The RE:Connect Project: RE and Climate Change

February 2022 research of the month features Jeremy Kidwell

We’ve known about climate change for centuries. Joseph Fourier theorised the greenhouse effect in the 1820s, and we’ve had data indicate the climate was warming and CO2 levels rising since the 1930s. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been meeting and producing alarming reports since 1988. This is why the recent international meeting in Glasgow was COP26, because there had been 25 meetings before it. So why are we still talking about climate change and struggling to mobilise action to save life on earth on we know it? For several years now, climate scientists have also begun to ask this question, that is, why isn’t the clear and decisive information we produce on climate change not having the expected results in social change?

Social scientists call something a “wicked problem” when it becomes clear that there are dynamics at play which render a problem more difficult to solve than we might expect. Climate change is definitely one of these – especially inasmuch as we already know what sorts of changes need to happen in terms of reducing carbon emissions – but the complicated social dynamics of lifestyle and social change have left us stymied in a way that was on clear display in Glasgow at COP26 last November. To put this another way, climate change isn’t just a scientific problem after all. It is, in equal measure, a cultural problem. This realisation is really important inasmuch as we’ve confronted the climate emergency as if it was just a matter of presenting evidence about carbon emissions in snappy charts and ignored the social dimensions. This is reflected in school curriculum, where climate change is often treated as a matter for science and geography teachers, and rarely brought into teaching on other humanities subjects, and RE teaching is no exception. Given the ways that culture, vocation and values can be mobilised with such dynamism and creativity in RE, it’s time to acknowledge the crucial role that RE can and should play in confronting the climate emergency.

So how do we get climate change into our RE curricula? There are a few obvious starting points and well-trodden paths: one might start by adding discussion with pupils on the ways that religions have commented on climate change. The Yale Forum on Religion & Ecology has produced a good website which includes details of many formal statements by religious leaders. There are also an increasing number of religious groups intervening in public policy around climate change, which was seen in a presence from a wide range of religious leaders and NGOs at COP26. But as many teachers and policymakers quickly discover, the religious responses to and experiences of environmental change are far more complex and dynamic than their institutional expressions. By extension, pedagogical engagement across the messy edges of climate change and the messy edges of religion is much more complicated.

This discussion foregrounds the importance of enabling RE teachers to work with continuing research engagement. The research landscape moves in different ways across different subject areas, and whilst this is not the case for all fields, the need for ongoing engagement is particularly urgent for religion and ecology as it is a situation where multiple innovations are at play in an ongoing way: scholarship in religion & ecology often goes outside conventional formulation, highlighting ways that religion can appear in unexpected places. In a parallel way, pedagogical innovation and creativity are also demanded, not least because of barriers presented by syllabi, but also because pupils are often unprepared to engage with nature as part of learning in the Humanities. There are some good examples of dynamic and creative pedagogy which confronts climate change in the space of RE (and we’ll share more about these in a follow-up article a bit later in the year!), but by and large, this is a new frontier for RE pedagogy.

Katharine Burn at the University of Oxford, is one scholar who has done quite a lot of work to confront this challenge of research engagement for teachers. Her work, which has been done in collaboration with the Historical Association, has introduced some exciting innovations: introducing the role of Research Champions in schools, and using action research methods to collaborate with teachers around new approaches to CPD. With a shared desire to help RE confront the climate emergency, Ian Jones (Director, St Peter’s Saltley Trust), Kathryn Wright (CEO, Culham St Gabriel’s Trust) and I sat down to design a project with this same kind of collaborative ethos – aiming to find novel ways to enable collaboration between scholarly subject research and RE pedagogy. We set about to design a project that could connect up cutting-edge research with innovative pedagogical practice to confront this paradoxical challenge. Rather than simply seek to replicate a top-down transmission approach to knowledge transfer, we settled on a teacher fellowship model. With funding support from CStG and St Peter’s Saltley Trust, we’ve brought together six teachers from across primary and secondary and at various career stages. We’ve had to adapt fast under Covid and Plan B protocols, but we’ve still managed to have some really challenging and exciting conversations about the pedagogical challenges that need to be confronted in learning and curriculum design. Our teacher fellows are each working on a curriculum project, and we’ve designed a series of workshops which each present a different kind of nexus where religion, theology, and climate change meet: around environmental justice, activism, scriptural reasoning, and RE learning through fieldwork. Our project research assistant and PhD candidate Amy Barnes, has also designed an ongoing set of personal reflections designed to give fellows a chance to reflect on aspirations, pedagogical and curriculum challenges and probing potential new forms of pupil teacher dynamics.

We’ll have more to share with RE:ONLINE later in the year as our curriculum projects start to coalesce and as we digest and share data from our survey of RE teachers, but for now we’ve confirmed our initial suspicions that there is a huge amount that RE teachers can contribute through their subject teaching to the issue of climate change. And there’s a huge desire out there to get this kind of work underway – 89% of the teachers we surveyed shared that they would like to do more work to explore the environment more fully as a theme in their current RE teaching. However, there are also significant barriers to this work. On that same survey, the highest number (45%) of respondents suggested that one the current syllabus prevents them from exploring the environment more fully as a theme their RE teaching. A lack of available work schemes (35%) and resources (29%) came in second as barriers to exploring teaching on this subject. This opening for “culture” in the midst of this supposedly technological and scientific problem has been a long time coming, but we’re ready and excited to bring insights from RE practice which can help RE teachers across the country to overcome these barriers and create new and dynamic learning opportunities in our subject.