Making a difference in the Religious Education classroom: integrating theory and practice in teachers’ professional learning

Vivienne Baumfield

Research Summary

In this article, Baumfield discusses how RE teachers’ professional practice can be transformed through engagement with theory, showing how educationalists from John Dewey to Lawrence Stenhouse have seen the classroom as a laboratory and the teacher as an investigator. She gives accounts of different UK RE projects that have aimed, in different ways, to develop teachers as enquirers or set up collaborations between teachers and academic researchers. She finds that despite problems, RE teachers are well placed to promote their own professional learning by forming communities of inquiry, offering a useful synopsis of what has already been done.

Researchers

Vivienne Baumfield

Research Institution

University of Exeter, UK

What is this about?

The article addresses several closely related issues. What does it mean to be professional? For teachers this question has always been complex, for one reason because we work in two sets of knowledge (subject knowledge, to develop learners’ knowledge of the world, and pedagogical knowledge, to work with other practitioners). Further, there are knowledge for practice, provided by research, knowledge in practice, gained through teaching experience, and knowledge of practice. Knowledge of practice integrates subject knowledge and pedagogical knowledge and is what makes teaching a profession. How can it best be developed? Through professional learning, the most fruitful form of which is participation in practitioner enquiry stimulated by participation in curriculum development. RE teachers are already very good at developing teaching ideas and sharing these via networks, but we also need to be prepared to criticise the practices that we develop and share.

What was done?

This is not a primary report of original research, but a synopsis of previous, well-established theory on teacher professionalism and teacher enquiry, coupled with detailed commentary on how various UK projects have sought to develop teachers as researchers or enquirers along those lines. The article includes balanced critical discussion of these initiatives. The writer gives useful, provocative indications of how such work might be developed so as to lead to increased RE teacher professionalism in the future.

Main findings and outputs

Background Theory
In the American educationalist John Dewey’s ‘laboratory’ approach, the teacher works with the interest of the learners, connecting their experiences and the curriculum: ‘psychologising the subject’. The UK educationalist Lawrence Stenhouse saw the curriculum as a process rather than a set of pre-planned outcomes: it needs to be tested in the classroom and teachers must then articulate what they have learned about teaching it , practice thus helping to develop theory.

Examples of UK RE Projects
The North East School-Based Research Consortium promoted knowledge of practice with RE teachers. Research into thinking skills was tested in the RE classroom. Teachers in each of six secondary schools in the project selected a strategy, integrated it into a topic and evaluated its impact. Students’ thinking skills and teacher professional learning were found to improve.

The Warwick REDCo community of practice used action research to develop the interpretive approach to RE in various school and teacher education settings, finding that teachers’ ability to add to the theory of RE was improved, especially in the group setting, not working in isolation.

Recently, in ‘RE-searchers’, primary school children became members of a community of inquiry into different forms of RE pedagogy. It was found that asking learners to become investigators creates a virtuous circle: the skills of their teachers also grow.

Summary Finding
RE teachers are well placed to form communities of enquiry and add to professional knowledge of practice, but must be prepared to interrogate findings rigorously to contribute to RE’s theory.

Relevance to RE

The article has very high relevance to RE. In relation to policy, it places emphasis on teachers to make judgements and take responsibility for their classrooms, increases our autonomy and charges us to collaborate with students. It suggests that curricula ought not to be overly prescriptive, space being left for teachers and learners to jointly investigate areas of interest related to RE (e.g. learners’ own questions). There are challenging indications for pedagogy; we need to investigate the content of RE jointly with learners, depending less on pre-set outcomes. Many teachers would need to develop new and different skills and approaches to do this and one of the strengths of the article is to indicate what has been done already. The writer insists that teachers sustain a critical stance in relation to the pedagogy developed and its implications for RE theory. If successful, this would mean a considerable increase in RE teacher professionalism. Many complain of excessive management and rapidly changing outside policy pressures, yet probably fewer are familiar with the more responsible model of professionalism documented here. RE teachers might use the research as a basis for establishing their own communities of inquiry, ideally in conjunction with academic researchers.

Generalisability and potential limitations

This article has high credibility, written by a very well-established expert and leader. It draws on a good range of influential sources, integrating these into a useful, considered, challenging discussion. The findings are true to the original sources. It is in the nature of the form of research covered that the findings have to be generalised through classroom practice (it might be better to say investigated through classroom practice), but that is the offering of the article to RE teachers. The writer is very clear about the possible limitations of the form of research that is advocated, pointing out, for example, that non-specialist RE teachers might find it too demanding, that a geographically dispersed group of teacher-researchers might struggle to maintain momentum and that a community of practice might struggle to constantly reach out to a wider body of RE theory. However, these are useful provisos to bear in mind.

Find out more

British Journal of Religious Education 38.2 pages 141-151

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01416200.2016.1139889