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Inciting students’ curiosity is the key to a good lesson. When motivated, we all learn better. Scientific research supports this intuition.

In my last blog I suggested that some bafflement about religions may not be a bad thing among students in order to prompt them to think further.

The importance of encouraging students to think for themselves has been extolled by educators throughout time.

Socrates is perhaps the best example of a pedagogue who presented students with conceptual puzzles to solve in order for students to be drawn into a more complex understanding of the issues surrounding any given topic. He believed this so strongly that he famously stated that he knew nothing himself and was only a ‘midwife’ to knowledge. The process of posing perplexing questions in order to promote learning has since become known as the Socratic method.

A typical Socratic way of teaching was to introduce a seeming impasse, or aporia, that would necessitate new ways of thinking. Students’ initial thoughts could then be challenged and refined further by counter-examples and sub-questions.

Religion presents unique problems for pedagogy in this respect. To what extent can students begin to answer questions about religions themselves? And to what extent is it appropriate to challenge students with religious questions?

Some educators have argued that children’s narratives should not be silenced by the truth-claims of religions (see my previous post on this). Yet at the same time, most religions rely on traditions, authorities and bodies of knowledge that can be certainly questioned, but when abandoned entirely, no longer remain of that religion. Because of this, pedagogies of religious education that are too child-centred have been criticised on the account that they are not religious education at all.

Yet it is possible to present some subject content in the form of conceptual puzzles. I use here the term ‘thought experiment’, taken from philosophy, to mean a hypothetical question that prompts thinking or rethinking on a given principle or idea.

Here are three thought experiments adapted for the classroom in the form of practical conundrums.

1. ‘A trip into space’ (the design argument)

Give two students at random a space academy’s mission assignment to go to another planet.

In another room place two boxes, one labelled ‘Planet A’ the other ‘Planet B’. In one box place a rock. In the other place an old mechanical stop clock, in working order with its mechanism exposed.

The two astronauts bring the items back to the classroom, describe them and show the class.

Give the class five minutes to draw as many conclusions about the planets as possible from the evidence. The only evidence available about planet A is that there was a rock on it. The only evidence available about planet B is that there was a clock on it.

After, consider and build upon the students’ answers. You may wish to prompt the following: the rock could be evidence that there was life because it could limestone made from dead sea creatures. Others say that the clock proves that the planet has been visited by humans or aliens.

After a discussion about what we could glean from our astronauts’ findings, then introduce the design argument in a condensed form.

Finally, discuss and have students write their own opinions and reasons of whether they think the argument is good or not.

2.  ‘The uncaused shuttlecock’ (the cosmological argument)

Before the lesson, arrange for a student or assistant to hide until the rest of the class has begun work. This person will from outside the room hit a shuttlecock into the room with the badminton racquet when you begin the lesson.

A student will without doubt shout out an assumption like ‘Someone hit the shuttlecock into the room’, to which you can challenge – ‘how do you know that?’ Throw the shuttlecock out again and have it mysteriously fly in again. Ask ‘Couldn’t it have happened for no reason?’ Repeat as much as necessary.

After eliciting the idea that we usually expect something to happen for a reason, give another example with a row of dominoes. The last domino falls as a result of the chain reaction set off by the first domino being pushed. Ask the next key question, if it is the case that everything is caused by something, what started everything off in the first place? This is the question which St Thomas Aquinas asked, is there not an ‘unmoved mover’ who started the whole thing rolling? At this point, introduce a version of the cosmological argument.

3.  ‘Do you have a present for me?’ (Pascal’s wager)

Display the following information with your name:

What’s the sensible choice?

I do not know if [insert name here] will give me a present, but if I write ‘[x] has a present for me’, s/he may give me one. If I write, ‘[x] does not have a present’, s/he won’t give me anything. 

Ensure students know to complete the sentence, but give as little away as possible. Have a box on your desk with a lid closed shut. In it have a bar of chocolate or some other small prize. You may like to have more around the room in secret places and a couple of dummy locations. Pick students to read out their sentences. If they have not written a complete sentence, disqualify them. If they have written that you do not have a present for them, do not invite them to look into the box. If they have, invite them to look in the box. It is good to run the experiment a few times to make sure there are students who say you have a present for them who are both winners and losers.

The main question for discussion is therefore, what is the sensible choice? Elicit the rational answer that you lose nothing if you say there is something there and there is not, but you lose everything if you say there is not and there is.

After discussing this, ask the question: ‘what has this got to do with RE?’ Then introduce the use of a similar argument by Pascal for belief in the existence of God.

Concluding thoughts

Presenting students with a choice or dilemma by presenting a practical conundrum to solve helps keep religious education interesting, open and inclusive. The dilemmas need not force students into taking up a particular philosophical position.

Once the conundrum has been introduced and understood, it is important to develop the lesson with factual information and criticisms of those arguments in order to take their learning beyond their own suppositions and take their learning to higher levels.

It is also important to remember that Christianity – the religion that the above thought experiments relate to – has traditionally claimed that religious belief is a matter of both faith and reason (a principle shared by thinkers in other religious traditions too). Hence, according to mainstream Christian theology, no thought experiment is sufficient alone to make sense of its doctrine.

Philip Wood’s latest blog has thrown down a gauntlet to the RE community. What is the best way of promoting religious literacy? Should we abolish RE and teach about religion across the curriculum?

He argues: “RE is not the best way to achieve these goals (securing religious literacy) because it endorses a division between religion and other forms of culture and invites students to believe that religion should not be subjected to the same kinds of analysis as other traditions”.

http://reonline.org.uk/blog/teaching-about-religion-without-religious-education

It’s a serious challenge. Let’s park the conclusion. It will win no favours with RE teachers whose careers are on the line! But are there lessons to consider from the argument?

Wood questions the credibility of RE as an intellectual discipline. Is this the reason we struggle to define the aims and purposes of RE? His argument seems to rest on two key points:

1. RE struggles to attain the level of rigorous critical enquiry demanded of other subjects.

In particular, he suggests that the separation of RE from the wider curriculum is a way of privileging religion. He highlights, for example, the tendency to let ‘orthodox’ interpretations of any religion take precedence over ‘heterodox’ forms of the faith.

But more powerfully he argues that RE shies away from allowing students to properly draw their own conclusions from evidence. His meaning here is important. Clearly much RE does involve critical enquiry – but nevertheless there is an underlying assumption that presumes ‘the primacy of religion over any other forms of culture’. Although he doesn’t say it explicitly Wood seems to be arguing that, within our secular education system, religion should only be investigated as as a ‘form of cultural production’ subjecting religion to the same kind of critical investigation applied to all other forms of culture. In effect Wood seems to challenge the idea that any attempt to use theology as a discipline within RE will undermine the legitimacy of the subject. Theology can be examined as a form of ‘cultural production’ but it cannot be deployed as a discipline in its own right.

Wood’s argument here is timely. The Understanding Christianity project is a perfect example of the problem. Superficially it appears to be about enquiry but because it strips out study of any sociological, psychological, historical and philosophical perspectives it falls into the trap of privileging religion over other forms of cultural production.

2. RE relies on a faulty assumption that all value the study of religious pluralism. Many don’t!

He quotes Daniel Moulin: ‘no mainstream religion teaches that we should treat members of other religions with nothing other than total respect’. Wood points out that this is wrong. There are many who wish to exercise exclusivism, denying the truth or validity of other religions. They believe religious education should ‘transmit pure belief to the next generation without criticism or deviation’. Some are fearful that if you ‘give multiple messages of who God is to children then this will affect their religious and moral health’. Learning about other beliefs is feared as a ‘way of diluting the pure heritage that must be transmitted unpolluted to the next generation’. Others recognise that ‘children acquire an emotional connection to a religious community long before they can understand the theological content’ with the implication that impartial RE runs the risk of damaging that emotional attachment. Elements of this thinking underpin the ambiguous approach to RE in much of the faith school sector.

And, of course, many researchers have confirmed the finding that religious pluralism undermines religious commitment: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/religious-diversity-may-be-making-america-less-religious/

Wood rightly challenges the ‘taken for granted’ view amongst the RE community that learning about religious diversity is a ‘good thing’ which will enrich pupils’ lives.

These are serious challenges. The argument seems to be that in its pursuit of the fragile liberal goal of encouraging dialogue, respect for diversity and mutual understanding, RE has fallen into a trap. On the one hand it ignores the fact that some parents and faith communities don’t want a pluralist approach to RE (including some within the faith school world). On the other hand, the attempt by RE to promote respect undermines the intellectual credibility of the subject by separating it from the kind of critical analysis applied to other forms of cultural production.

Wood’s solution – scrap RE and redistribute the study of religion across the curriculum – is undermined by his own rather feeble examples of teaching Constantine or Arab conquests in history and dealing with arranged marriage in sociology. There is still a place for the rigorous study of religion and belief within a secular curriculum – but we need to heed his warnings and ensure the RE curriculum does fully ‘reflect the complex, lived reality of religion and belief’.

If we had just one day to explore religion with students, where would we begin?

What could be a good metaphor or symbol of religions in today’s world to communicate the essentials?

With only limited time and resources in schools to introduce students to the whole panorama of the world’s religions, and the concept of ‘religion’ more generally (if there is one), with what skills and knowledge should we equip students?

Every religious educator needs to consider such questions, for faced with the immensity of religions and their claims, any religious educator knows they pale into insignificance. Regardless, decisions must be made about where we should start, and what will impact on students’ understanding and perceptions.

Religion is both exotic and all around us, unnoticed. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, culture is made of many implicit religious practices and artefacts. Marshall McLuhan made the famous comment that the fish does not know it is in water. Religion can relate to culture like this. When you order a cappuccino you say so because the colour of the coffee resembles the hood of a Franciscan monk (Capuchin). And when you say goodbye, you contract ‘God-be-with-you’ (for example).

Perhaps one way to explore the more explicit side of religions is to go to their heart more directly. But where and what would that heart be?

You could have a variety of answers to this, and all of them would rest in some way on theology. Arguably this is the most difficult question of all for religious educators in plural contexts – on what theology should the religious educator base their endeavours?

If you were looking for the physical centre of today’s most populous religions, perhaps the city of Jerusalem is one location that would be reasonable to choose. Here are the ruins of the Temple, the holiest site in Judaism; the places of Jesus Christ’s Trial, Passion, Death and Resurrection; and the third holiest site in Islam, the Al Aqsa Mosque.

Arriving in Jerusalem for the first time is challenging. It is like being at the meeting-point of three gigantic global rivers: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In the old city, people of all these faiths can be seen rubbing shoulders, visibly displaying their religion.

Jerusalem is perhaps a good place to begin exploring the three main Abrahamic religions – either remotely, or in person. It has featured in religious education text books and schemes of work for years. But if we took Jerusalem as a metaphor or symbolic key to religion, what could it mean? Or what, more importantly, would students make of studying it? You will also see security, barbed wire, walls, police and visible weapons in the city. Here I invoke John Dewey’s dictum that despite our educational aims, we can never predict what students will really learn from any activity.

Entering the Holy Sepulchre, the remnants of Constantine’s Basilica and the crusader church, one is struck by Christianity as a religion based on the historic claim of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ – what is referred to sometimes as the ‘scandal of particularity’ – that Salvation for all people took place at one point in time through one event.

But the weight of this redemptive power is contrasted humbly with the reverent chaos of what appears to be a construction site, and streams of tourists who snap away with their cameras. With Golgotha to your right as you enter, the slab where Jesus’ body is believed to have been anointed in front of you, and the presence of Christians of seven different rites (Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Egyptian Copts, Syrians and Ethiopians), one does not know exactly how or where to place one’s respect. There is no other church like it. You can be ushered into the Aedicule and file past a piece of stone that originally sealed the tomb, and momentarily crouch in the Sepulchre – the site of the Resurrection.

After visiting the Holy Sepulchre, many visitors to Jerusalem then move onto the Western Wall, which is located in a precinct under the Temple Mount. From here the distinctive golden roof of the Dome of the Rock Mosque can be seen glistening above the city.

As the site of the Holy of Holies, the Dwelling Place of God, is not known exactly, rabbinic authority does not permit observant Jews to walk on the Temple Mount. The Western Wall is thus the closest place to the site of the Temple Jews can pray.

By coincidence, the first and second sackings of the Temple occurred on the same date – the 9^th of Av – spaced by over six hundred years. These events are lamented on the Holy Day of Tisha B’av (which includes among other privations a 25-hour fast). Arriving on the Sabbath before this festival, for the first time in my life, I saw the distinctive shtreimel bear-skin hats worn by some Hasidic Jews.

In the space of an hour, piled on top of each other, these experiences were a little overwhelming. It may be an understatement to say Jerusalem offers an experience of religions a little different from what the UK-visitor may be usually accustomed.

As a religious educator, I tend to think I know, and I am familiar with religions. But I could not help being baffled by what I saw. What does it mean to have such divergence, culturally and religiously, at the same time as such geographical convergence?

It is tempting to try and explain religions. But the experience of the transcendental, or the mystery of God, perhaps remains stubbornly incommunicable and ineffable. Then there is the particularity of the religions, their contradictory claims, and the diverse customs and practices of their believers – which also go beyond our imaginations. Furthermore, in Jerusalem there is the current political situation and the city’s violent history. Why should reality be as it is?

Some bafflement is perhaps to be expected when encountering religions. And in answer to those difficult questions posed at the beginning of the blog, in a sense, some bafflement is no bad thing for students to encounter either. For there is always more to learn, and inquisitiveness can be prompted by ignorance, confusion and doubt. Furthermore, on a deeper level, a mystery that can be readily explained does not have the power of mystery at all.

We should do without Religious Education. I do not mean to argue that religion is false and deserves no place in society, or that students do not need religious literacy to understand their own society or other societies. Merely that ‘RE’ is not the best way to achieve these goals because it endorses a division between religion and other forms of culture and invites students to believe that religion should not be subjected to the same kinds of analysis as other traditions.

A common theme of this site has been the relationship between RE and the Christian religious instruction embodied in the 1944 Education Act and its predecessors. Nicky Morgan’s statement in February clearly invoked the wishes of ‘parents and the local community’ to allow for the prioritisation of religion over ‘non-religious world views’. This sentiment lies in tension with the legal duty of the state to provide equal respect to ‘different religious convictions and non-religious beliefs’ and to the educationalists’ mantra that RE ‘reflect the complex lived reality of religion and belief’. What are schools to do where parents and students do not wish to accord equal respect to different worldviews, or expect that ‘orthodox’ tradition should take priority over ‘heterodox’ ideas or practice?

Phenomenological relativism seems to offer a solution to this impasse that will avoid giving offence. But the phenomenological approach to RE can be in danger of simply describing different behaviours that are seen as religious. The need to cover a breadth of content (and give space to different ‘world religions’) can mean that teachers sacrifice the key issue of how social actors construct their religious legitimacy in different contexts.

There is a danger that the inclusive philosophy of RE curricula simply lifts inclusive meanings from different religious traditions in order to promote cohesion and mutual sympathy. But in so doing we may not do justice to the fact that many religious traditions are exclusive. Indeed, Jan Assmann, the historian of memory, has observed that Abrahamic monotheisms have been so successful precisely because they have possessed mechanisms to exclude outsiders and their ideas and to preserve scriptures in writing and ritual. In order to understand why these traditions are important, we need to acknowledge that they carry inside them rules to exclude members of other races or beliefs from their community, and that this has historically played a role in their success.

A slightly fuzzy approach to the issue of religious difference is obviously attractive in a multicultural environment like much of modern Britain. Multicultural theorists like Bhikhu Parekh, created a peer by the Blair government, have argued that minorities have legitimate claims to preserve their cultures over multiple generations and that these must be sustained by governments without the pressure of assimilation. In this model, different religious traditions can remain discrete from one another and unassimilated, but students from one tradition will have the opportunity to observe how different traditions endorse similar values.

In a contribution to this site, Daniel Moulin argues that when cultural difference is examined in the curriculum, students engage with openness and respect. For Moulin, this acts as a challenge to the discourse of the clash of civilizations. He gives the example of fashionable young professionals dancing to a band that draws its members from many different ethnicities to illustrate the possibilities of a living multiculturalism, where distinct traditions can all be drawn upon and enjoyed.

The problem here is that Moulin assumes that ‘no mainstream religion teaches that we should treat members of other religions with nothing other than total respect’. Unfortunately, this is wrong. A good example is the Deobandi Muslim institutions studied over the past decade by Philip Lewis, but one could find parallel examples in other religious traditions too. Lewis notes the strong condemnation of sharing the customs of the kufar (the infidels) in Deobandi thought. He notes the criticism of Muslims who give or receive cards on Christmas or Valentine’s day and the advice given by some imams that Muslims should not befriend or socialize with non-Muslims. He argues that this strong presentation of inter-confessional boundaries is linked to a Manichaean view of history, where Muslims have always been persecuted by the powers of the day and have a duty to transmit pure belief to the next generation, without criticism or deviation.

Lewis’ findings are in harmony with another study conducted by Jonathan Scourfield in Cardiff. Scourfield’s team found that parents exercised close control of their children’s social lives (much closer than those of their non-Muslim peers), to the extent that they rarely met non-Muslims outside school (even in a diverse city like Cardiff). In interviews with parents and children, family values and moral behavior were identified very closely with Islamic values, to the extent that non-Muslims were seen as lacking any moral compass. Interviews with children also revealed a clear sense of the dangers of alcohol and sexuality, which divided them as Muslims from the world around them. One eight year old even told them that [if you marry a Christian] ‘Allah will punish you and you’ll go to hellfire and you burn.’

The interpretations of religious scholars (in the first study) and the behavior of parents (in the second) endorse a vision of the world that is starkly divided according to religious lines and where this affects the social connections of children and adults. Similar results emerge from a series of other ethnographies, where multicultural society is seen as highly threatening for the ability of conservative Sunni Muslims to reproduce social and religious norms from generation to generation. A key fear is that girls will marry non-Muslims, which prompts threats of damnation in the next life and ostracism in this.

While the revelers in Moulin’s example are at ease with the co-existence of different cultural traditions, in the long-term, co-existence leads to the blending of cultures. Likewise, friendship that crosses cultural and religious boundaries may lead to marriage. This is extremely problematic for exclusive traditions that seek to bring up children without confusing outside influences.

One would like to imagine that it would possible for people to learn about other religious and cultural traditions that were once foreign to them and use them to enrich their own lives. But there are cases where learning about other traditions is feared to be a way of diluting a pure heritage that must be transmitted unpolluted to the next generation. For instance, Shiraz Thobani’s study of Islam in the British RE curriculum observes the resistance to multicultural teaching by Muslim parents in the 1980s and 90s. As one parent put it: ‘If you give multiple messages of who God is to children then this will affect their religious and moral health’.

The critical study of religion is important because it has the potential to allow students to see how religions have developed in their historical contexts and to see the diversity within religious traditions. It also offers students the potential to understand how religions have emerged out of one another and taken time to develop into the forms we encounter them now. A notion of how religious traditions are interlaced and the products of mutual exchange should be an antidote to Manichaean visions of the world. The idea of a religious tradition that is pure from alien influence is harder to maintain if students see that many religions are born from the mixture of older traditions in new contexts.

But there is a grave danger that religious groups will feel themselves to be targeted if RE becomes a tool for questioning religious sentiments in a way that seems critical. In particular, criticisms of specific religious traditions can seem to put students ‘on the spot’ to address public concerns without necessarily having the knowledge to do so. Children acquire an emotional connection to a religious community long before they can understand the theological content of doctrine or its evolution across time. And this is a reality that needs to be acknowledged.

In an environment where one person’s neutral criticality is another’s ad hominem attack, a solution to the problem is to teach religion outside RE. We can study the reign of Constantine in the fourth century; the Arab conquest of the Near East in the seventh century or the reign of Henry VIII as part of history. We can study the effects of segregation or exclusive marriage or the provision of charity within politics or sociology. And we can examine the rights and wrongs of violence or abortion within the context of ethics. If we presume, a priori, that there is a distinctively Christian or Muslim form of reasoning, or distinctively Muslim or Christian forms of government or city structure then we close down a number of possible readings of the evidence by presuming the primacy of religion over other forms of culture. It may be, for instance, that Muslims and Christians writing philosophy in an Aristotelian tradition have more in common with one another than with their co-religionists.

In sum then, I am arguing that we owe a duty to our students to draw their own conclusions from the evidence. Part of this obligation includes treating religion on an equal footing with other kinds of cultural tradition, as much as treating all religions equally. This also means that one role of education about religion is to investigate it as critically as we investigate any other form of cultural production. Where specific religious traditions are invoked to defend social practices, the purpose of an education system must be to empower young people to judge all practices by their results, rather than on their ‘authenticity’ within a specific belief system.

B. Parekh, ‘Cultural pluralism and the limits of diversity’, Alternatives 20 (1995), 431-57.

P. Lewis, ‘New Social Roles and Changing Patterns of Authority Amongst British ˋUlamâ’, Archives des sciences sociales des religions 49 (2004), 169-87

J. Scourfield et al., Muslim Childhood: Religious Nurture in a European Context (Oxford, 2013)

S. Thobani, Islam in the School Curriculum. Symbolic Pedagogy and Cultural Claims (London, 2010)

F. Panjwani, ‘Educational reform’, Critical Muslim 15 (July 2015)

P. Barnes, ‘Misrepresentation of religion in modern British (religious) education’, British Jnl of Educational Studies 54 (2006), 395-411

Using Online Talk as an Additional Learning Space for RE.

As an RE teacher I have often been frustrated by the lack of impact that IT has had in the classroom. My previous job working in IT had left me fairly technically literate and yet I struggled to find the time to implement technology into my lessons in a way that positively impacted on the students learning in RE. Yes, I had an interactive whiteboard in some of the rooms I taught in and I had occasional access to computer labs, but mostly I used PowerPoint presentations and clips from online sources. That was the mainstay of my use of IT. Over the years I experimented with CD ROMs like Kartouche and ‘jazzed’ up my presentations but mostly I failed to make use of IT in a way that I would conclude significantly affected learning. Now I know there are some remarkable teachers who have invested the time and energy into applying IT in much more inventive ways but I am sad to say that was not how I did it. I had other worries and my main one was lack of time in lessons. Working in a comprehensive school and trying to deliver high quality RE in one hour a week for full course GCSE, and with even less for KS3, left me concerned that students were just not getting enough time to really develop their thinking. My lessons were fast paced, rattling through the content, packing in lots of activities and challenges but I realised that there was not much time for students to actually ponder the issues, to share their ideas with others and engage in meaningful dialogue to develop and refine those initial thoughts into a more informed and intelligent response.

Completing a Masters in RE at Kings’ College London provided me with some time to sit back and consider my approach to teaching RE. Sessions delivered by Andy Wright convinced me that I needed to find a way to allow students to discuss more in order to learn more. I was inspired to implement Critical Religious Education (CRE), taking seriously the need to provide classroom experiences in which students could explore bigger questions, engage with a variety of responses to them and arrive at their own critical and rational judgements. The frustration was that this was a tall order in the time available.

This is where I started to consider the use of IT and specifically the use of online forms of ‘talk’. Being a user of social media myself I was well aware of how I used these forms of technology to chat to people and that it was an effective way to do so when pushed for time. When the school I worked in implemented a VLE that offered a chat facility this provided me with my first steps in trying out online talk and it is this that I now continue to research for a PhD at Canterbury Christ Church University.

My research question aims to explore the quality of the talk we can achieve online in RE and whether this might therefore be a useful tool for our subject. I’ve developed my understanding of ‘talk’ by looking at the work of Neil Mercer at Cambridge University who has coined the term ‘exploratory talk’ to describe the most productive form of discussion that we can encourage and promote in our classrooms. Mercer’s idea of exploratory talk relates to the types of conversations in which students take others’ ideas and build on them, where they think aloud and where they explain their reasoning on issues. To me, this seemed exactly the kind of talk I was looking for when implementing CRE in my lessons. Of course, this is not guaranteed in lessons and so my research combines looking at the talk within the classroom alongside the talk we can generate online.

I’ve completed a pilot study so far with a year 7 group. They were taught a unit on Philosophy using the CRE approach. Interwoven in the lessons were activities designed to improve their quality of talk face-to-face, alongside the introduction of online opportunities to talk both within and outside of lessons. To do this I made use of the Edmodo platform freely available on the web which looks like Facebook but is specifically designed for use in Education. The students were given login details and introduced to the software within lessons. This interface allowed them to effectively ‘talk’ to each other just as they might do in groups in class. They were given questions related to lesson content and asked to ‘discuss online’ freely. We made use of the software both in class – on PCS and using mobile phones – and as homework. I was able to monitor their chats throughout and to even interject where necessary – usually where they needed some more prompting although over time they began to do this for themselves. The screen shots show both an example of my own questions and some of the students’ responses.

It’s still early days for my own research project but so far there are definitely some positive signs emerging from the data I collected:

• Students definitely seem to take well to ‘talking’ online and quickly become used to the software
• There seems to be a link between quality of classroom talk and the quality of talk online
• Students, even in year 7 with only a few weeks of practice, begin to spontaneously engage in exploratory forms of discussion online

There are issues of course with using technology: in learning to use it yourself; teaching students to do so and the expected issues with access and speed from time to time when working in schools. The Edmodo software I used is available as a mobile app which certainly helped with these issues as I was able to walk around the classroom engaging with students that way and could also easily monitor and administrate discussions using my phone outside of school. But I was encouraged by the fact that by the end of the unit students were asking for the online option to be included in tasks and by the focus they showed when undertaking them.

One quite clear additional bonus to this form of discussion is that they are preserved – you can view them, respond to them and assess them as you would any other piece of written work. This certainly strikes me as a strength for this as a method of discussion. It offers a way of capturing the dialogue between students so that you, as the teacher, can see what has been going on within your groups much more so than you can when moving between groups in lessons. You are also able to interact with them – the students seemed to enjoy my occasional interruptions! And in looking over the responses and talking to the students about their use of the software they found that they thought that the quality of their responses was improved. They noted particularly that they are able to go back to re-read the question under discussion, to talk at the same time as others without waiting a ‘turn’, to edit answers and to think a bit more without feeling pressured to respond. They did also note that it could easily become quite tricky to keep up when other students were responding too quickly for them. So there are issues with it too. As there are for any method.

My plan is to review my current data in full and to build on my findings but gathering another set of data to look at. I am keen to continue to make use of CRE in the classroom and to consider ways to make this a more practical and accessible approach to RE that promotes some serious thinking amongst our students. My belief is that central to this is the need to promote quality talk amongst students even within the limited timeframes many of us experience and that making use of online discussion to do this might just be useful.

Please do feel free to email me if you have any comments of questions about the project at: katie.clemmey@canterbury.ac.uk or via twitter @katieclemmey

How should Christianity be defined? And how should this definition affect the way Christianity is represented and taught in schools?

These are perplexing questions, particularly in Britain with its long history of diverse Christian traditions that have gone on to have global impact (Methodism, The Salvation Army, The Society of Friends – for example).

Jeff Astley, writing in the early 1990s, noted this problem for religious educators in a seldom-read article ‘Will the real Christianity please stand up?’

Astley argues that being a Christian is a matter of degree. Not only are there many kinds of Christianity, but ‘being Christian’ is synonymous with holding particular Western values rather than any specific religious beliefs.

All over Europe, despite secularisation, and anti-Christian prejudice, Christianity is mixed with popular tradition, customs, events, culture, and even older pre-Christian festivities. Together, these aspects of European societies constitute what is sometimes called ‘implicit’ religion. We can think of this as the kind of Christianity that is not obvious, probably not articulated by Christian faith communities as ‘Christian’, but there all the same, in the background.

Interestingly, implicit Christianity may include activities that seem to be distinctly ‘non-Christian’ to some. A good example of this might be the famous San Fermin festival held in Pamplona every year. Popularised by Ernest Hemmingway’s book, Fiesta, the sun also rises, the nine-day festivities attract visitors all over the world. The small streets of the old city become crammed for a series of rituals: a mass-libation to start the event; bulls being run to the bull ring every morning (with human accompaniment); a bull fight (and deaths) in the evening; and drinking and partying continuously.

You may be excused for thinking there was not much ‘Christian’ element to this, but through the crowds on the 7^th July you can see the figure of San (Saint) Fermin – a 3rd century Bishop and martyr – held above heads of the onlookers in a procession which is both playful and reverent.

If we apply religious identity theory to this event, through the complex layers of history, custom and myth, we can interpret the San Fermin festival as a mass ritual that reinforces identity. (The heritage and identity represented by the festival also being packed-up and sold as tourism.)

As well as festivals, this summer has seen ugly and absurd violence in Europe. The world is completely different from the 1990s when Astley wrote his article. In today’s context a question such as ‘Will the real Christianity please stand up?’ becomes a little more serious – perhaps too provocative?

I use the example of the San Fermin festival to show how connected Europe is with its Christian heritage (despite all its complexity). There are plenty of examples of similar identity-consolidating rituals in the UK: ‘bonfire night’, Shrove Tuesday, Christmas Day, the poppy appeal etc. These events cement the sense of self, group ties and are aligned with political positions too.

My question is this: what happens to those of Christian heritage in an implicit Christian culture when they feel under threat? Acts of wanton violence within Europe have been deliberately committed in order to bring out a wider religious conflict, such as the murder of Father Jacques Hamel. With tragedies like this, those who may only be implicitly Christian may suddenly feel more inclined to identify as Christian than previously.

An example of this is the use of the St George flag in England before and after the Brexit vote as a symbol for anti-immigration and pro-Brexit positioning. The Christian cross is used as an identity marker, as a banner to reinforce perceptions of ‘Englishness’ against the non-English.

Much has been written about the failure of elites, or the triumph of the people, in the Brexit referendum. After the vote, populism reared its ugliest head in an increased spate of race-hate and xenophobic crimes, such as signs saying ‘Leave the EU, no more Polish vermin’ being posted.

In these troubled times, the questions ‘How should Christianity be defined? And how should this definition affect the way Christianity is represented and taught in schools?’ need to be asked afresh.

For long, education for social cohesion and harmony has taken the focus of educating about ‘other’ religions. That is, if students in the UK know about non-Christian religions, they will be less prejudiced about them and their adherents.

I don’t dispute the worth of learning about religions other than Christianity. My point is that, with a deep but implicit Christian culture across the UK and Europe, when challenged, those of Christian heritage may turn to their nominally Christian identity as a marker. That is not a problem as such, but how widely is Christianity understood when more religiously conceived? Have religious educators given a solid enough religious education for people to know what Christianity is when they may wish to turn to it? Is being ‘Christian’ to be conceived just a matter of nationality or race to be used in opposition to the ‘other’ (whoever they may be) in enmity?

I think there is an opportunity to help students explore the Christian faith, for its own worth, and also to think about the wisdom of its social teachings for the common good.

Deciding on what the ‘real’ Christianity is will always be debatable, but in an increasingly divided and polarised world, it is surely important to inform, guide and encourage students to think it through.

How to double your teaching time so that you have a chance of covering all of the new GCSE content in the limited time available

This case study presents the findings of a project undertaken as part of a Farmington Scholarship. An early version of the paper was presented at the Technology in Schools Symposium at the University of Oxford in April 2016. It is based on research undertaken at Chesterton Community College, an 11-16 comprehensive school in Cambridge. All learners have their own iPad and these are connected to the school’s wifi network. All students also have wifi access at home: where families do not have an existing wifi network, the school has assisted them in paying for this service and setting it up.

There is no denying that the new GCSE RS courses are content-heavy. In the AQA A specification that we have chosen to follow, students will complete in-depth studies of two religions and also consider a range of ethical and moral issues and religious responses to them. Lesson time is limited – just 100 minutes a fortnight in a single block in our school – and so teachers need to make the most of the homework time that is available to them. One way of maximising the effectiveness of classroom time is to ‘flip’ the learning process.

Flipped learning is a model in which the typical lesson and homework elements of learning are reversed. Students undertake knowledge-building activities at home before the class; lesson time is then devoted to the higher-order skill of applying this knowledge and using it to construct new understanding, often working in small teams. The classroom-based time is repurposed: the teacher becomes a ‘guide on the side’ rather than a ‘sage on the stage’ and this allows for more effective differentiation and personalisation of learning.

The knowledge-building homework tasks might involve reading a book excerpt or an article, listening to a podcast or watching a video. This phase of learning can also be personalised by providing a range of source materials for students to choose from.

A small group of humanities teachers at Chesterton Community College have been experimenting with flipped learning for the last 2 years. The main concern raised by staff involved in this pilot project was that some students were not completing home learning assignments prior to lessons. This meant that there were large gaps in their knowledge as there was a deliberate choice to make no attempt to teach key ideas and information in a traditional way in lessons. Some students were arriving at lessons without having done any of the preparatory work, and this meant that the higher-level classroom tasks were not accessible to them as they lacked the basic underpinning knowledge.

After surveying groups of Year 9, 10 and 11 students about their initial experiences of flipped learning, we decided that we needed to introduce a knowledge-check prior to the lesson. Some students were becoming frustrated by the fact that their peers were not learning the flipped material before the lesson and that this was slowing down their progress, particularly when they were being asked to work in groups during lesson time. It was clear that this knowledge-check needed to be automated, as it would otherwise take too much teacher time to administrate. We therefore decided to introduce a multiple-choice quiz as the knowledge check. It was agreed that students would have to complete this at least 3 days before the lesson so that the teacher had time to access the results and ensure that anyone who had not completed the task was placed in homework detention prior to the lesson. This ensured that they had done the pre-learning before arriving in class as they were set the task to complete during their detention.

A wide number of online quiz generators are available for teacher use. These include Quizalize, Quizizz and Google Forms. We asked a small group of students to use quizzes on each of these platforms and to feedback on their preferences. We eventually chose to work with Quizizz for four main reasons:

• students reported that they liked the gamification element of the software – many said that they liked the memes that appear after every question; others said they found the accompanying music motivating; others said that they liked the competitive element where they could see where they ranked within the class in terms of speed and accuracy of their answers;
• Quizizz shows students a summary of their answers once they have finished the quiz, allowing them to review any errors that they have made;
• Quizizz provided a very simple and easy option for staff to download Excel spreadsheets of class data – this allowed them to analyse individual and whole class performance in detail;
• it is free to use.

Figure 1: A screenshot from Quizizz showing class performance on each multiple-choice question

Staff working on the project then decided to create their own videos to meet the requirements of the new specifications. They created a number of PowerPoint presentations, each with a script. These were then recorded, using QuickTime screen capture software on a MacBook, and saved as .mp4 files to be used as the resource for the flipped learning element of the lesson. The files, usually between 7-15 minutes in duration, were then shared with students via the edmodo platform (as this is the VLE that is used at Chesterton). Students accessed the videos via their iPads and then completed the multiple-choice Quizizz to test their recall of key factual information. Each quiz question presented four answers for students to choose from; one of these was always ‘I don’t know’ and students were strongly encouraged to use this option rather than guessing as it would give their teachers a much clearer picture of their level of understanding.

The completion rate for pre-learning tasks increased significantly as a result of including the knowledge-check quiz as part of the homework assignment. The results of the quiz allowed teachers to direct students into two groups for the start of the lesson

• a guided group – those who needed additional teaching to build up knowledge before they attempted higher order tasks;
• an independent group – those who had mastered the core knowledge and were ready to attempt the higher order tasks and shape their own learning during the lesson, within a framework carefully designed by the teacher.

During a guided learning session, the teacher works directly with a small group of students with similar needs. In traditional non-flipped classrooms this happens once the main shared teaching has take place. In the flipped model where a pre-test has been done, this can happen earlier in the lesson, thereby saving time. In the flipped context, the emphasis is on supporting students in mastering the knowledge from the home learning task and then applying it. The teacher can identify likely misconceptions in advance of the session by using the pre-test quiz data. The guided learning session is specifically targeted.

Figure 2: A screenshot from Quizizz showing individual student performance on each multiple-choice question.

Whilst the small guided learning group is working closely with the teacher, the remainder of the class (i.e. those who have mastered the core knowledge) work independently on higher-order tasks. At Chesterton, we have relied heavily on the availability of iPads to support this phase of the lesson. A range of resources are uploaded in advance to the class edmodo group so that students have access to them quickly and easily and can choose to work with resources that suit their own learning style. These could be videos, textbook excerpts, podcasts, newspaper articles, etc. Where possible, students are given a range of choices about how they might present their work. In GCSE RS lessons that address Christian responses to ethical issues, students are encouraged to become experts in a denomination of their choice. Wherever possible, we provide resources from Anglican, Catholic and Quaker viewpoints. Anecdotal evidence from lessons suggests that students are significantly more engaged with their learning when they are able to make choices about the focus of their study. Our intention is that by allowing students to shape their own learning in this way we will be able to realise the following objectives:

• everyone challenged so that they have to grapple appropriately with the subject;
• everyone curious so that they want to know more;
• everyone motivated so that they seek to close the gaps in their understanding;
• everyone able to access resources so that learning is not confined to lesson time;
• everyone reaching their potential in GCSE RS.

A Year 10 student voice panel was interviewed after they had experienced one cycle of the flipped learning approach. All members of the group were able to identify a range of advantages of the flipped pedagogy and felt that they had experienced these in their home learning and classroom based sessions. A number of students stated that they completed the homework tasks, including the multiple choice quizzes, as soon as they were set – i.e. 10 days before it was due in – and that they then struggled to remember the key ideas during the lesson as they hadn’t taken any notes. This was easily addressed by providing the text of the video script as an iBook that students could download when completing the initial task. They were then able to produce flashcards from this material to create a revision resource. Several students suggested that the lesson should start with a quiz to test recall of knowledge and they were keen to use Kahoot! for this task. This software is free and produces useful data about the responses that students have selected. It is also very popular among students. This suggestion was incorporated in the lesson design, as shown on the accompanying lesson flowchart (designed using the free LucidPress software).

Download this image as a high quality pdf

Figure 4: A screenshot from the iBook.

Figure 5: Multiple-choice questions from Kahoot!

Staff surveys revealed a much higher level of satisfaction with the flipped learning concept as a result of these changes. Teachers were empowered to arrive in their lesson knowing that all students had completed the pre-learning and to divide students into groups, based on their level of mastery of core knowledge, to enable more focused interventions to be undertaken during lesson time. One member of staff who had been experimenting with the edPuzzle software suggested that this could also be incorporated into the course design. edPuzzle allows teachers to upload videos and then embed questions into them. The video stops playing when an embedded question is encountered and students must answer it before they can move on to the next section of the video. Multiple-choice questions are permitted, and marked automatically, alongside short answer responses that are marked by the teacher. One key advantage of the edPuzzle platform is that it allows the teacher to see how often a student has viewed each chunk of the video. This can allow them to identify any areas of understanding that students appear to be struggling with and then address them in their next lesson. We are currently considering whether or not to move our flipped videos from edmodo to edPuzzle.

Figure 6: Screenshot from edPuzzle showing the number of times that an individual student watched each segment of the flipped learning video.

We were particularly interested to note that this style of homework seemed to engage some of our previously less engaged, underachieving boys. Many of these boys completed the Quizizz element of the homework more than once. When questioned about this, the majority responded that they wanted to be top of the league table for their class; they completed the quiz, checked their score, and retook the test to improve their position if they weren’t top. They then checked again on subsequent days as their classmates were taking the test and were motivated to resit again if they were ‘knocked off’ the top of the table.

Figure 7: Screenshot from Quizizz showing the league table. Note that both Luke and Sam have taken the quiz twice (Luke2 and Sam2 are their second attempts) in an attempt to gain the top place on the leaderboard.

The flipped learning + guided learning + independent learning formula clearly does not need to be applied to every lesson in a scheme of learning. It can be used regularly when time is tight and teachers need to increase the number of guided learning hours, or it can be used more sparingly. Experimenting with the approach, and speaking to students about their experiences of learning, had a significant impact on our teaching and learning approach at Chesterton. We would be delighted to support any other schools who wanted to embark on this journey and are happy to share the resources we have made. Please do contact us if you would like to view these or if you would like to come and visit us to see these techniques in action.

Dr Katharine Hutchinson

Head of Humanities and Director of CPD

Chesterton Community College, Cambridge

khutchinson@chesterton.cambs.sch.uk

We are nearly all agreed that the law on religious education in England needs to be reformed. To address the task of reform, Mark Chater has produced a commentary on the existing law on RE using the textual and legal method of Midrash.  He then builds on the commentary and offers a draft of a new law for RE.

Read the full document here: The Law on Religious Education: a Midrash

Every teacher of religious education knows that even those least interested in religion will have some acquaintance with the word ‘Jihad’ and will associate it with Islam – even if they have no other knowledge of the religion.

This is not surprising because ‘jihad’ is often used in the media as an explanation for the acts of violence and terrorism across the world that seem to be re-replayed on television, computer and mobile phone screens with increasing frequency.

Unfortunately, for some, Islam has become inseparable from the voyeuristic-violence and entertainment-spectacle played out in our media where, with each horrific slaughter, people join in a social drama by changing their facebook profiles, for example. In this grim performance, ‘Islam’ is synonymous with an insidious viral death-cult aiming to destroy civilization as we know it.

The association of Islam with violent criminals feeds social instability and political extremism and leads to increased polarisation. Research suggests it can also lead to stigmatization in the classroom – affecting students identified as ‘Muslim’ by their peers and teachers.

There are, of course, some people who believe in violent jihad. It has been suggested by security experts that young men and women travelling to Syria, for example, may be motivated by power, sex, status, a change of identity, hedonism, and the opportunity to become rulers of their own domain rather than for religion.

Religious educators in the last fifteen years have tried hard to counter these and other harmful stereotypes about Islam. They have done this in order for non-Muslims to develop positive attitudes to the religion and also in order to educate Muslim students about different interpretations about jihad. This has led to something that could be called post- 9/11 RE. However, arguably this approach quite often became an apologetic without weight, losing importance particularly after the coalition government dropped the agenda for social cohesion.

One problem with post-9/11 RE is that by attempting to tackle stereotypes directly, usually teachers cannot help but invoke them. By presenting images of violent jihad in an attempt to counter it, religious educators still use the same representations. In this way, harmful stereotypes can be reinforced in the classroom rather than dispelled.

But what if students were introduced to a different story altogether that went beyond jihad?

Professor Lamin Sanneh (Yale University) provides a different image Islam in a scholarly but readable book, Beyond Jihad: the pacifist tradition in West African Islam. This is a historical account of how Islam spread peacefully in West Africa with no violence or jihad, and how a distinct, peaceful kind of West African Islam was developed by Africans.

Reflecting on this book, I would like to observe three comments about it in relation to religious education.

Firstly, because this book offers a different perspective of Islam, it is bound to attract attention and rightly so. It provides a counter-narrative to the misrepresentation of Islam presented by a small, violent minority. It shows the genuine reasons that people may take up Islamic beliefs and practices for the betterment of themselves and society. Furthermore, it shows how religion may adapt to local contexts and evolve into distinct forms. For there is no monolithic entity of Islam; to believe there is, is one beginning of prejudice.

Secondly, religious educators need interaction with a variety of religions in a variety of contexts to understand the real complexity of religions. I enjoyed reading Beyond Jihad because it brought back very happy memories of an exchange programme with The Gambia Teacher Training College, Banjul I undertook as a student at Bristol University. There I had the opportunity to speak with Gambian Muslims and Christians and get a sense of how these traditions related to wider Gambian society. I think opportunities such as these are essential to develop teachers because religious education teachers need real experiences on which to build their subject expertise.

Thirdly, I would like to make a more general comment about the value of scholarship for religious education, such as we see in a book like Beyond Jihad.

We need scholarship because only scholarship can show us the true complexity of religions. Religious ideas and theologies need to be understood, as well as history. This is important for the education adherents receive ‘inside’ a religion, and the education of those ‘outside’ a religion about a particular tradition, such as Islam. For the education of reasonable attitudes to those identified as ‘Muslims’, and for those who self-identify as ‘Muslim’ to develop reasonable attitudes to other religions and cultures, we see that educational programmes that use new ways of thinking offered by cutting-edge scholarship are essential to re-enliven the subject.

But it is not just the content of scholarly research that can give new perspectives to the problems facing relations between religions and their adherents. Scholarship itself can actually promote the habits of mind we need when engaging with all kinds of complex problems including those raised by cultural differences. The development of these capacities beyond scholars, is therefore pertinent to achieving the greater understanding much needed in the world today. For beyond jihad, there are whole worlds to be known.

Following a series of blogs and conversations, Jane Chipperton (RE Adviser for the Diocese of St Albans), Gillian Georgiou (RE Adviser for the Diocese of Lincoln), Kathryn Wright (RE Adviser for the Diocese of Norwich) and Olivia Seymour (RE Adviser for the Diocese of York) have revised their paper, Rethinking RE: Religious Literacy, Theological Literacy and Theological Enquiry. The revision offers a commentary on how their thinking has changed.

Download the revised paper, Rethinking RE – a conversation about religious and theological literacy, here: REThinking RE A Midrash June 2016