Teachings That Contribute To The Cultural Development Of Students

RE including teachings which focus on the major world religions as well as Christianity which demonstrates that RE contributes to the cultural development of students. According to Ofsted, cultural development is about “pupils’ understanding their own culture and other cultures in their town, religion and in the country as a whole” (Ofsted, 2004, page 51) in order that students come to “value cultural diversity and prevent racism” (Ofsted, 2004, page 51) at a local and national level. RE enables students to learn about other cultures, which according to the DCSF (2010, page 8) “teaches pupils to develop respect for others” and “prompts them to be aware of their responsibilities” towards others and shows them that religion and culture are two

The aforementioned model is a positive model to use within the classroom due to the fact that it draws upon both AT1 and AT2 to help pupils explore and understand religious beliefs, values and traditions in order to come to a “critical evaluation of their own beliefs and values” (Grimmitt, 2000, page 35). Furthermore, the RE and human development model can be used within the classroom in order to “help children mature in relation to their own patterns of belief and behaviour through exploring religious beliefs and practices and related human experiences” (Grimmitt, 2000, page 35). An example of this could be seen through a year 8 lesson on Zakat in Islam that I observed in which the students were given the information to learn about (AT1) and then they were asked to look at a series of pictures showing natural disasters and using questions from the “thinking hats”, they came up with ideas as to how we can overcome the situations in the future or prepare more thoroughly for them (AT2). The aforementioned lesson encouraged students to use information given and reflect on how it made them feel and what they were able to learn about the topic. The ideas that students came up with generally reflected personal beliefs and indicated positive ways of dealing with the natural disasters. They unanimously stated that they would be happy to

This model is more focused on delivering AT1 to students. The phenomenological model asserts that “teaching and learning in RE should promote both academic and personal forms of knowledge and understanding” (Grimmitt, 2000, page 27), which in reality provides a much narrower insight into RE than the human development model, as it is more focused on content rather than depth. The phenomenological model should be used as “a starting point for the study of any religion” (Grimmitt, 2000, page 28) as it is useful for imparting sound knowledge about a topic, or to reinforce prior knowledge, or information that is already known about a topic. Within the classroom, an example of the phenomenological model can be seen from a year seven lesson regarding the features and use of a Church; the students in the lesson were given a think, pair, share activity in which they had to pair up images of a church, then write down information about the features. Following the think, pair, share activity, students completed an RE Safari task (carousel activity) in which the main aim was to collate as much information as possible before returning to their desks and creating a diamond nine of the most important features. The lesson was rather shallow in content, as the students had learned many features of a church, however they had not gone further in their learning, and couldn’t describe the significance of said