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Category: Research

After Religious Education?

Professor Bob Bowie

I have been invited to be apart of the “After Religious Education: Reimagining Religion and Worldviews Education” project led by Dr David Levin of Strathclide University. The project website has now been launched. It says: “

This project aims to explore the nature of the educational representation of religion(s) and to support the development of a new vision for Religion Education (Religion and Worldviews). The project draws attention to the limitations of the predominant world religions paradigm (WRP) in the educational representation of religion(s). Drawing on the expertise of academic specialists in Religious Studies and Education Studies along with skilled and experienced teachers, the project seeks to reimagine Religious Education by recognising the complexity of subject matter while acknowledging the pedagogical challenges.” (https://butterfly-butterfly-bnhl.squarespace.com)

I was really pleased back in Advent 2020 to have a conversation with David Lewin . I had been wanting to talk to David for a while, ever since hearing a paper he gave at a symposium on reduction and the curriculum. That might come as a bit of a shock for RE teachers where World Religions has tended to be seen as a more progressive approach than other approaches but perhaps Lewin is revealing that the school subject has more to learn from academic developments and Lewin’s own insights are interesting. In this video we touch on this issue and also a number of other related topics.

David’s related publications: 

Lewin, D. (2020) “Religion, Reductionism and Pedagogical Reduction”. In Biesta and Hannam (eds.) Religion and Education. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Sense. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004446397…

Lewin, D. (2020) Reimagining the RE/RS Curriculum, in The BASR Bulletin, the British Association for the Study of Religions. Available at: https://basr.ac.uk/2020/11/18/basr-bu…

Lewin, D. (2020) Between horror and boredom: fairy tales and moral education, Ethics and Education, 15:2, 213-231, DOI: 10.1080/17449642.2020.1731107 

Lewin, D. (2018) Toward a Theory of Pedagogical Reduction: Selection, Simplification, and Generalization in an Age of Critical Education. Educational Theory, 68: 495-512. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12326

David and I had a great chat about things related to this area on Youtube.

NEW RESEARCH PROJECT: Consolation and hope in a time of crisis

Consolation and hope in a time of crisis is a two-year funded research project commencing in June 2021. It aims to investigate how experienced chaplains from Church of England and Catholic sectors can help mitigate the consequences of the various aspects of loss and suffering, caused by Covid-19 disruption, for year7 pupils during their induction year. The` project has a particular interest in pupils disproportionately disadvantaged by Covid-19 disruption, including pupils from minority ethnic backgrounds and pupils receiving pupil premium. 

A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

Senior research fellow, Dr Ann Casson and researcher, Ann Pittaway will work with the school chaplains creating an ecumenical virtual community of practice. The research team will bring to this community of practice a detailed digest of the latest research on the induction process and spiritual well-being, for consideration by the chaplains. We will facilitate 9 virtual communities of practice over the course of 24 months, offering the community opportunities to reflect and identify best practice, and develop policies and resources for induction 2022-23 and beyond.  

SPIRITUAL RESILIENCE

Bringing together chaplains from different Christian backgrounds in a community of practice will directly impact student well-being and spiritual resilience and reveal insights into the professional roles. The shared expertise from the virtual community of practice will provide a forum for debate and an exchange of new ideas and practices for a wider audience, disseminated through the medium of online platforms. Termly reports for UK school leaders and policy makers will offer a detailed record of induction practices for 2022/23 and present resources to develop strategic plans in readiness for any potential re-occurrence of the Covid pandemic.  

If you are interested in speaking to one to the team about the project please contact the centre nicer@canterbury.ac.uk

Flourishing Schools

The Flourishing Schools Program: https://nicer.org.uk/flourishing-schools

FREE RESOURCES: This website has been designed to support school Spiritual Development, Improve Religious and Worldview Education and help provide tools for Shaping Character in the Curriculum with access to research and professional development materials and videos.

Leaders of Christian ethos schools, Church schools, Catholic schools, are challenged to develop an educational community that is shaped by a Christian understanding of the human, the world and God. For human beings, this includes their multiple dimensions, intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual, as well as their potential. They also must be led by an idea of the good that human society is capable of becoming, and the Christian contribution to that common good. These pages provide deeper insights from many teachers and school leaders involved in projects undertaken by NICER with our partners, to understand more deeply the reality of Christian schooling today.

NICER seminar – Science and Religion Encounters (sub-project 1 findings)

Wed 07/10/2020 15:00 – 16:00

Online seminar to present and discuss the preliminary findings of the SRE sub-project 1.Curating superficiality: a comparison of two lessons on the Creation Story

Professor Lynn Revell

Teaching the creation story has long been a possible site for controversy because of potential areas of conflict around the faith/science nexus. This paper analyses teacher questions in a year three and a year six Religious Education lesson on the Creation story. Both lessons were videoed and transcribed with a particular focus on teacher’s questions and instructions and their responses to pupil questions. Analysis of the structure of the lesson and the nature of teacher questioning indicates that in both lessons teachers exercised significant control over the discussion so that the ability of pupils to ask questions that could potentially challenge a preconceived narrative was limited. In the year six class nearly 50% of all questions asked by the teacher were closed or rhetorical and in the case of the year three class this rose to 85%. Teachers employed a range of pedagogical tools that effectively curated both the tone and content of the lesson. The tools included: ignoring questions, reframing questions, reframing pupil answers, presenting rhetorical questions as open questions and the use of physical gestures/body language to facilitate or close down discussion. A consequence of this strategy was that pupils were unable to explore questions and issues that fell outside of the teacher narrative. Where pupils did attempt to stray beyond the limits set by the teacher they were immediately stopped. The results were lessons characterised by a superficial approach to the Creation Story and where complexity or a diversity of interpretations was marginalised.

Video-based grounded theory study of primary classroom strategy: pedagogical problem-solving when science and RE topics interact

Dr John-Paul Riordan

When science and religion topics interact during school lessons participants can face challenging pedagogical problems. What types of pedagogical problem exist and what participants can do about these problems is unclear in the literature. This paper integrates the Pedagogy Analysis Framework (Riordan, 2020) with an analysis of pedagogical problem-solving by participants in the classroom, illustrating both using data using data from a video-based study of one science and one RE lesson.

Email nicer@canterbury.ac.uk if you would like to attend

At the RExChange Festival

This online conference is for teachers, advisers, leaders and members of religious and non-religious worldview communities. I am speaking today at two sessions and here are the related presentations

Discover a message wrapped in words, and step through the doorway into a more hermeneutical worldview education with the Texts and Teachers Research Project:

Texts-and-Teachers_presDownload
Read an early report about the Beginning Teachers and the Science Religion Encounter in the Classroom Project: BeginningTeachersSREDownload

Find out more at nicer.org.uk/

Texts and Teachers Part 2: The Findings

Here I explore some of the findings of the Texts and Teachers project, touching on links between institutional and personal worldview, deep conversations in the classroom, criticality and formal examinations structures. It is a prerecorded version of the second half of the session given at the joint AULRE/ CstG event on Thursday 14th and Friday 15th May 2020.

A Message Wrapped in Words

This page contains a link to an interview with Dr Margaret Carswell (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer at Australian Catholic University. She was an advisor to the Texts and Teachers project (http://www.canterbury.ac.uk/nicer/hermeneutics).

Carswell takes an academic and disciplinary approach to the study of sacred texts. In her work, she has critiqued a number of RE programs which fall short of the hermeneutical expectations of scholarly study which the Catholic Church has committed to in its statement on the Interpretation of the Bible in the Church.

These studies can be found in her thesis which is available online:

There are two articles which contain her further research on this theme. The abstracts are free online to read and give some idea of her conclusions:

Two other links

  • Teach Scripture is a website designed specifically for teachers in Catholic Primary Schools to enable teachers to teach Scripture – not just use it – using the composite Model. (http://www.teachscripture.com/ )
  • Her section of the 2020 Texts and Teachers Practice Guide (Free to download from here: http://www.canterbury.ac.uk/nicer/hermeneutics) contains an outline of the LAaSMO method, which is one way of taking the scripture scholarship into classroom practice.

Texts and Teachers Research and Practice

To download
Opening the Door to Hermeneutical RE: The Findings Report
and
The Practice Guide: Classroom Tools for Sacred Text Scholarship
click here.

This project, a collaboration between Professor Bob Bowie and Ms Katie Clemmey of the National Institute for Christian Education Research (NICER) and the Centre for Research Evaluation in Muslim Education with Dr. Farid Panjwani at University College London (now renamed the Centre for the Study of Education in Muslim Contexts (CEMC) ), sought to support teachers in seven contrasting secondary schools, teach RE more hermeneutically. It came on the back of research by Bowie and others (for instance see here with Coles, and, by Panjwani and Revell, see here) and that the use of texts in RE classrooms is and has been an ongoing problem for many years that continues with the revised GCSE. It was inspired by the thought that a more hermeneutical approach in the subject might help both the transition to Religion and Worldviews education and also the development of a stronger disciplinary knowledge base. It was grant funded by Culham St Gabriel’s Trust and supported by Bible Society.

Early indications were presented at AULRE 2019 at Newman University. You can download this research poster here:

Opening the Door to Hermeneutical RE: The Findings Report outlines the project, its findings and conclusions.

The Practice Guide: Classroom Tools for Sacred Text Scholarship contains some of the professional development materials developed for the project. It is written to support teachers and curriculum designers teach RE with a focus on Sacred Text Scholarship.

Who is the report for?

The report is for teachers, curriculum leaders, curriculum designers and examination boards.

Summary of Findings

  1. The teachers described a sense of agency that hermeneutical tools gave students in activities around the interpretation of sacred text.
  2. The teachers reported that pupils were positive about engaging with longer extracts of sacred text including students who they had thought would struggle or lack motivation in such activities.
  3. Hermeneutical approaches in these cases led to a deeper quality of conversation in lessons about texts.
  4. Hermeneutics was seen as a valuable dimension in curriculum design allowing for progression through multi-religious study.
  5. Almost all of the teachers developed competent hermeneutical lessons, some with excellent examples of student work.
  6. From their key stage 3 changes, several teachers thought that hermeneutics would lead to better GCSE responses, particularly in explaining differences within religions. They also felt that a better space for hermeneutics could be included in exams.

In conclusion, we thought:

“Sacred text scholarship allows students to investigate the layers of meaning that people find significant. In making the hermeneutical process more explicit teachers help students become conscious of the process of reading sacred texts, and the place of the reader in making sense of a text, as well as the senses held by communities, and those held at different times and places. “

“There is a greater possibility for change and for reform of religious education if the idea of inhabiting the place of a sacred text scholar becomes part of Religion and Worldviews in schools. It offers one pathway to unlocking a disciplinary study of how people find significance and read meaning through worldviews.”

Blog piece written by Professor Bob Bowie and updated 30/3/2020