Subject Knowledge: Love, Learn, Teach By Andy Lewis
bit.ly/uked15mar19 I am able to confess that I am absolutely obsessed with my subject. I really love RE and I hope in some small ways this is infectious to my students: • “Sir, why are you getting so excited about the Great Schism of 1054?” Because it is SO monumentus in the history of Christianity. Why are you not as excited? • “Mr Lewis, is Thomas Aquinas really this interesting?” Yes. • “Do you need to jump up and down / stand on a chair / shout for no reason about Gandhi?” Absolutely. It is pleasing that my enthusiasm is evident and noted in lessons. I’d hate for students to not realise that I passionately believe that RE is one of the most important lessons they study. After all, it’s where we discuss and attempt to answer the big questions such as ‘Where do we come from?’ and ‘Why are we here?’. It’s where we can challenge Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism, and where we can discuss death and the suffering of friends and family. We study literature, history, politics, culture, music, film. We address moral and ethical issues such as abortion and euthanasia. We learn about the things that matter to a huge number of people are the world, and ask why people will die for these beliefs. We explore spirituality and that whole ‘other dimension’ to human nature. So how do people know I love my subject? Blogging I blog about religious issues at TalkingDonkeyRE.co.uk. This is primarily geared to my own students; I want to pick out a variety of stories that will be useful to their study, but also go beyond it. I provide questions for reflection and often focus homework tasks on a news story that I have recently written about. RE is not the only subject that works well with the news, however rarely is religion out of the news! I am also trying to get my 6th form students to share in this interest by writing their own blog posts: shomrs.blogspot.co.uk. Tweets This goes hand in hand with the blog. My @TalkingDonkeyRE account is for students and links to the blog. Once a story is published, I will tweet about it so students will view. I also carefully select articles to retweet, if characters allow, with a 22 UKED Magazine
personal comment to encourage them to view. It’s amazing what students do pick up and often students will say, “I saw you tweet about…”. It is great for picking up news too and often a lesson will begin or end with something I have seen on Twitter. We also sometimes use in lessons… students tweeting Richard Dawkins was a highlight! Organising Events Having helped organise a number of TeachMeets, I wanted to do something specifically for the subject community. RE teachers can be quite isolated, sometimes in one person departments. Sometimes they are keen and willing nonspecialists. It is also clear that the biggest area of concern is a lack of subject knowledge, or a lack of confidence. As a result The London RE Hub was born (TheLondonREHub. com) and I am leading this first event in March. We will have over a 100 delegates and it has been organised from scratch by a number of teachers. The internet (particularly Save RE on Facebook and #rechatuk on Twitter) has enabled this to happen. A whole day, not of pedagogy, but of members of the faith community talking about their faith. I literally couldn’t be more excited. Share Resources There are now a variety of ways to do this. Many teachers have moved away from the original sites which dominated the resource sharing market. It is now possible to set up or join various cloud storage facilities such as DropBox or GoogleDrive. Many teachers share via these, and then share links via their own blogs or through sites such as UKEd Resources. I have set up an A-Level RS Dropbox (bit. ly/uked15mar20) and a RC Dropbox (bit.ly/uked15mar21), there is a Save RE GoogleDrive which is often filled via discussion on the Facebook group. I’ve even gone as far as to set up a website to try and bring together and share more resources, CatholicREsource.co.uk. National Involvement There are ways to get involved with your subject nationally through subject associations and national bodies. For RE teachers, NATRE (natre.org.uk) is very active but there are also local SACREs who help promote and support the subject. As a Catholic RE teacher, I am also in regular dialogue with the CES who are easily accessible via Twitter and email.