Description
This Spring issue is packed with articles and features that delve into the heart of ongoing discussions surrounding the purpose of our subject and the place of values and ethics within it. Ideas for exciting and challenging RE that engages with big moral questions and debates.
We in the RE community know there are many crossroads at which we find ourselves when reflecting on the nature and purpose of our subject, and often these involve questions around the extent to which RE should engage with values and ethics? Does RE have the power to shape our students’ morality, and if so, is this a legitimate, and indeed ethical, aim for RE? Is there a danger that values and ethics might become the cuckoos in the nest, crowding out the development of religious literacy and academically rigorous RE?
Despite recent and not-so-recent re-imaginings and re-naming’s of RE, whether at individual school level or nationally, as in Wales and as proposed by some in England, it is essential in my view that our subject’s academic significance is recognised, galvanized and, where necessary, renewed. To navigate with confidence a world increasingly full of ethical complexity, children and young people need rich and accurate knowledge to inform their understanding of the world, and learning experiences which enable them to develop skills, including critical and creative thinking, and independent scholarship. RE, taught well, can contribute enormously to these academic aims. Good RE broadens horizons, encourages empathy and understanding of different perspectives and ways of living, but also RE needs to equip children and young people with the wherewithal to challenge spurious claims and injustice, distinguish truth from lie, fact from opinion. So, the very best RE, for me at least, is not merely an academic pursuit, but it is an academic pursuit nonetheless.
Leave a review
There are no reviews yet.