Viewing archives for Archive

You turn your back for a month and when you look again things have got out of hand!

January saw the first meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on RE (the APPG) since the 2015 General Election. It seems one of the concluding remarks was that “the aim of RE should be to awaken and promote moral awareness and character education”. What happened? Has the world gone mad?

We are engaged in a debate about the purpose of RE and the meaning of ‘religious literacy’. What is clear is that this is a political debate. It is a debate about ‘who owns RE’. There is a wide range of opinions and, crucially, a wide range of powerbrokers operating across the RE landscape.

What is the nature of the debate? How can we define the landscape? Three metaphors come to mind: a garden of delights, a warzone and a wasteland!!

A garden of delights: the most positive image sees the landscape as a fertile diversity of ideas and perspectives which are mutually enriching. There are a number of gardeners working to create a richly diverse landscape. This metaphor recognises a range of pedagogical approaches allowing teachers to select and combine in ways that suit their teaching style, their pupils’ needs and the demands of the curriculum. Together they help describe (rather than define) a range of possibilities within the concept of ‘religious literacy’. The challenge is how to encourage teachers to spend time exploring the garden without getting lost.

A warzone: a troubling image but perhaps one we cannot pretend does not exist. The meeting of the APPG reminded us about the battle lines. This image portrays the landscape as one in which there are genuine disagreements and red lines. One of the problems the RE Council faced in developing the 2013 Framework for RE was trying negotiate a compromise where, in reality, there was covert discord. For some, the inclusion of non-religious perspectives on the RE curriculum is beyond the pale. For others, the confessional model of RE reflected in some sections of the faith school sector is simply anathema within a state funded education system. We ignore the disputes and disagreements at our peril.

A wasteland: equally troubling – an image of teachers wandering lost without a clear compass or roadmap to help them make sense of the landscape around them. I am sure this is far too negative as a description of what is happening but there are elements of this metaphor around us. I fear that, in the continued absence of national agreement, we may see a deepening of fragmentation within our community unless we can grasp the issues around purpose and aims.

All this brings us back to the issue of who owns RE. Answers such as ‘the children own it’ or ‘we all own it’ are sentimental responses that have little meaning

The debate about local/national control is still with us. Who should exercise control? What would be the best model of power distribution for the future of RE. Let’s not go there today!

The most successful period for RE in recent years, in terms of generating a shared vision of ‘religious literacy’, was the period after the launch of the 2004 RE Framework. An authoritative national body, the QCA, with an internal structure of discipline and relative detachment, battled to produce an approach to RE which aligned with thinking in the wider curriculum.

So, when it came to writing the 2013 Ofsted report RE: Realising the Potential, a decision was made to try to shortcut the complexity around the purpose of RE by referring to the concept of ‘religious literacy’ rooted broadly in the expectations of the 2004 Framework. There were some things that most pupils did ‘understand’ by the time they left school:

• They recognised the world of religion and belief is diverse
• They ‘knew’ religion is controversial and there are no right answers
• They respected the right to believe what you want
• They knew there are ‘big’ moral and social issues about which religions have views

But pupils struggled to:

• identify some of the big ideas that underpin different religious/belief traditions
• connect up different aspects of any religion/belief into a coherent picture
• explain the diversity that exists within different religions/beliefs
• offer informed balanced and reasoned judgements about issues of truth in religion – too often they reduce everything to ‘it’s all a matter of opinion’
• understand the metaphorical/non-literal nature of religious language
• explain patterns within the social reality of religion and belief in the modern world – e.g. links between religion and wider cultural, social and political change.

So, it is good to see that the impetus created by last year’s three major reports on RE and religion in public life is not being lost – despite the fact that the APPG seems not to have noticed the reports exist!!

The RE Council will announce very soon the details of its “independent Commission to look into the complex range of issues that relate to the legal and wider policy framework around RE. This will involve appointing a set of commissioners to independently investigate the issues and report back with findings and recommendations. It is hoped that the Commission will begin its work in mid-2016 and complete a final report by mid-2018.”

Watch this space http://religiouseducationcouncil.org.uk/

In my last series of blogs I attempted, among other things, to show exactly why I think RE research is important and particularly why it is important that RE teachers are research literate. By being research literate I mean that teachers should be aware of emerging research and able to integrate it into their professional practice, while also developing understandings of rigour and research methodologies that will improve their own personal classroom based research activities. This is good: staying up to date with research can help teachers improve their subject knowledge, develop their teaching and wider professional practice, and, engaging with new ideas and methods can be a great source of energy.

The problem, as many teachers know all too well, is that finding relevant research is a hugely time consuming process beyond the means of busy professionals and access to published research can be impossible if you’re not a member of a university. So RE teachers need a way of accessing information on relevant research that takes into account the busy realities of being a teacher. The information needs to be easily digestible, concise, understandable and with clear relevance to RE.

Therefore, in this blog, I’m going to build on my previous posts (particularly Research in RE (part 4): How Should RE Research be Shared? and outline a new innovative model for achieving this in much more concrete terms than I have done before.

However, the first point to make is that when we talk about RE research, we understand it in very broad and inclusive terms. I argued in <Research in RE (part 1): What is RE research? Broadening our perspectives that RE research should be thought of as research about RE and research for RE. Research about RE is often the default position people take when talking about RE research – it is work on pedagogy, RE teacher classroom practice, RE teacher identity, RE history etc. In other words it is research that generally comes out of the RE world, is often published in journals like the BJRE, and where the object of analysis is specifically related to RE as a classroom subject.

Research for RE, on the other hand, can be thought of in terms of research that isn’t specifically focused on RE, but has implications for RE teacher knowledge and practice. It could be research on religion, religions, belief traditions or philosophy coming from theology, anthropology, sociology, psychology etc that has a bearing on teachers’ subject knowledge. It could be general research on pedagogy, assessment, educational technology etc, which has implications for broad professional knowledge and practice. This kind of research, although often coming from outside the RE community, can have a huge impact on teachers. In fact, many RE teachers are more interested in this kind of research, particularly work related to RE subject knowledge, as their love of studying belief traditions is often what got them into the profession in the first place.

All too often RE research is understood too narrowly as simple research about RE. However, when talking about the kind of RE research that teachers want and need to access, I think it is essential that we broaden our definition and make sure that we understand RE research as both research about RE and research for RE. This broad, inclusive understanding is what I’m talking about here.

So having reiterated a need for a broad understanding of RE research and highlighted the importance of helping RE teachers to access information about research that is concise, digestible and relevant, the question is – how can this be achieved?

In my fourth blog on this issue I outlined the need for a website for both RE teachers and researchers. The researcher side of the site would offer an interactive form that provides researchers with guidance on presenting their work and allows them to distil the essence of their projects and key findings into a format that is concise, accessible and relevant to RE teachers. The content would then be approved by an editor (or team of editors), automatically turned into an attractive and appropriately tagged webpage and released into the public domain onto the teacher side of website. At the same time, the content would automatically be turned into a newsletter that would be pushed out to RE teachers directly via an automated emailing system.

Statistics and feedback would play a huge role in this system. The website and emailing tool would automatically gather statistics on the number of times pages had been accessed and the number of emails opened, also recording levels of engagement. On the teacher side of the site, users would be given the opportunity to provide qualitative feedback describing how they had used the research and providing them with the means of directly communicating with researchers in order to discuss the relevance (or lack) of the research to the messy reality of the classroom and to highlight areas for further study the researchers may not be aware of. Offering researchers project specific quantitative and qualitative data would likely be a key factor in motivating them to engage with the system since they would be provided with direct evidence of impact (useful for funders and the REF).

Although this all sounds relatively simple, there are clearly a great number of extremely complicated aspects to producing such a website. The first is the fact that it all hinges on getting the form right. In order to publish coherent, useful material, minimize the workload placed on editors, and ensure the system is as automated as possible, a great deal of work will have to go into producing the form used by researchers. This will require careful collaboration with RE teachers, consultants and researchers in order to ensure the form is fit for purpose. A successful form will be beguilingly simple but rooted in a great deal of knowledge and experience of RE, education, and research.

Secondly, no website is a ‘field of dreams’. Researchers won’t come and share their work simply because it’s been built. There will need to be a huge amount of interpersonal work undertaken behind the scenes making universities and researchers aware of the site and the benefits it can bring. Although organisations such as AULRE will be able to help with some of this, if a broad understanding of RE research is used, links will have to be made with institutions and researchers that go well beyond existing networks in the RE community. A good starting place for this task would be to look at some of the major research funders in key subject areas (e.g. ESRC, AHRC, Templeton etc), highlight key projects and contact the PIs. However, a major role for the website editor or team or editors would be reading journals, contacting researchers, attending conferences etc in order to develop, build and maintain a network of researchers, academics, university outreach contacts, press officers etc. who would promote or contribute to the site.

Similarly, RE teachers won’t automatically come to the site simply because it’s been built. Careful communication with a wide range of RE teacher networks will be required if the site is to be used properly by RE teachers. As such an obvious home for the site would be RE:ONLINE, a key website for RE teachers with an already large group of user and with an existing reputation for excellence in the RE world. An additional key stakeholder would be NATRE and I would argue that a fully collaborative partnership would be required for this project to be successful. However, there are other key groups, networks and local hubs that would need to be targeted to properly promote the site.

Thirdly, although the vision for such as site is for the research reports to be produced by the researchers themselves, developing such a network will, as I’ve highlighted above, take time. Therefore, alongside developing links with researchers and promoting the site to RE teachers, an editor or team or editors would also need to be engaged with emergent research and willing to produce reports about projects themselves in order to populate the website with research related content in the first instance. The importance and time-consuming nature of this task shouldn’t be underestimated

Finally, although both the teacher and the researcher sides of the website should appear relatively simple, they will require a fairly complicated backend system in order to process the research forms, publish/ disseminate the reports, generate qualitative feedback and provide report-specific use statistics and feedback to the researchers. This will require careful thought and collaboration with researchers, teachers and web developers to ensure the site is user friendly, robust and fit for purpose.

So lots to think about and lots to do. I suggest it would take around 18 months to get to an operational state, but in the spirit of being concrete, here is a list of tasks that need to be done in order to get things moving and get to the point where research materials and ideas are successfully being shared back and forth between researchers and teachers.

1. Establish a budget and secure funding (a biggie!!)
2. Employ a project lead/ lead editor and a wider team of editors
3. Develop a collaborative partnership relationship with NATRE
4. Create a working group of RE teachers and consultants and develop the form (the key document).
5. Create a working group of researchers, academics and web developers to draw up a plan for quantitative and qualitative feedback.
6. Work with a web developer to produce the site.
7. Forge links and develop a network of researchers, academics, university outreach officers, press officers etc through targeted approaches, conference attendance, drawing on existing networks etc..
8. Develop a mailing list of RE teachers.
9. Develop content alongside developing contacts.
10. User test; user test; user test.
11. Promote; promote; promote.

I think the RE world is crying out for exactly this kind of reflexive communication between researchers and teachers and, in this time of policy debate and (potentially) policy change, this is the perfect moment to ensure that we, as professionals, are all fully engaged in a wide range of emergent research and empowered to use our knowledge and enthusiasm to improve RE in the classrooms across the whole country.

Dr James Robson is the Knowledge and Online Manager at Culham St Gabriels and a lecturer at Oxford University Department of Education where he is Learning and Technology Pathway Leader for the MSc Education and Masters in Learning and Teaching.

The BBC’s recent adaptation of War and Peace for television has, of course, aroused interest in Tolstoy again. The hundredth anniversary of his death in 2010 also saw the publication of numerous newspaper and magazine articles; several books; a two-part documentary by the BBC, The Trouble with Tolstoy; and major conferences held in New York and Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s estate south of Moscow.

An examination of Tolstoy’s life reveals a complex genius who, in addition to writing two of the most highly regarded novels of all time, engaged in all kinds of artistic, social and political projects. He inspired Gandhi, he made his own shoes, he promoted vegetarianism, he conducted a census in Moscow, he organised soup kitchens to feed the victims of famine, etc.

However, what many people don’t realise is that Tolstoy was an innovative and committed religious educator. Furthermore, he advanced a kind of religious education that, although idiosyncratic, is in many ways an antecedent to popular strands of pedagogical and religious thinking today, particularly in Britain and North America.

1.  Tolstoy founded a school before he wrote War and Peace

Tolstoy was an aristocrat turned teacher. He founded several schools around his estate when he was a young man in order to teach peasant children. This was important at the time as it coincided with the emancipation of the serfs and there was debate over the best way to educate the peasantry.

2.  Tolstoy did experimental educational research

Tolstoy was not satisfied just teaching. His school was experimental and he published the findings of his educational experiments in his own educational journal named after his beloved country estate, Yasnaya Polyana.

Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, is now a museum preserved as it was when Tolstoy died in 1910. Lessons for peasant children were held in several locations, including in the main house shown here. It is very similar to the Levin’s house described in Anna Karenina.

3. War and Peace was first a lesson plan

Tolstoy’s experience teaching inspired him to write great literature. A key motivation to write his epic, War and Peace, was the enthralled reaction of his class when he told them the story of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in a history lesson.

4. We can learn more from children than from adults

Tolstoy believed that teachers could learn to be better teachers by observing students. But he also believed that writers could learn to be better writers by engaging with children and writing with them. His pedagogical journal contains the stories written by his students and he kept stories written by students in a class he took when he visited London all his life.

5. Tolstoy loved English attitudes to religion and education

Tolstoy loved Dickens because his novels expressed what he considered to be true Christian values. He also greatly admired British Unitarian thinkers and the Quakers. He therefore employed several English Governesses at his estate to teach his own children.

6. Tolstoy taught religious education all his life

Although Tolstoy’s experimental school was closed only two years after it opened, he continued to teach groups of peasant children religious education until his death. He was interested in the way children thought about the Bible and even wrote a version of the Gospels based on their religious thinking.

7. Tolstoy was more Protestant than Orthodox

Tolstoy grew up in an Orthodox household but gave up this Orthodox faith and Trinitarian Christianity altogether. He was eventually excommunicated for his criticism of the Orthodox Church. He had read Kant, Rousseau, Luther and Schleiermacher as a youth and this undermined his belief in any kind of orthodoxy. In his later life he was influenced, and held similar views to the American Transcendentalists and Universalists, including Channing, Thoreau and Emerson.

8. Tolstoy believed in multi-faith religious education

Tolstoy engaged with Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the Baha’i. He learnt Hebrew to read the Jewish Bible, read the Qur’an and visited Muslim leaders on his trips to the steppes. He corresponded with the Ahmadiyya Muslim movement. One of his last works was a collection of similar teachings from all the world’s religions to show how there was a universal spirituality and morality. His greatest influence remained the Christian Gospels, however, particularly the Sermon on the Mount.

9. Tolstoy thought moral and spiritual education was the most important thing in the world 

Towards the end of his life, Tolstoy increasingly believed that bad religious education led to war, greed and inequality. He believed that if all children were given an authentic religious education, then the world’s problems could be solved. Elements of this ‘true’ religious education included pacifism and Transcendentalism, including awareness of the spiritual and moral teachings of the world’s religions (as Tolstoy saw them).

Tolstoy is buried in a wood in Yasnaya Polyana where he played as a child. One of the students of his experimental school dug his grave. It has been said that it was the first non-Christian burial in Russia for 1,000 years. It is still a site of devotion and newly-wed couples often leave flowers here (which is peculiar perhaps given Tolstoy’s notorious relationship with his own wife).

10. Story telling is the best way of teaching

The lines between art and education were blurred for Tolstoy. He believed good literature was educational and there was nothing better than a short story that delivered a moral lesson. His Azbuka (ABC Book) was a primer for Russian children, but it included many moral parables, his own or adapted from other sources. He eventually gave up writing novels and only wrote simple didactic stories for instructional purposes.

For more information on Tolstoy and education, see Daniel Moulin, Leo Tolstoy (London, Bloomsbury).

Photographs are the author’s own.

A range of recent reports and blogs on the future of RE have noted significant confusion about the purpose of RE. Without clarifying the purpose of RE, it is difficult to identify appropriate pedagogies for delivering RE, devising a curriculum that is accessible to all and defining a method of assessment that is practical and helps pupils and teachers understand what progress and achievement look like in RE. 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 produced the following paper on rethinking the purpose of RE. It focuses on clarifying what is meant by ‘religious literacy’, ‘theological literacy’ and ‘theological enquiry’, all of which are terms in frequent use in the RE community.

Download the paper: Rethinking RE: Religious Literacy, Theological Literacy and Theological Enquiry

‘Can you wait here, please.’

‘Thank you. Line up, please.’

‘A line please.’

Repeating these words, encouraging an orderly queue is part of any teacher’s work to ensure the safety of a large number of students as they wait for lunch or are about to go into assembly. But this is not crowd control of Year 7s on a Friday afternoon before registration (although one or two of those waiting look about the same age). This is a line of refugees, mainly from Sudan, waiting for second-hand coats on a sand dune in Calais.

One of them has a book. As he approaches in the line I ask him, ‘What book is that?’

He shows me the cover of a Bible. I inquire ‘Are you Christian?’

He says ‘No.’

His friend interjects ‘A man gave it to him, he has it just for information.’

The young man with a book has some black polished prayer beads with Arabic writing on them around his neck which he says, ‘Is his friend.’

Not wanting to ask him more, I ask him to move on to collect his coat (is it a memorial, a lucky charm or does it belong to his friend?). There are more than 50 others waiting.

Shivering, hungry, and possessing all but nothing, these people have escaped violence and instability to find just that, 32 miles from the UK. They face cold, hunger, crime and disease in the camp, groups of vigilantes outside it, and an ever tighter cordon of riot police who permanently populate the barbed wire- topped security fences to stop the scramble for the trucks or tunnel.

Another man in the line asks me ‘Where are you from?’

‘England’, I reply, and I see an expression in his eyes that is quite beyond words. It is a look that captures brokenness, desperation, hope, and envy.

‘It’s not as nice as France’ I say.

As he looks into my eyes incredulously, I wonder what he sees. For my part, I see a glimpse of a far crueler world, a world unimaginable.

He says, ‘England! Sudan!’ and gestures with his hand reciprocally – presumably hinting at some old colonial ties, some shared cultural connections.

A young teenager behind me shouts ‘England, go back Syria!’ My colleague, a trainee nurse on vacation, doles out coats of varying quality in an impeccably caring manner. As we walk back along the muddy track through tents and shacks she tells me she is a Seventh Day Adventist. From an immigrant family some generations ago, she explains she is here because it could have been her.

That was the day after Boxing Day. A few days later I walked straight onto the ferry. The faces of the Afghans, Sudanese, Iraqis, Eritreans and Syrians I left there haunt me still. I thought I had encountered poverty before, but these refugees must be the least regarded of all people, including the least regarded of refugees. The Calais ‘jungle’ and other camps nearby have a different status than most camps across Europe. It remains so squalid because, at the behest of the British and French governments, no NGO has been invited to deal with the situation. Across the sand dune I saw some newly painted shipping containers glint in the sunlight behind a fence, part of a new initiative which appears to put a worrying degree of permanence to this situation, which is reminiscent of something from a bad, but not too distant, European past.

‘Crisis’ is a word that indicates a short term problem. But there will be longer term challenges for both refugees and European societies. Some of these challenges have everything to do with religious education. One issue that bothers the public is that of ‘integration.’ With a million new arrivals in Europe this summer, it is clear there is a need for mutual cultural and religious understanding. I admire the Muslim refugee I saw walking with a Bible ‘for information.’ It was in a language he did not know well and despite his motivation for carrying it, he was presumably given it in attempt to convert him. I admired him because to be informed about religions, even when you have nothing else, can be so important. And in this crisis, information, and correct information at that, is difficult to obtain through political, media (and in the camp, rumour) smoke screens. That goes for greater understanding of the religious orientations and principles that are held by refugees, and refugees’ understandings of the populations in the European countries to which they have fled. What is needed is more than information, however, partly because integration is more than one sided. We need to know how it feels to encounter the other, especially when that is difficult. It is for this reason perhaps that the Calais camps attract hundreds of volunteers who, because of the trauma of news headlines, want to be in human touch with refugees, face to face and hand to hand.

Religious education can offer more than knowing how to encounter the ‘other’ and what that ‘other’ may believe, do and think. It can offer the very grounding of who we are and what we can hold on to when we cannot make sense of something. Working with volunteers at the Calais camp I met Christians, Jews and Muslims who saw what they were doing as religiously motivated. I also met atheists who saw their ethical motivation as equally powerful.

The volunteers came from all walks of life: an actor, a teacher, a model, a writer, an ex-professional sportsman, a nurse, health workers, a musician, chefs, builders and unemployed people. Like the refugees, they all had their own reasons for being there. It was one of my favourite RE lessons that had prompted me. For RE GCSE courses, and for a scheme of work on Year 8 parables, I encourage classes to act out the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25: 31-46). This can be achieved by safely sitting a Son of Man on a chair on a desk, and sending sheep and goats to him to be sorted to his left or right, following the text. There is something about the imagery of this parable that captures the imaginations of the most disinterested of students, particularly when they are told that in Jesus’ time separating sheep and goats was difficult because they looked so similar. But this parable, and other parts of the Gospel, are to be used with caution. Ideas like this are so dangerous (and they are difficult to keep non-confessional.) To the young, they can stand a political situation on its head. In Calais, and in other camps around Europe, there are real imprisoned people, real strangers, really in need of clothes, something to eat and something to drink. Asking students to abandon their preconceptions and to consider whether they are sheep or goats, may bring RE to life, but in this case it could also bring it into opposition with much of mainstream opinion.

Photographs are of a make-shift Eritrean Church in the Calais Jungle, by kind permission of J. Jason Mitchell.

Lesson Modules from the UN Refugee Agency can be found at http://www.unhcr.org/pages/4ab356d36.html

It’s been a long term but for those committed to the change agenda in RE it has been successful. Three major reports on religion in education that have done such a great job to raise the profile of RE and help define that crucial change agenda.

The impetus of the three reports is not being lost.

The RE Council of England and Wales has announced its own evidence and data gathering review of RE’s legal and wider policy framework with the full collaboration and participation of all its member organisations, and that the process could be completed by 2017-18.

At the same time Charles Clarke and Linda Woodhead are looking to build on their New Settlement for Religion and Belief in Schools report by undertaking further research and consultation to refine their thinking with a similar deadline to the REC.

It is to be hoped that these two exercises will talk to each other to see how far we can achieve some consistent, shared messages to support the drive for change.

Two final reflections before we pack up and set stuck into the celebrations!

First, we are all aware of real teachers facing real threats to their RE provision. My good friend Joy Schmack constantly reminds me that however intriguing the debates might be, we must not forget those who are anxious about the future of RE in their school and their future careers. There is a danger that endless ‘change debates’ will destabilise the subject at the very moment when teachers in the classroom need our support. This is not a reason to walk away from change – but it is a warning that we need to make sure we don’t drive the political opposition into even more intransigent positions.

Second, we need to recognise that the debate is political with both a large and small P. We are trying to influence the politicians, those that can effect legal/policy changes. This is proving very difficult and I suspect has got worse under Morgan. Gove was difficult but he was someone whose position was clear and who was keen on evidence-based policy debate. Morgan seems much more difficult to engage and her own conservative religious background could prove unhelpful in the end.

And then we have the internal politics of the RE community – more strained and troubled than I have known them for many years. There are some deeply held positions and vested interests which are already making dialogue difficult.

As we enter into a period of further consultations and evidence gathering it might be worth considering recent statements by two political commentators reflecting on the nature of politics.

First, Owen Jones, whose recent book The Establishment I thoroughly recommend. Writing in The Guardian last week he said: “To believe that politics is conducted solely at the level of reason is to lose. This is what the embattled opposition to the Tories has to learn. It needs to appeal to people’s emotions, their hopes as well as their insecurities; to have a coherent message that can be easily translated into a pub conversation as well as one conducted on the doorstep.” The Guardian 10 December 2015.

Second, Jonathan Freedland also in The Guardian: “The political brain is an emotional brain. It responds not to data but to instinct and feeling. A bombardment of statistics rarely wins any political argument….Instead the only way we can hope to fight a populist fire is with populist fire of our own. So what would such a populism .… look like? Its first move would not be to dismiss, but to understand whatever fear is drawing people to the flame in the first place – and to show that it understands it.” The Guardian 12 December 2015

So the key Christmas message. As we build momentum for the RE change agenda we need to remember:

Evidence, data and reasoned argument are invaluable – but we also need to address the emotional responses of those opposed to change. We also need a ‘populist’ narrative that will capture the imagination and appeal to the instinct of the opponents. What’s in it for them?

We need to understand the fears and insecurities of those opposed to change – both outside and inside our RE community. Why do they feel at risk? What is making them resistant to change?

So with that – a merry Christmas and a happy new year to all.

Three major reports on RE in one year. All Game-changers

Clarke/Woodhead in June: http://faithdebates.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/A-New-Settlement-for-Religion-and-Belief-in-schools.pdf

REforREal in November: http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/goldsmiths/169-images/departments/research-units/faiths-unit/REforREal-exec-summary.pdf

Woolf Commission in December: http://www.woolf.cam.ac.uk/practice/commission-on-religion-and-belief.asp

And all of them produced by ‘OUTLIERS’. Not the usual suspects special pleading the case for RE; these were all produced by those outside the standard RE professional community. And they are all the stronger and more important for that! We need the ‘OUTLIERS’

But wait a moment…… they are NOT primarily reports about RE.

This matters and it’s important we understand the context. If we miss the big picture, we may miss the game-changing moment.

These reports, in different ways, take their starting point from the much broader question of the place of religion in education. Their scope extends well beyond RE to explore collective worship, faith schools and, in the case of Woolf, wider aspects of religion in public life. They are asking very significant questions about why we include religion in the educational space. In this way they are touching on the fundamental question: What is the place of religion in public education?

This echoes the concern within the RE community about the ‘purpose and aims of RE’. Ofsted and RE professional bodies are rightly focused on the issues that affect the quality of RE. They have expressed concerns about:

• Low standards of religious literacy
• Teachers’ confidence and confusion about purpose
• Patchy, and in some schools declining, provision
• Teacher recruitment and training
• Collapsing local structures
• Impact of changes at GCSE on RE

And these are really ‘no-brainers’ – the issues in themselves are not controversial – they just need sorting out.

BUT these three reports start somewhere else. While they recognise these practical issues, their questions are more fundamental:

• How far has policy about religion in education kept pace with the dramatic social and cultural changes since 1944?
• Are the structures around religion in the public school space fit for purpose?
• Does our thinking about RE need to change to reflect the reality of religion and belief in the 21^st Century?

These questions are controversial with the potential to divide and separate. The answers may challenge vested interests and existing power networks. But in many ways they are among the big political questions in contemporary education and society. It will take brave people to sort them out. A message coming out loud and clear is that pupils, teachers, parents, employers, academics, social thinkers and RE professionals think learning about religion and belief is important; it matters in the 21^st Century.

“A religiously literate society … can only be achieved by a root and branch reform of how we learn and think about religion and belief at school, at university, at work and in everyday life” Woolf Report.

The RE community must not just try to grab the bits from the reports which serve our purpose and fail to grasp the game-changing nature of the messages.

A tricky balancing act.

As an RE community (or is that communities plural?) we need to focus on RE. Getting involved in the collective worship and faith school debates will divide rather than unite us. HOWEVER, the principles and findings that will drive the agenda for change in RE will also have implications for those wider issues. There is an inexorable but edgy logic here.

If we pursue the agendas set by these reports it will involve these kinds of discussions about the future direction of RE:

• Should RE still privilege religion and, in particular, Christianity?
• Is ‘confessional’ RE (of any kind) any longer acceptable?
• Should decisions about RE be taken out of the hands of the religious (and non-religious) establishment?
• Should a ‘national’ curriculum apply to all publically-funded schools, including faith schools?
• Can we address the finding that too many syllabuses ‘fail to reflect the reality of religion and belief, having a rather sanitised or idealised form of religion as their content’?
• How do we face the finding that too much RE fails ‘to include non-religious worldviews, for example humanism, and does not deal with competing truth claims’? Woolf Report
• How does RE ensure pupils understand ‘that religion is contemporary, pervasive and real. It is lived. It is fluid identity, as well as solid tradition, and it is contested internally in each individual’s daily experience’? REforREal report.

These discussions will very quickly coalesce in the public imagination and in the minds of the politicians and civil servants with the wider debates about the place of religion in the educational space. If you apply these principles and questions to RE, they will bump into debates about collective worship and the role and nature of faith schools. We need to tread carefully but decisively.

But let’s enjoy: religious and belief literacy is now a clear educational priority.

Who would have thought 25 years ago that we would be saying this?

Radically Reassuring and Reassuringly Radical

The latest report from the RE for REal project (part of the Faiths and Civil Society Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London) is a ‘must read’.

Main Report: http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/goldsmiths/169-images/departments/research-units/faiths-unit/REforREal-web-b.pdf

Executive summary: http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/goldsmiths/169-images/departments/research-units/faiths-unit/REforREal-exec-summary.pdf

It is both radically reassuring AND reassuringly radical. The strap line: A 20th Century Settlement for a 21st Century Reality – is the core of its message. The 21st Century reality is that religious literacy matters BUT the settlement underpinning RE is still rooted in the last century. Change is needed so RE can realise its potential!

Radically Reassuring

We knew it was true, but this Report nails it – RE is popular and it matters. One of the original features are the extended quotes from students, teachers, parents and employers which point to the value of RE and its relevance in the 21st Century. These are some of the most comprehensive and authoritative statements of what people think about the importance of religious literacy.

I anticipate classrooms across the country displaying quotes from the Report; a few headlines:

• Students are saying “learning about religion and belief is becoming more and more relevant because they see more of it, and what they see is more diverse”.
• Teachers see “RE as a key space for personal, spiritual and moral reflection in school”.
• Parents think: “religion and belief learning should prepare students for religion and belief diversity”.
• Employers believe “young people need to learn about handling religion and belief diversity in ways that prepare them for workplace diversity”.

Religious Education matters. The Report has strong messages about changes needed to secure great RE for ALL. It will be tragic if the Government’s failure to take responsibility leads to its continued decline in many schools.

I am greatly encouraged by indications that the DfE and ministers are beginning to get the message. This parade of reports is having impact.

Reassuringly Radical

But there are challenging messages to consider. The Report makes radical proposals about the purpose and nature of RE which need careful consideration. The students showed the way with their comments that:

• they want to learn about a wider range of religions and beliefs; this includes a lot of interest in informal religion, and non-religion
• they enjoy learning about real ‘lived’ religion, especially through thinking about religion and belief controversies; they prioritise the contemporary over the historical and are especially keen to study real-world controversies
• they think RE lacks status and there is a perceived colonisation of the RE space: “We’re supposed to be doing RE and then we’re doing global warming”.

The Report makes strong recommendations in two key areas:

The question of purpose

It reiterates, with additional force, findings in other recent reports around the confusion of purpose; the problem when the RE space becomes colonised and congested because of this lack of clarity. Some core quotes will suffice here:

“There is a failure to clarify the relationship between general aims of schooling, to which RE makes a contribution, and particular aims specific to Religious Studies……The possibility that RE as a subject could be rethought, as well as its relationship to possible alternative spaces for teaching and learning about religion and belief outside the RE space…….. RE in England has increasingly been colonised by themes such as citizenship and cohesion …… Perhaps we should question whether RE bears too much of an instrumental responsibility and whether that responsibility should be concentrated in the RE slot, where it risks filling up the already limited and contested space.”

The way RE should reflect the real religious/belief landscape

It is here that the Report is at its most radical, calling for a significant re-imagining of teaching and learning in RE. Again one key quote illustrates the argument:

“If understanding about religion and belief is as necessary and important as the Religious Literacy critique suggests, teaching and learning are in need of being re-imagined. Cutting edge research … suggests that it will be strongest when it moves away from teaching the world religions as though ‘they’ are problematic, ‘out there’, exotic or other, or as historical traditions, either in the past or stuck there.

Research indicates that religion is contemporary, pervasive and real. It is lived. It is fluid identity, as well as solid tradition, and it is contested internally in each individual’s daily experience. How can we equip people to get to grips with the religion and belief, which turns out to be all around after all? In schools, what sort of teaching and learning about religion and belief can help?”

This echoes and vindicates conclusions in the 2007 Ofsted report that:

“RE cannot ignore the social reality of religion. Most of the issues in the RE   curriculum for secondary pupils have been about ethical or philosophical matters … It has been unusual to find questions about religion’s role in society, changing patterns of religion in the local community, or the rise and decline of religious practice. It now needs to embrace the study of religion and society.” (Ofsted 2007 Making Sense of Religion para 138)

As weeks go – that was quite a week. The TES summarised it well: https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/religious-education-needs-be-brought-21st-century-study-concludes

We had new Goldsmiths report, RE for Real, recommending changes to bring religious education into the 21st century.

The research said that an “urgent conversation” is underway about the future of learning about religion and belief in schools after “growing criticisms of the policy muddle” surrounding it.

The report has been published in the week that the High Court ruled that education secretary Nicky Morgan made “an error of law” when she left “non-religious world views” out of the new religious studies GCSE.

The link to the RE for Real report is here: http://www.gold.ac.uk/faithsunit/reforreal/.

A clear explanation of the BHA’s legal challenge is here: https://humanism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/BHA-Briefing-High-Court-decision-on-Humanism-in-GCSE-RS.pdf

A battle with the big beasts for the soul of RE

What lies at the heart of these debates? Certainly a concern that the Government has neglected RE and is allowing the structures surrounding the subject to fall into serious disrepair.

But is there something more fundamental in play?

Both the report and the legal decision challenge the established view that RE should be under the control of the Big Beasts – the big 6 formal religions. We see that ‘control’ most obviously in the way the GCSE has been re-configured around the study of the Big Six (pick just two!). It is also reflected in the way the bodies with responsibility for RE, the SACREs and Dioceses, are largely in the control of those same formal religious institutions.

It raises the huge issue: Who is controlling the content and debates in RE? Whose interests are being protected here?

Some recent social posts have asked serious questions about “how come the smaller religions (Zoroastrianism, Jainism, The Baha’i Faith to name but three) will not, realistically, be included at all in GCSE Religious Education studies? …. I could guess that even Sikhism and Hinduism may be pushed aside.” (to quote one post).

What is going on? There are two key ways in which the configuration of debates in RE is being controlled by the vested interests of the Big Beasts.

First – depth not breadth. This reflects the important Tim Oates’ mantra: ‘Doing More with Less.’ The mantra is correct BUT the issue is who defines what constitutes depth – depth in what?

We are seeing the Big Beasts trying to dictate the debate by saying that pupils need to study specific religions in greater detail in order to secure that depth. So depth in RE is defined primarily as knowing a lot about one or two religions. The Big Beasts keep control. They want to make sure RE focuses primarily on them!

The problem with this approach is that it leads to competition for the available space. How can some of the other smaller animals find space at the waterhole? Humanism wants a piece of the action – but what about Paganism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, The Baha’i Faith etc.

And what about that significant number of people in Britain who appear to live without reference to any religion, including those 69% of 15-24 year olds who self-define as ‘nones’ (2014 British Social Science survey)?

Are there other ways of configuring the ‘depth not breadth’ debate?

Second – making sure any ‘issues work’ focuses on religious perspectives about philosophical and ethical issues. So the issues are NOT issues about religion and belief. No space to explore the lived social reality of religion and belief in the modern world. No space to explore the nature of religion or changing patterns of religion and beliefs. No space to study the impact of secularisation, growth of non-religious perspectives and changing reality of religious identity. No space to explore critiques of religion. No space to explore alternative secular and religious approaches to spirituality.

The assumption is that the Big Beasts have well-defined perspectives on ethical and social issues – even if the reality is that many of their adherents happily ignore those perspectives. So they try to keep the focus on the issues they can control – with a little philosophy of religion thrown in for good measure.

What the Big Beasts do is make sure students don’t investigate thorny issues about the complex social reality of religion and belief in the modern world; those sociological perspectives that threaten the authority of the religious establishment.

Which brings us to a key recommendation of the RE for Real report

“… we recommend that suggested content should reflect the real religious landscape, as revealed by cutting edge theory and data, and should always include:

– The study of a broad range of religions, beliefs and non-religion

– Exploration of religion, belief and non-belief as a category

– Exploration of the changing religion and belief landscape and its impacts on contemporary society

– A focus on contemporary issues and the role of religion and belief in current affairs and controversies

– A focus on the relevance of religion and belief for workplaces and working life

– Exploration of religion and belief as lived identity as well as tradition”

This is a big agenda – but one taken out of the control of the Big Beasts! It needs careful working through to see how depth can be achieved. The beasts will squeal – if that is what beasts do!!

It will involve a very different way of configuring the ‘depth over breadth’ issue.

It will involve developing an approach to ‘issues’ which focuses directly on the real world of religion and belief in the modern world.

AND – I suspect it will mean feeling our way towards approaches which many teachers love to explore with their pupils and students.

I am genuinely grateful to a colleague for reminding me how we so often miss the obvious.

It was a day when a group of us got together to share ideas. What are those core concepts at the heart of our ‘doing more with less’ curriculum? What are the elements of ‘deep learning’ essential to understanding? We need to get beyond ‘learning stuff’ and focus on the really big ideas that lie at the heart of our subject. The ideas were flying: incarnation, prophecy, inspiration, faith etc, etc.

And then we were reminded about the core concept of our subject: religion! And we noticed how, too often, in the hurry to get to the religions themselves, we rush past the most important concept of all.

I am still astonished that the GCSE course criteria and specifications include NO opportunity to study the concept of religion itself. It is amazing how in the haste to study the detail of specific religions, the most basic concept is ignored.

So maybe it is necessary to ‘state the obvious’

Why do we so easily miss ‘religion’, the most basic concept of all?

Four possible reasons:

• It is so assumed that we are simply blind to the way it is overlooked. Not seeing the very thing that is immediately in front of our eyes.
• It is too difficult to handle. That it involves a kind of meta-theory that is too challenging for younger pupils.
• It isn’t the main priority of the religious communities whose main concern is that pupils understand their particular religion.
• OR, if I was feeling more sceptical, because the religions feel threatened by the study of religion. Asking questions about the nature, role and value of religion smacks of investigation by the human sciences and that could dangerous!

It is crucial that we identify the core concepts that lie at the heart of our subject. Religion is not just a catch-all word we use to gather disparate content together. It is THE core concept at the heart of our subject. And Oates says:

“subtle contextualisation of fundamental concepts is the key to deep learning”

I think this means that two key questions are golden threads that should run through all learning in RE. These are the keys to ‘deep learning’:

How has what we are learning helped us to answer the question: What is religion and belief?

How has it helped us think about really effective ways of studying religion and belief?

In practice we need to consider at what age these threads should enter into the landscape of learning. I suspect it is around the same time pupils can begin to actually discuss what they think the nature of RE is as a subject. When might that be? Young children (KS1) can easily tell you the kind of things they look at in RE but would struggle to answer the question: What is RE?

So what might this mean in practice?

Two initial thoughts:

1.  Whenever we teach about material from specific religions/beliefs we need to include opportunities for pupils to reflect on these core questions: How has this helped us think about religion and the way to study religion?

2.  We also need to include some specific opportunities to develop pupils’ understanding of the concept of ‘religion’. Examples I have seen include:

– Creation Myths with year 4/5 – looking at similarities and differences between myths. Pupils were asking big questions about religion. Why do people tell creation stories? Are the true? How do they link to science?

– Year 7 units exploring the concept of religion and identifying different kinds of questions that need to be asked when studying religion – although sadly this work is sometimes then parked and not revisited across the key stage.

– A unit on belief in Year 6 with pupils designing a survey to investigate what different people in the school community (parents etc) think about religion; what they believe etc.

– A Year 8 topic on Buddhism concluding by looking at Smart’s dimensions and applying them to Buddhism – deciding which lens gives the best account of Buddhism (answer – it all depends!).

– Units on Religion and Spirituality – asking questions about whether it is possible to be spiritual without being religious, is there a difference between religion and spirituality? etc.

But there is much more. We could be looking at different ideas about the nature of religion. What is religion? Why are many people not religious? Why do some Christians, for example, say they are not religious?

To paraphrase my colleague again, we can explore whether religion might be thought of as:

• belief – religion as a set of beliefs which people accept to which commit themselves
• tradition and identity – religion as a cultural and social way of living, a sense of identity
• experience – maybe thought of as a spiritual pathway, a journey towards some form of spiritual goal

I would add another:

• a set of values – religion as an ethical way of life

All this before we even get onto different theories about the origin, function and role of religion in human life. Is religion the opium of the people; the sigh of the oppressed, social glue, essential to human happiness, a form of social virus, a meme system?