One of the reports to be made to this year’s SoF AGM in July is that of the Network’s Religious Education Commission. This was set up in 1996 with a wide-ranging brief which may be summarised as follows: to consider how a SoF approach may contribute to the teaching of RE; to consider how a SoF approach may contribute to the debate on collective worship in schools; to consider a SoF approach towards working with other reform groups, seeking representation on Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education (SACREs), and contributing towards training and support for RE teachers; to consider publications such as a collection of personal and professional experiences, materials for classroom teachers, and contributions to professional journals and papers. Some 25 members have expressed interest in the Commission, which has met five times between January 1997 and April 1998, latterly convened by Val Clarke, who has edited the following extracts from what members have written about their professional experiences.
1. Training of Primary School RE Teachers
“As well as acknowledging student teachers’ own school experiences, it was important in my sessions to look at the professional implications involved in teaching RE and a collective worship...In fact, realizing that even archbishops, bishops and priests are not required by law to conduct an act of worship on a daily basis with large groups of young people, put into perspective the complete craziness of the whole scheme. What, students began to ask, is “worship” if it can be required of children daily?”
2. Approaches to Teaching RE
“I believe most pupils and teachers enjoy RE lessons, although in some there is that tense feeling of self-defensiveness on the part of pupils usually associated with someone confronted by an insurance salesperson trying to sell them something they don’t really want. My intention is to ‘plant seeds’ of thoughts and experience and give ‘tasters’ of issues. I try to overlap into other subject areas — it is difficult to avoid this anyway — and to be as topical and current as possible. If pupils leave school more open to new ideas, other cultures and life-styles and beginning to take up their own life-stance, I think I have done something of value.”
“I would like to advocate what may perhaps be called a ‘caring neutrality’ which presents students with a fair selection of all points of view from which they may decide for themselves their own positions whilst hopefully counterbalancing what in 1996 Nicholas Tate (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) described as ‘the preoccupation with self-satisfaction’ so prevalent in our pop culture consumerist society.”
“I think that RE should be taught, first and foremost, as an investigative experience. One should ask the question what is religion even in the early years. I belong to the school of thought that we are beings with a dimension of consciousness which we call spirituality and that we are somehow more than the sum of our parts. It is this dimension which should be explored in the early years of schooling and at ever deepening levels throughout the whole period of formal education and beyond.”
3. A-level Religious Studies
“At a Masterclass conference for teachers of A-level Religious Studies in July 1996 one of the tutors, a Chief Examiner, revealed to us two key thoughts. First, Religious Studies was moving away from Biblical Studies, through World Religions and towards Philosophy. Second, nonrealist thinking was too avant-garde and peripheral to be included in A-level syllabuses; syllabus content had more or less stopped in the 1960s; questions were rarely set beyond that era so teachers were not expected to read beyond it. Taken separately these remarks were worthy of note. Taken together, they were quite remarkable, not least for being virtually incompatible. In fact, recent conferences (1998) for A-level students suggest that nonrealist thinking is becoming acknowledged, although often dismissed in favour realist thought.”
4. Teaching Approaches: Bereavement and ‘Ultimate Things’
“One great issue that confronts children — as it confronts adults — is bereavement. Not only the bereavement caused by death but also of serious loss through illness or the loss of a parent through separation or divorce...I have found children are more able to cope with death as a reality than they can with any idea of an afterlife. Even intelligent children cannot abstract enough to cope with concepts like heaven, and to say things like ‘Daddy has gone to live with Jesus in heaven’ just confuses them.”
“If we consider some of the definitions of the word ‘ultimate’ given in a dictionary we find words and phrases like ‘last’, ‘fundamental’, ‘incapable of further division’, ‘the maximum’, ‘the greatest’, ‘to reach the limit’, ‘to come to an end’. Indeed, the word comes from the Latin ulter meaning ‘situated beyond’. Not only might we ask, beyond what? but we might cynically want to make the link with the word ‘ulterior’. Do the use of ultimate questions in the teaching of RE mask a hidden realist agenda? By adopting them in our teaching are we implicitly playing the realist game under realist rules? Perhaps not; not, that is, if we take the ? mark in ultimate questions as a sign of discomfort with the concepts normally associated with the word ultimate. Perhaps, in non-realist RE, ultimate questions should be read as the ultimate brought under question.”
5. Teaching Approaches: Using Story
“From the onset, in spite of its strongly narrative and dramatic character, Christianity chose to align itself with philosophy against myth, theatre, drama, etc.) and therein lie some of the roots of the fantasy — which the Sea of Faith is trying to explode — that Christianity is and must remain a constant and unchanging system of belief. If life really is just for this time, then stories which are time-bound have much more power to shape human life than philosophy.”
6. Examining the SoF Position
“Can SoF insist on having a voice? Can it be argued that children need to know the alternatives and that not to do so ignores the 30% of the population who quite explicitly ‘do not believe in God’ (never mind the rest who may be unaware of what the question means!) Is scepticism crowded out because of power positions, not only in church but also in education?”
We are currently developing a document to examine collective worship in schools in terms of concepts of worship, justifications for an act of collective worship, approaches adopted and practical arrangements. Since January 1998 we have also become aware of the new status of RE following the announcement by the Secretary of State of a review of the National Curriculum at key stages 1 (5-7 years) and 2 (7-11 years) in order to focus on what he called “five core subjects of English, Maths, Science, Information Technology and Religious Education”. Since this is the first time that RE has been explicitly named as a core subject and placed in the same league as English, Maths and Science — the three core subjects of the earlier National Curriculum — it will be interesting to see how it develops within this ‘core’.
We hope to be able to play some part in this development.
Val Clarke