Cultural, British and global turns in the history of Early Modern Scotland

Assesses the state of the historiography of early modern Scotland, focusing on the effects of the cultural turn, New British History and global history. Based on a paper delivered at a conference sponsored by the Scottish Historical Review Trust 29-30 October 2010, The State of Scottish History: Past, Present and Future

Sharing the purpose of secondary RE in the school

Religious Education as a school subject has suffered a decline in status over recent years. An analysis from the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education in 2019 showed significant decline in RE in secondary schools with almost 40% of community schools and 50% of ‘Academy schools without a religious character’ not meeting ‘their legal or contractual requirements for the subject’ (NATRE, 2019, p.2). It is therefore important to consider how RE is portrayed as a subject across your school community. The online survey results below, from a survey completed by 949 teachers, gives some sense of the issues involved. Religious Education teachers come from a wide background of first degrees’ covering different disciplines. These different disciplines approach knowledge-building differently with different purposes. Student teachers can bring in quite different assumptions about the purposes of the subject, based on their background study or their prior experience. Religious Education as a subject might be able to help these diversities but RE itself is in a fragile condition

How can I foster collaboration between the RE and science departments in my school?

Participants in our online survey were asked to describe the relationship between science and RE departments/subjects in their schools by choosing one of five options: • Collaboration • Conflict • Dialogue • Independence • Integration Research shows that religion and science can often have a complementary relationship. How, then, might secondary teachers work to build more opportunities for dialogue and collaboration between two related subjects

What are science/religion encounters and how can I prepare for them?

We conducted a survey with beginning teachers and more experienced teachers to explore what science/religion encounters they had experienced in their classrooms. The findings are shared in this module, along with some suggestions of what you might be able to do to support your teaching around science/religion encounters in the future

What role can different disciplinary knowledges play in shaping RE?

Within cohorts of student RE teachers, we found evidence of debates about the value of different disciplinary knowledges underpinning the purpose of RE as a school subject. This toolkit explores how different disciplinary lenses might be used in RE lessons

Science religion encounters toolkit 12: science and religion in the classroom

I was a classroom science teacher for 17 years (I now work in Initial Teacher Education). Many years ago, I was welcoming year 9 pupils (13-year-olds) at the door of my classroom for a physics lesson. One pupil stopped in the doorway with a puzzled expression on his face. They all knew I was religious as it was a Catholic school, and I was a Eucharistic Minister at the school Mass. He said, “I thought scientists weren’t allowed to be religious.” I don’t remember what I did and/or said in response, but that incident struck me at the time and now as interesting. How can I make my classroom an inclusive place for people of diverse religious beliefs, the unsure, and those without religious beliefs

What is the purpose of RE on the school curriculum?

Secondary teachers of RE have a variety of different views on the purposes of RE. Purpose matters because it affects all the classroom and curriculum decisions. Being able to articulate purpose matters because a teacher is required to be able to explain the intentions of their subject to different audiences. Having a joint department view matters for a coherent curriculum experience

How can an interdisciplinary ITE day support student teachers of RE?

Two universities we spoke to had developed a collaborative day for science and RE secondary student teachers to come together and plan collaboratively around some big, overlapping questions. There are new challenges in ITE, but how might we give beginning teachers, especially student teachers of Science and RE, opportunities to come together and talk about the topics they have in common? Acknowledgements Our thanks go to Mark Plater and Jenny Wynn of Bishop Grosseteste University for helping us put together this resource

How can I teach about truth in a complex world?

How should a pupil make sense of what Science and Religious Education lessons offer, especially when they have aspects of shared content, but might cover different ways of knowing? This resource supports an exploration of ways of knowing, how they are currently covered in your school and how they might be explicitly taught in the future