‘A Touchy Subject’: Year 7 pupils’ views on when RE is good (and RE teachers’ views on the benefits of engaging with research)

Dr Kevin O'Grady & Professor Robert Jackson

Research Summary

The research was conducted during 2018 in a secondary school in South Yorkshire, England with a class of 11–12-year-old boys and girls and the class teacher of religious education (RE), in consultation with the head and deputy head of the RE faculty. The focus of the project was on the extent to which existing research findings can assist teachers to deal with issues of religious diversity, including how the classroom can be a ‘safe space’ for dialogue and discussion and how media influences can be managed; issues identified in the Council of Europe publication Signposts (written by Bob Jackson and available for free download at http://www.theewc.org/Content/Library/COE-Steering-documents/Recommendations/Signposts-Policy-and-practice-for-teaching-about-religions-and-non-religious-world-views-in-intercultural-education ). The findings highlight: the need for teachers to be given support in learning skills for managing classroom dialogue; the interest of young people in exploring difference; and the benefits to teachers of participation in classroom-based collaborative research.

Researchers

Dr Kevin O’Grady & Professor Robert Jackson

Research Institution

University of Warwick

What is this about?

• Making use of research findings to help teachers to strengthen and refine RE pedagogy.
• Assisting teachers to teach Y7 pupils to manage issues of religious and cultural diversity and difference.
• Ways in which Y7 pupils value RE, and how to build on these to secure progressively better engagement.
• Why and how teachers can benefit from contact with researchers and research findings.

What was done?

One of the researchers joined a school’s RE faculty for a series of discussions and planning meetings, during which a small number of research reports were used as the basis for a series of enhancements to a Y7 scheme of work on Christianity and the environment. The researcher then observed the research-enhanced lessons, keeping an observation log. A sample of pupils completed questionnaires about their experiences of the lessons, a further sample also participating in interviews that explored these in more depth. Members of the teaching team were also interviewed about the project’s contribution to their professional practice.

Main findings and outputs

• Discussion of controversial issues of religious and cultural difference is aided by clear classroom ground rules, especially when pupils contribute to the identification and setting of those rules.
• Contact with representatives of religious groups in the local area (e.g. by interviewing relatives or family friends as homework) helps build pupils’ motivation and their sense of RE’s relevance.
• Religious texts should be approached through a hermeneutical questioning framework: e.g., what would this have meant when originally written and read? What different interpretations are possible? What different meanings or interpretations might be given to it today, by people of different backgrounds or interests?
• Pupils experience RE as interesting when it investigates different views of the world and lifestyles, and differences between people. Pedagogy is successful when it genuinely enables such investigation.
• Contact with researchers and research findings can give teachers increased confidence and new angles on classroom practice. The non-judgmental, collaborative, subject-specific nature of this joint research contrasted positively, for the teachers, with being ‘monitored’ or receiving generic, data-driven CPD.

Relevance to RE

RE teachers could adopt the pedagogical strategies outlined in the research to their own situation and practice. They could make links to researchers and research and undertake similar projects of their own. Culham St Gabriel’s would be very interested to discuss and help shape such projects. Email Kevin@cstg.org.uk

Generalisability and potential limitations

The study was only of one school, but could prove to be a useful pilot to follow up in others. The action research methodology and published research sources used are broader and more established. The concept of research-enhanced teaching (where a research finding is used to model a small-scale ‘tweak’ to classroom practice, costing little time or effort relative to the significant positive effects) calls for further exemplification, which the researchers hope to generate in further studies.

Find out more

Kevin O’Grady & Robert Jackson (2019): ‘A touchy subject’: teaching and learning about difference in the religious education classroom, Journal of Beliefs & Values, DOI: 10.1080/13617672.2019.1614755