Inspired by … REXChange 2020 Dr Richard Kueh

Of the many great speakers at REXChange this year, the moment that inspired me the most was Dr Richard Kueh’s “Religious Education and Ofsted’s Education Inspection Framework.  It was great to see knowledge, especially building knowledge of the complexities and diversity of Religion & Worldviews, being promoted alongside the importance of impact on the child’s personal worldview.  

As quoted in the presentation, “good readers of texts are self-aware of their assumptions”. Our pupils can come to learning in RE with many assumptions beyond texts; be it from home, society, media or past misconceptions.  How can we make pupils self-reflective and self-aware? How do we get them to leave their own assumptions at the door? One approach I took in recent lessons to counter this was asking children to define or reflect upon the key concept for the lessons right at the beginning.  

“Who is God to you?” I asked. From these personal definitions we were able to engage prior learning from the year before; unpack misconceptions; and, most importantly, delineate between what was prior learning and what was personal worldview or belief. Of great discussion was do you need to believe in God to learn about Christian ideas of God? As one child eloquently put it “you don’t need to support a team to learn about football in PE, so why is it any different in RE?”. To be fair on my unwitting students, I had deliberately posed the question to see if it would cause an academic or personal/emotive reaction.  Taking time to reflect upon and then put aside the personal helped students to be open minded about the aspects of God seen in the Bible and what these mean in context.  

This leads me on to the second point of the presentation that got me excited and thinking in equal measure. As part of the RE inspection, “Personal Knowledge” will be investigated. How are students reflecting upon learning in light of their own personal worldview? Does learning fit in with their worldview or is this new learning helping to shape it? At my rural Norfolk school, we are 95%+ White British and Christian or of Christian heritage. Therefore, promoting diversity and understanding of the complexity of the world is a core theme of our curriculum. We aim to negate children seeing RE as “learning about our stuff and their stuff” as one child put it.  

I am still working on ideas to evidence this second point. How can you measure a change in personal worldview in an 8-year-old? Maybe through discussion of contentious issues? Possibly through exploring the Civil Rights movement and reflecting upon why others would want to oppress others?  

My hypothesis is that it will be measured over the long term, with teachers seeing more open minded students. Children who have learnt to appreciate the filter their own personal worldview brings to their learning and how that learning in turn alters that filter. Lots to investigate and lots to think about and even more to be Inspired by.