Primary Curriculum – Branching out from you

As Mary Myatt explained in her latest blog post for ReformingRE, change on a fundamental scale is in the air for Religious Education. The 2018 CoRE report offered many suggestions and changes in how RE is delivered. In response to these fundamental changes, many SACREs (the local bodies that set RE curriculums) have updated or released new Locally Agreed Syllabuses.

The biggest change within my Local Syllabus in Norfolk was the introduction of a disciplinary pedagogy that asks children to study RE using the skills (or lenses as they are referred to in the documentation) of Theology, Philosophy and Human & Social Sciences. Theology is defined as thinking about believing and asking questions that believers of a faith may ask, with children exploring questions from inside religions. Philosophy is the study of ideas, pondering questions from thinking about “the nature of knowledge, existence and morality more broadly”. Which means we could include ethical questions or debates. Our final lens is Human & Social Sciences which explores the “lived experience” of members of a religion and what happens when Theology meets everyday life. As these names are quite the tongue twister, we call them Believing, Thinking and Living in my school. with younger learners.

Norfolk schools were also given freedom to design their own units and courses of study. With a new pedagogy and new freedom in mind I sat down to look at our current RE curriculum and discussed with children what they thought of the subject:

“I like doing our stuff but it’s interesting to see their stuff and see how different people live.”

And having heard their thoughts, I threw the old curriculum in the bin and started afresh.

Planting a new tree

My school is what many think a Norfolk village school is: over 95% white British and Christian or of Christian heritage with some children’s parents and even grandparents having also been pupils. Which is why at the heart of the new curriculum I did not want children doing a unit of “their stuff” (Christianity) followed by an entirely different unit of “other peoples’ stuff” (any other religious or non-religious practice).

Our world is becoming more fractured and fractious with it. If children are to see the beauty and value of other people, religions and worldviews they will need the skills to appreciate them and, most importantly, find ways of connecting with them.

This got me thinking about exploring: if you know where you have been, it gives you a good basis to explore the new. So, I decided to be bold: every unit of learning would start with Christianity. We would learn about what we already know, or thought we knew or (in the case of Christmas) thought we knew but was actually wrong; and then link outwards. Finding links and connections between Christianity and other Religions & Worldviews would form the bedrock of our curriculum.

View fullsize

Branching out

This new curriculum would follow the Bible as its basic structure, with three half-terms exploring concepts rooted in the Old Testament, followed by three half-terms of New Testament content. This proved to be very helpful as it dislodged Easter and Christmas from the times we celebrate them (there is no Biblical acknowledgement of when Easter or Christmas took place.) This structure was inspired by the brilliant Understanding Christianity project designed by the Church of England Education Office.

As we are a church school, at least 50% of our RE content should focus on Christianity. Therefore, the first 3 or 4 lessons of each half-termly unit has a Christian focus and usually contains theological study of the Bible. This gives time to explore our Key Question and reflect on how Christianity answers them. Having built a solid knowledge base in Christianity, learning then moves on to one or more other religions or non-religious traditions for comparison.

For instance, In Year 6 Autumn 2 children explore Genesis 1 and 2 pondering the Philosophy Key Question Why was the Earth made? Children recap on the key events of Genesis 1 and 2 and then debate and discuss how women are described in markedly different ways between Chapter 1 and 2 (they were written at different times by different authors and then collated together at a much later date). A lesson is spent looking at the scientific description of how the Earth was formed and what similarities this has to Genesis. This is not an apologist attempt to explain Genesis, rather a time to discuss what real ‘events’ humans wrote into the Genesis story and why we think this coincidence could have occurred (the importance of water to life) and to explore what makes no scientific sense (light is created before the sun) and what this tells us about the writers of Genesis and the time and the audience they wrote for. It is a good time to discuss how correlation does not imply causation.

To conclude the unit, we spend 2 lessons exploring the events of the Hindu creation story and its expression of our universe as one in string of many (Samsara on a universal scale). Children quickly spot the beginning of the world in darkness and water and how a prime mover is needed to bring light and life into the world.

And that is the most important part of the new curriculum: children begin by finding and celebrating what is the same and then question why they are the same. How can two religions from different sides of the planet have similar beliefs? How can two faiths that appear so different actually be quite similar?

Growing leaves

Growing this new curriculum and pedagogy has taken time and lots of energy from the amazing staff at my school. As we move further towards a R&W curriculum, emphasis will be placed on denominations and how, for instance, there is no single “Christian Worldview”. The aim is that children can see how worldviews similar to their own can very different, whilst the superficially different can be very similar.