DAY 1 Changing Approaches to Religious Education

Diverse Approaches to Religious Education Catechetical – Rote understanding Apologetics – Defending the Faith Kerygmatic – Scripture Focus Praxis – Shared Christian Praxis focus Experiential – Drawing of faith and religious experience Phenomenological – Describes conscious experience Catechism 1950’s book of brief questions and answers about Catholic belief and practice dotrine- centreed Apologetics focuses on providng the Catholic Believer with the knowledge and skillt to argue in favour of Catholic Beliefs an dpractices and deffend them from sceptics hostile to the Catholic faith. – faith and reason to defend an argument Kerygmatic the purpose of the kerygmatic approach was to enable students to reflect on themselves and their lives and to examine these in depth so that they came to see God present in their own lives. The aim being to renew the significance of the Church liturgies and scriptures. Shared Christian praxis focus – Thomas Groome naming- When do we, Reflecting critically – why do we, accessing the Christian tradition – what did/does the community believe, , integrating – so what? Explaining How can will we? Phenomenology concentrates on the detailed description of conscious experience, without recourse to explanation, metaphysical assumptions, and traditional philosophical questions Ontology is the branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature or essence of being or existence, the opposite of phenomenology, the science of phenomena. - a philosophical doctrine proposed by Edmund Husserl based on the study of human experience in which considerations of objective reality are not taken into account

Reconceptualist Approach Crawford & Rossiter Gabriel Moran Yoram Harpaz The creation of ‘zones of freedom’ in the religious education classroom allows for an authentic educational process and genuine student engagement. The tragedy would be that that academic inquiry is not challenging enough and formation is not particular enough. A powerful questioning pedagogy, within the context of a community of thinking, stimulates and supports genuine, active and authentic student engagement. A Reconceptualist Approach to RE in schools is elaborated and nuanced in a variety of ways in the work of a number of scholars. Key insights include: Marisa Crawford and Graham Rossiter : approaches to Religious Education that align with approaches in related curriculum areas are likely to be more educationally effective in a school context. Religious education needs to be academically challenging from Year 1 to year 12; RE in primary school needs to keep pace with the level of critical pedagogy and critical content that pupils normally experience in other learning areas The approach to studying the religious tradition needs more problem-posing content and a critical, student centred, research-oriented pedagogy Gabriel Moran: “Endless talk about Christianity is not religious education. What deserves that title is teaching people religion with all the breadth and depth of intellectual excitement one is capable of – and teaching people to be religious with all the particularity of the verbal and non-verbal symbols that place us on the way.” Yoran Harpaz: Teaching and Learning in a Community of Thinking 2005 (Director, Mandel School of Educational Leadership, Jerusalem) the ability to pose questions to understand ourselves and our world lies at the heart of what it means to be authentically human. sees in many schools what he calls an ‘answering pedagogy’ where the underlying assumption is that knowledgeable teachers are asking ignorant students questions that are largely examining student recall rather than stimulating the genuine exploration of problems and issues In the RE Arch of Brisbane P-12 there are three key considerations for teachers: the Avoidance of Presumptive Language, Teaching ‘about’ the Tradition and Powerful Pedagogies The reconceptualist approach involves learning about religion and learning from and through religion.”

Kerry Rush Principal Education Officer, Religious Education krush@bne.catholic.edu.au