This summer the newspapers were full of pictures of armed French police forcing Muslim women to remove articles of clothing on a beach in Nice. The pictures showing four policemen standing over the woman while she removed enough clothes to make sure her outfit was one that was ‘respecting good morals and secularism’. Some accounts reported that as police roamed the beaches of Nice making women undress, onlookers applauded and shouted ‘go home’. How can teachers support children making sense of such media stories? Teachers of religious education are often asked to justify the existence of their subject when the number of people who claim to be religious in the UK declines year on year. Yet, the incident described above is an illustration of how religion is rarely out of the news. Very often the presence of religion in the media also signifies questions of racism and discrimination and raises issues and questions related to freedom of expression, immigration and human rights that could be addressed in the Citizenship classroom. It makes sense then that some of these issues could be addressed with more thoroughness, nuance and depth if teachers were able to consider not just the civic, moral and political context and content of many of those issues but the religious as well. Later in this article we critique classroom approaches
