Educating teachers to teach a subject with agreed limits and defined kinds of knowing

Arguably the least contentious recommendation from the final report of the Commission for RE is on the urgency of developing high-quality teachers. There need to be minimum standards for a significant component of teacher training to be devoted to RE and the subject should be supported with the same kind of incentives and the equal opportunity for subject knowledge development as other subject areas.

In a decade which has seen a shift towards a curriculum design, and at a time where the educational ideologies driving government policy weigh more heavily on knowledge, the question of the preparedness of teachers and their confidence to teach religion and worldviews, points to the elephant in the room. We need a consensus on the limits of the scope of the curriculum and the nature of the grammar of the subject.

When I did my PGCE, almost nothing I did or taught in terms of the curriculum, was relevant for my first year in school employment. Virtually nothing I had studied at university related in any way to what I taught children. I wonder how common that experience remains today?

Whether you call this the discipline and the subject field or something else, if we cannot decide what the rules are for how information is interpreted, what schemes of analysis will be privileged, and what patterns of association are deemed most desirable, it will be hard to prepare a workforce to be consistently able and confident to teach. Time and equal priority are essential, but so is some consistency about the shaping of the subject, which means a connection between the examinations, the degree organisation and the school curriculum that teachers are then prepared for. Think about how often you see a great resource which is not relevant because of the sorts of questions the knowledge leads towards is ‘off topic’.

The commissioners rightly argued that teacher education is a crucial factor. But once we have been able to incentivise and recruit them, we need a subject that agrees with itself, with enough consistency and manageable levels of diversity. This is an uncomfortable truth as it leans against the flow of “ever more diverse diversity” which some in RE proclaim.

Imagine you give a child a Lego piece, a Stickle Brick and an Octon (Google it if you have forgotten). Then ask them to make something with it. What are they to do? You can construct many different things out of Lego because there is an implicit set of rules around how Lego pieces fit together while still enabling rich diversity of the possible organisation. The skills emerge from the practice of the knowing a certain knowledge (like in the way a high level language speaker starts to think and dream in the language they have learnt – the way they know changes). But expecting someone to fit the differently designed pieces won’t offer the same expressive potential.

We need to decide whether we are playing Lego, or Stickle Bricks, or Octons. In RE we do not agree enough about which we are playing.

You can ask RE questions in ways that require entirely different sets of knowledge to address:
“How can there be a good, great and knowing God, given the evil and suffering in the world?”
“Why is it that so many people have faith despite the suffering they experience?”
Think about the kind of knowledge and sort of answer you might construct, one drawing on philosophical debates and knowledge, the other on spiritual and psychological ones. Which way should we turn? Is one better than the other?

If you structure a curriculum around themes which nod to different bits of religion, then the operating system of a worldview will not be seen inside out. You would never, for example, view a long sacred text for what it is and how it developed and how it is read now. Instead, you would visit it in short quotes as you would only need a few quotes that you can relate to the themes. Indeed, the real knowledge you are teaching rests in the decision to construct a theme in the first place and in the organization that chose to link certain fragments to certain arguments.

This could easily be read as an attack on the current organisation of local curricula. I concede it can be seen that way. But in truth, it is asking a more foundational question than that. It is about the dream that we might one day have a workforce with confidence to build appropriate curricula on an agreed foundation which is based in deep and powerful knowledge.

So what should we educate our future teachers to be able to explore with their students? What kind of knowing (for all subjects offer one or more types of knowing), do we want teachers to know good ways of modelling and exploring with students? For pedagogy is knowledge and knowing sensitive. You cannot separate the pedagogical conversation from the curriculum conversation. Here are some of the options:

– a set of ‘religious studies’ categories, with information from a range of different religion and worldviews traditions to fill each one? – thematic category studies

– the knowing that comes from the knowledge of a religious language, the inner system of concepts, ideas and understandings that shape a worldview? – practical/public/moral theology

– the knowing that comes from the knowledge of the tools and traditions for interpreting religion and worldviews in its principal manifestations and searchings? – hermeneutics

– the knowing that comes from the knowledge of deductive and inductive argumentation? philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition

– the knowing that comes from the knowledge of one or more examples of spiritual practice – participatory religious studies, as it is called in US RS circles

– the knowing that comes from the knowledge of social and moral issues – social sciences and philosophical ethics

And these options do not stand apart, or separate, from the development of religion and worldviews themselves. They are drenched in particular histories and interactions. The social sciences emerged based on alternative theoretical accounts of humanity and the universe to those offered by theological accounts. Deductive and inductive argumentation owes much to the ancient Greek philosophy. The religious studies categories of the 1970s contest with participatory religious studies which also date back to that time.

These disciplinary frameworks are now seen with a contemporary hermeneutical perspective which acknowledges the crucial role of positionality and readerly perspective, in the construction of denoted ‘legitimate questions,’ what constitutes reasonable reason for the processes of analysis, and the values implicit in any system of evaluation. In short, it’s about the worldview you adopt and the interpretative frame it draws for the making or discernment of meaning.

For us to have good and confident teachers, we most certainly need a system of initial teacher education in this subject, but for that to be possible, we also need to agree on what it is we want them to teach.

Dr Bob Bowie
Former Chair of the Association of University Lecturers in Religion and Education