Welcome!

This first post is to welcome you to this new project website. During the lockdown of Autumn 2020 I was fortunate enough to have a period of research leave. The idea for this ‘After Religious Education’ project evolved during this period, inspired in part by Cotter and Robinson’s edited volume ‘After World Religions’. I have always had a keen interest in Religious Studies and it was great to see a renewed interest in questions of method: what we think we are doing when using the conventional concepts of ‘Religion’ and ‘Religious Studies’. The ‘Critical Religious Studies’ movement (if that is not too grand a term) is really engaging and exciting: helping us to deconstruct some of the weighty categories (like world religions) that once seemed so natural to me.

For this project I wanted to take the opportunity to think together with scholars of religion or education and teachers to explore how together we might contribute to a reframing of ‘Religious Education’. This interest was also sparked by the CoRE report and the debates about the future of RE in England and Wales that followed.

Maybe I should mention that I was briefly a teacher of RE having done a PGCE at Winchester University in 2008 followed by a brief, but signficant career at Holy Cross 6th Form College as a teacher of RE. I have always been fascinated by this subject and have increasingly become interested in the distinctly educational (pedagogical or even didactical) questions that come along with thinking about school subjects; in particular RE. These ‘educational’ questions are not just to do with the mechanics of how to teach effectively, but about what we think we are doing, and why we think we are doing it when we are engaged in representing some aspect of the world to someone else.

So welcome to the project. Feel free to drop me a line and share your own perspective.