Methods of Teaching Religious Education

Embrace your teaching style in Religious Education

Have you ever observed another educator conducting an RE lesson and felt that their approach didn't resonate with you? Trust your instincts – if it doesn't feel right, it might not be right for you. This section is designed to assist you in crafting an RE teaching approach that aligns with your values and style. It's about defining your personal perspective on what RE should achieve, both in the realm of education and within society.

Discover diverse views on the purpose of RE

Education, especially in RE, is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Different educators may advocate varied roles for RE – celebrating diversity, exploring profound life questions, or nurturing pupils' intellectual growth. Each of these viewpoints holds validity. The secret lies in finding your own distinct vision of RE.

Unveil effective RE pedagogies

This collection of films and articles, developed over four decades, offers a range of pedagogies for teaching RE. By engaging with these materials, you'll be guided toward forming your perspective on the essence and objectives of RE. It's a journey of self-discovery that leads to your unique interpretation of RE's purpose and significance.

Phenomenology - Ninian Smart

RE is rooted in looking at the concrete and abstract phenomena that religious groups express. Rooted in the work of Ninian Smart, this pedagogy takes a rigid "religious studies" approach. The argument is that the key aim of RE is to enable learners to develop an understanding of religions. RE is an academic discipline like history or science, with its own set of approaches and its own frontiers with faith and with education.

Phenomenologists want students to understand the "nuts and bolts" of religion using the Smartian seven dimensions of religion: ritual, practice, narrative, doctrinal, ethical, social and material.

This approach is at the heart of AT1 and still has tremendous influence over teaching. It is best when it takes a comprehensive approach to religion.

Key Text: Smart, Ninian, The Religious Experience of Mankind, 1983.

Concept Cracking - Trevor Cooling

RE should be aiding pupils to 'crack the concepts' that underpin the teaching of RE, the concepts behind the phenomena. RE is seen as aiding students to be able to make judgements about the competing truth claims in religion. Statements of belief are taken seriously and the evidence for them is weighed up. The key skill is enabling students to become critical evaluators of truth claims from the competing world religions. They have to make decisions about which of these truth claims, if any, they believe to be true. This is arguing against the post-modern and relativistic world view of 'all beliefs are equally valid'.

Key Texts: Cooling, Trevor, Concept Cracking, 1994; Download the Concept Cracking Document

Critical Realism - Andy Wright

RE should be aiding pupils to discover the truth claims that religious groups are making and to be critical about these, in the terms of the religion.

RE is seen as aiding students to be able to make judgements about the competing truth claims in religion. Statements of belief are taken seriously and the evidence for them is weighed up. The key skill is enabling students to become critical evaluators of truth claims from the competing world religions. They have to make decisions about which of these truth claims, if any, they believe to be true. This is arguing against the post-modern and relativistic world view of 'all beliefs are equally valid'.

Key Text: Wright, Andrew, Prospects for Religious Literacy, 1993.

Human Development - Michael Grimmitt

RE is involved with the development of spiritual understanding. Students are spiritual beings and this aspect of their self needs to be educated and developed.

RE is a tool to enable human development, and spiritual development. The aim of RE is to allow students to respond for themselves to questions about the meaning and purpose of human life. RE's place in the curriculum is related to the overarching purposes of the SMSC curriculum.

RE is built on questions of meaning and there is often a strong focus on ethics and morals. A good RE lesson is part of the student's search for meaning and there is much time for reflection on 'what does this mean for me in my life?' The teaching and learning in a humanist classroom will focus on how the facts relate to the lives of the students. This approach strongly influenced the development of AT2 ('learning from religion'). The focus on 'finding meaning' has become axiomatic for many RE teachers.

Key Text: Grimmitt, Michael, RE and Human Development, 1987.

The Interpretive Approach - Robert Jackson

RE cannot talk about religion as a coherent whole but only as the experiences of the individuals within the faith tradition. We need to be ethnographers of religion and study the life experiences of individuals.

This approach lends much to social anthropology and challenges the idea that a strict phenomenological approach ignores the dynamism of religion in the life of the individual. Students should be able to make sense of religion in the ways that it is lived and enacted today, not just from the 'official viewpoint' but from the 'view on the street'.

One key skill is listening and responding to believers and realising that the idea of 'religion' is an academic construct, a box into which adherents of that religion may not comfortably fit. Another is that students gather data and construct meaning about the religion from that data. There is acknowledgement that religious belief cannot be separated from culture, race, country or family.

Key Text: Jackson, Robert, Religious Education, an interpretive approach, 1997.

Spiritual Development - David Hay

RE should be involved in the experiences of religion and religious practice, using the senses and extensive use of role-play, drama, dance and other sensate activities.

This approach develops the idea of experiencing the traditions and the phenomena of religion. With a strong focus on multi-sensory approaches, the key aim will be for the students to focus on, and respond to, the spiritual dimensions of life. Lessons will be very 'hands on' and include guided fantasy, reflection, meditation, drama and role-play.

A recent development of this has been the work on the 'Theatre of learning' by Sue Phillips. (with thanks to REtoday magazine).

Key Text: Hay, David & Hammond, John, New methods in RE teaching, 1990.

Deconstructionism - Clive Erricker

RE should begin by helping the student to understand the world-views that religions propagate and to deconstruct these before building world-views of their own.

Lying at the heart of this approach is the belief that the job of education is to allow an individual to make meaning about themselves and the world. Much of previous religious pedagogy is seen as oppressive as it aims to construct a world-view for the student, not allowing them to construct their own. In order to develop this world-view, students must be given the tools to deconstruct the narratives with which they are already familiar.

This is a strong post-modern approach to equal validity and truth claims which treats religious, spiritual, humanist and secular narratives as equally valid world-views.

Key Text: Erricker, Clive, Reconstructing Religious, Spiritual and Moral Education, 2000.

Contextualisation - Liam Gearon

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