We are committed to the teaching of the major world faiths and also non-religious worldviews in Religious Education, to an accurate and fair representation of their beliefs, values and practices in all of our teaching materials. We work in the UK and internationally to give children a broad and balanced education to support them in the world they live in, through the teaching of high-quality RE in schools.We support teachers in ALL types of schools
We are committed to the teaching of the major world faiths and also non-religious worldviews in Religious Education, to an accurate and fair representation of their beliefs, values and practices in all of our teaching materials. We work in the UK and internationally to give children a broad and balanced education to support them in the world they live in, through the teaching of high-quality RE in schools.We support teachers in ALL types of schools
This story is one of a collection of stories from RE Today. Each story is available as a one-page pdf downloadable at the point of sale, free of charge. Each story is accompanied by Key Questions for pupils, or Activities for working with the story in the classroom; main themes covered by each story are identified.
THEMES: generosity; helping those in need
This story is one of a collection of stories from RE Today. Each story is available as a one-page pdf downloadable at the point of sale, free of charge. Each story is accompanied by Key Questions for pupils, or Activities for working with the story in the classroom; main themes covered by each story are identified.
THEMES: hope; freedom; standing up for your beliefs; God acting in history
Inspirational people can be named as such because
of their actions, the effects they have had on their
locality, people or the wider world, or just because
of who they are. They are often motivated by
beliefs, religious or otherwise. The people featured
in this book are many and varied, religious and
non-religious, contemporary and from long ago.
When studying inspirational people we often look
at three categories. We have included people from
each of these categories in our book:
Religious figures (leaders, messengers or
prophets) connected with the origin of the
religion, such as Jesus, Guru Nanak and the
Prophet Muhammad.
A religious leader – past or present, local,
national or international, such as a local vicar,
the Queen or Rabbi Julia Neuberger.
People who put their beliefs into action in the
way they live, from small things such as thanking
God for sporting talent to letting those beliefs
affect the direction their whole life has taken.
In this category we have included vignettes of
contemporary people such as Jo Cox, Christine
Ohuruogu and Malala Yousafzai, and longer
units on others such as Dr Hany El Banna, who
began the British charity Islamic Aid.
The units in this book provide resources for studying
people from a range of religions and non-religious
worldviews, with substantial teaching suggestions
for work in teaching about Christians, Sikhs,
Hindus, Muslims and Jewish people. In our new
section ‘Ready Steady RE’ we offer some starters
for teaching about inspirational people, and
vignettes of a variety of people you may want to
share with your pupils. At the end of the book we
also suggest dos and don’ts when teaching about
inspirational people. In putting together this book
we have tried hard to show diversity in the people
we have featured. Inevitably we have not managed
to represent all groups, but it is important to look at
the people you are suggesting who some find to be
inspirational to ensure that they are not only old,
white, male and dead!
Please note that members can now download an
electronic copy of each unit, allowing you to save
it in year group or module files on your school’s
internal electronic storage system
This is the second volume of this series to explore Muslim
believing, expressing and living. As with the first volume,
we aim to provide authentic, first-hand resources to use
in the classroom. Our focus on ‘Muslims’ rather than ‘Islam’ seeks to avoid any essentialising of Muslim belief and practice, allowing for a close examination of particular beliefs (e.g. angels, pp. 12–13) and attitudes (e.g. towards animals, pp. 14–15), and
also opening up something of the diversity of Muslim
voices (e.g. of teenagers, pp. 8–11; on being Sufi, pp. 6–7;
and the vibrant art of Teakster, pp. 32–33).
We are aware that certain topics present difficulties
for students as they face examination demands. One
of these areas is on the relationship between Sunni
and Shi’a Islam. In the first book of this series we
produced a resource on what is held in common and
what is distinctively Sunni and Shi’a. In this book we
have opened up the origins of the divide, rooted in the
succession to Prophet Muhammad (see pp. 4–5).
Each resource page offers some suggestions to get
your students thinking. Two longer articles give ideas
for more sustained study: examining what goes on
at the mosque (for 11–14s, pp. 18–23) and how Muslims
practise charity (for 14–16s, pp. 25–29).
Through engaging with and encountering Muslim
voices, students can deepen their understanding of the
world and reflect on how they make sense of their own
place within it. This resource aims to enable personal
reflection as well as to develop religious literacy
This book is the first in our new series of practical and
ready-to-use resources for the secondary RE classroom.
Its focus is on providing original source material and
contemporary voices, while recognising and identifying
diversity of views, controversies and complexity. The series
intends to put lively, relevant, authoritative, insightful
information about religions and beliefs into the hands
of teachers and students, alongside thoughtful and
imaginative ways of using the material in the classroom.
The title indicates something of the approach:
we are examining religion and belief by focusing on
Muslims rather than on the religion of Islam. The
emphasis is on lived faith and practice, with an eye on
requirements for examination RS but not solely driven
by them. We include case studies and interviews,
use artwork and text, and explore data on Muslim living
and believing in today’s world.
Of course, we cannot hope to capture the full range
of Muslim diversity but we have tried to indicate
representative examples of Muslim ways of living,
recognising that there are dissenting voices within and
outside Islam. In general, we present ways of exploring
Muslim insider views rather than outsider descriptions.
This doesn’t mean that we don’t encourage students
to raise difficult or critical questions; activities enable
students to think for themselves, developing their
knowledge and understanding as well as their abilities
to analyse, appraise and evaluate ideas. Through
engaging with and encountering Muslim voices,
students can deepen their understanding of the world
and reflect on how they make sense of their own place
within it. This kind of RE aims to enable personal thinking
as well as develop religious literacy
It’s always a privilege to look a little more deeply into a
tradition. As always, the more you look, the more you realise
there is to know. Religious education is a multidisciplinary
subject, with scope for looking at social, psychological, philosophical, theological, historical, ethical dimensions (just for starters). To begin to do that with the richness of ‘Sanatan Dharma’ is absorbing but also a huge challenge.
To an extent, we are constrained in a brief publication
like this: we have to ask what teachers are teaching and
how we can help to support that with authentic, accurate,
engaging sources and resources. Our emphasis on texts
and philosophy, therefore, reflects the current syllabus and
examination specification demands teachers face.
We do approach these from the perspective of Hindu
living and thinking, however. We hear from teenage
Hindus from various traditions (pp. 4—7) and from young
ISKCON devotees running a café in Cardiff (pp. 18—23).
We outline key Hindu texts (pp. 8—9) before going more
deeply into two that are important in the lives of many
Hindus – the Ramayana (pp. 10—13) and chapter 2 of the
Bhagavad Gita (pp. 14—15). We have included progressively
detailed explorations of Hindu philosophy – examining
ideas of rita (cosmic order), karma and samsara
(pp. 18—23), before connecting these philosophies to
two major schools of thought about the nature of God
– Advaita and Dvaita Vedanta (pp. 24—29). We then dig a
little deeper into this with case studies on Shankara and
Ramanuja (pp. 30—31).
As always, we look to engage students with a deeper
encounter with Hindus and Hindu ideas, and to offer
opportunities for them to use this encounter to reflect on
their own ways of thinking and being
Welcome to the second book in our new curriculum series, Big Questions, Big Answers. This book focuses on worldviews.
I first became aware of this term about five years ago and, a bit like when you buy a different car you suddenly see lots of
people driving the same make, I now feel I hear the word more and more often. But what does this word mean and why might
we use it with our pupils?
The RE community is beginning to respond to the idea that the subject should examine worldviews,
but already substantial reports from Theos and the RE Council point out the complexity of the concept. In this book we try to introduce some ways of thinking about worldviews as part of your RE or for some Religion and Worldviews lessons. We hope
that the units and resources will prove practical and engaging in the classroom, increasing students’ knowledge and awareness of their own and others’ worldviews. Simple strategies have been used to increase pupil understanding of diversity within a
worldview looking at celebration of Diwali, Eid-ulFitr and, later in the book, Christmas. We also look at how worldviews affect how
you see things and, for many, how they choose to live their lives.
Our two multidisciplinary units introduce sociology and religious
studies, and relevant questions and methods, with our disciplinary experts Dr Rachael Shillitoe and Dr Chris Cotter. In these units pupils study the diversity of celebrations of Christmas and then what affects how people from different
groups dress.
We are really grateful to the teachers and pupils
who trialled the disciplinary units in the book, and we have adapted these resources as a result of these classroom trials. We continue to expand the digital offerings for our books – do go to the website and look for the many extras.Finally, we would love to see examples of pupil work to share with others – do send us some examples
It is always both exciting and daunting when starting to plan one of these books. It gives us an opportunity to help teachers and students examine some fascinating content, but even with extensive online support resources one publication cannot cover everything.
The RE community is beginning to respond to the idea that the subject should examine worldviews, but substantial reports from Theos and the RE Council have already pointed out the complexity of the concept (see p. 3 for details). As such, we
recognise our limitations. We can only introduce some ways of thinking about worldviews, but we hope that these will prove practical and engaging in the classroom, increasing students’
knowledge and awareness of their own and others’ worldviews
We spend some time on examining and applying James W. Sire’s model of worldview questions (pp. 4–11). This is a good starting point, as the questions are close to the kinds of things we
often address in our subject. As always, we include voices from religious and non-religious perspectives (pp. 12–13), which indicate something of the complexity and fluidity of worldviews in people’s lives. As well as starting by asking people questions, we also start at the other end: we present case studies that look at people’s actions, and ask students to discern what these reveal about these activists’ worldviews (pp. 14–15)
Our multidisciplinary approach introduces sociology and its questions and methods, with our disciplinary experts, Dr Rachael
Shillitoe and Dr Chris Cotter. We have set it up so you can take students through different processes, including gathering data, analysing it and drawing conclusions. Having examined it though the sociological lens, there is an opportunity to apply a religious studies lens as well. There are opportunities to reflect on the
potential of these disciplines for enriching an understanding of worldviews
Religion – our field of study – is vast, rich, complex and contested. Here we have selected content to illustrate how we can study religion in different ways. We might see religious
studies as a home discipline, which then draws on methods from many other disciplines. This contrasts with the theological approaches we often use, which tend to look for coherence
and deal with orthodoxy. RS tends to look at (non)religion as a social fact in descriptive and analytic ways (see Chris Cotter’s investigator file, pp. 8–9)
In this volume we analyse sociological data from the 2021 Pew Research data on religion in India, showing that the tidy boxes in which we often place religions in RE simply don’t reflect the reality of Indian religion (pp. 16–17). We apply methods of literary theory to the Ramayana, reading it from the goddess Sita’s perspective, offering a feminist viewpoint (pp. 18–19). Professor Linda Woodhead’s article (pp. 20–21) introduces her 2021 research, where mixed methods reveal the importance of values in the lives of Generation Z; she suggests that ‘values are the new religion’.
We look through an anthropological lens at ‘material religion’, including the use of amulets in Islam (pp. 26–29), and astrology in Hindu ways of living (pp. 30–31). Anthropological methods help to illuminate the integration of Christian and indigenous practice in southern Africa (pp. 32–33). We use these case studies to open up wider questions about the reality of a spiritual dimension in the lives of the majority of humans, and how this plays out in the secular world of the majority of our students
We also apply a critical lens to the nature of religion itself. In order to explore the relative importance of a range of features of religion, students undertake some research and compare it with data already collected (pp. 8–13). Building on this glimpse of the diversity of lived religion, students are then able to consider whether it is possible or desirable to pin religion down to a definition (pp. 14–15). Throughout, we offer opportunities for students to reflect on their own worldviews.
This story is one of a collection of stories from RE Today. Each story is available as a one-page pdf downloadable at the point of sale, free of charge. Each story is accompanied by Key Questions for pupils, or Activities for working with the story in the classroom; main themes covered by each story are identified
THEMES: feeling ashamed; saying sorry; being forgiven; changed character
This story is one of a collection of stories from RE Today. Each story is available as a one-page pdf downloadable at the point of sale, free of charge. Each story is accompanied by Key Questions for pupils, or Activities for working with the story in the classroom; main themes covered by each story are identified.
THEMES: revelation; commitment; experiencing God; friendship
This story is one of a collection of stories from RE Today. Each story is available as a one-page pdf downloadable at the point of sale, free of charge. Each story is accompanied by Key Questions for pupils, or Activities for working with the story in the classroom; main themes covered by each story are identified.
THEMES: faithfulness; obedience; sacrifice
This story is one of a collection of stories from RE Today. Each story is available as a one-page pdf downloadable at the point of sale, at a cost of just GBP1 per story. Each story is accompanied by Key Questions for pupils, or Activities for working with the story in the classroom; main themes covered by each story are identified
THEMES: hope
This story is one of a collection of stories from RE Today. Each story is available as a one-page pdf downloadable at the point of sale, free of charge. Each story is accompanied by Key Questions for pupils, or Activities for working with the story in the classroom; main themes covered by each story are identified.
THEMES: faith; prayer; turning point; Lailat al Miraj
This story is one of a collection of stories from RE Today. Each story is available as a one-page pdf downloadable at the point of sale, free of charge. Each story is accompanied by Key Questions for pupils, or Activities for working with the story in the classroom; main themes covered by each story are identified.
THEMES: loyalty; devotion; faith; evil; Holi
This story is one of a collection of stories from RE Today. Each story is available as a one-page pdf downloadable at the point of sale, free of charge. Each story is accompanied by Key Questions for pupils, or Activities for working with the story in the classroom; main themes covered by each story are identified.
THEMES: Allah’s wisdom; creation
This story is one of a collection of stories from RE Today. Each story is available as a one-page pdf downloadable at the point of sale, free of charge. Each story is accompanied by Key Questions for pupils, or Activities for working with the story in the classroom; main themes covered by each story are identified.
THEMES: God; Muhammad; respect; ritual
This story is one of a collection of stories from RE Today. Each story is available as a one-page pdf downloadable at the point of sale, free of charge. Each story is accompanied by Key Questions for pupils, or Activities for working with the story in the classroom; main themes covered by each story are identified.
THEMES: temptation; change; turning point
This story is one of a collection of stories from RE Today. Each story is available as a one-page pdf downloadable at the point of sale, free of charge. Each story is accompanied by Key Questions for pupils, or Activities for working with the story in the classroom; main themes covered by each story are identified.
THEMES: God; revelation; religious zeal
This story is one of a collection of stories from RE Today. Each story is available as a one-page pdf downloadable at the point of sale, free of charge. Each story is accompanied by Key Questions for pupils, or Activities for working with the story in the classroom; main themes covered by each story are identified.
THEMES: The power of Islam to change people’s lives; courage to stand up against prejudice; the call to prayer; standing up for what you believe in