Making the PRE GCSE Relevant to ‘Secular Sceptics’   A study into the effectiveness of different media in engaging secular students in Religion and Philosophy. Emma Raven  

Context of research: School Context: 60% pupils in the school stated no religion or none was stated. A further 25% were mainly non-practicing Christians. This shows that the most common belief was a secular one and what’s more, as the school were working towards an Equality award by promoting LBTQ+ and gender neutral ideas, a liberal one. Subject Context: R.E teaching at GCSE has undergone significant changes since the new GCSE reform. The new GCSE syllabus the school adopted was OCR. This required the teaching of two religions – Christianity and Islam. As well as this change, the emphasis on application of religion (which was part of the old Ethics, Philosophy and Religion syllabus) became much less important. This meant that the pupils had to sit a Christianity and Islam paper that solely tests their understanding and knowledge of the religions.

Literature Review: The debate surrounding the aims of RE: In the three year project ‘Does RE work?’ done in 2011, at least 13 apparent aims of RE were found. These ranged from ‘dealing with truth claims and pluralism’, to ‘spiritual and social cohesion’ to ‘sex and relationships education’. As if this was not enough, in 2014 ‘British Values’ were added to the long list of aims for RE teachers to tackle with. The review in this paper claims that, for the context of the study, the two aims which need to be given the most attention are the development of: Religious literacy (knowledge and understanding of religious ideas and language and their social and cultural impact) and dealing with religious truth claims. Philosophical Understanding, Moral Development and Socratic Dispositions. If we work with these two aims, we can create an account of RE which is relevant and contextually valid for the pupils in this study

Findings so far… Application so far… Involving students in research engages pupils in itself, they feel a sense of autonomy in their research. Doing research improves metacognition as pupils can see it is important to think about how and why they learn. Students creating their own versions of artwork, narrative or texts enables the learning to seem relevant to them as well as consolidating key philosophical and religious ideas.   Application so far… This study is a positive argument for more teacher-led research in schools. Metacognition can be developed through research. Pupils could perhaps design their own research strategies to help them learn about a topic. Giving pupils ‘ways’ to do religious studies helps get round pupils feeling they are learning endless content.