would love to see the kinds of approaches which you come up with!