Teaching Religious Education Creatively

Sally Elton-Chalcraft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317804772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Teaching Religious Education Creatively offers a brand new approach for the primary classroom and is crammed full of innovative ideas for bringing the teaching of RE to life. It helps teachers understand what constitutes a healthy curriculum that will encourage children to appreciate and understand different belief systems. Perhaps most importantly, it also challenges teachers to understand RE as a transformatory subject that offers children the tools to be discerning, to work out their own beliefs and answer puzzling questions.

Underpinned by the latest research and theory and with contemporary, cutting-edge practice at the forefront, expert authors emphasise creative thinking strategies and teaching creatively. Key topics explored include:

• What is creative teaching and learning?
• Why is it important to teach creatively and teach for creativity?
• What is Religious Education?
• Why is it important for children to learn 'about' and 'from' religion?
• How can you teach non-biased RE creatively as a discrete subject and integrate it with other curriculum areas?

Teaching Religious Education Creatively is for all teachers who want to learn more about innovative teaching and learning in RE in order to improve understanding and enjoyment and transform their own as well as their pupil's lives.

Section 1
Teaching Religious Education Creatively

Aims and principles

Chapter 1
Introduction

Creative Religious Education

Sally Elton-Chalcraft

This chapter sets the scene for the whole volume by outlining what is meant by creative teaching and learning and how this can be put into practice in religious education. The book, and this chapter in particular, attempts to answer the following five questions.

1. What is creative teaching and learning?
2. Why is it important to teach creatively and teach for creativity?
3. What is religious education?
4. Why is it important for children to learn ‘about’ and ‘from’ religion?
5. How do I teach non-biased RE creatively as a discrete subject and integrated with other curriculum areas?

This first chapter introduces all five elements. Subsequent chapters expand on these topics, drawing on each author’s wealth of experience and knowledge.

What is Creative Teaching and Learning?

Creativity has been notoriously difficult to define – in some literature it is defined as an abstract noun with particular characteristics as described in the NACCCE 1999 policy document (Table 1.1). In contrast, some authors define creative strategies actively as a verb – creative thinking (Buzan’s 2014 mind mapping, de Bono’s 2014 thinking hats, Cremin et al.’s 2012 possibility thinking). Some authors approach creativity in education in terms of strands – creative thinking, creative teaching and teaching for creativity, and creative integration of subjects (Copping and Howlett 2008).

Creativity also has been discussed from different cultural perspectives (Craft et al. 2007), which is pertinent to the debate because at the heart of religious education is a desire to learn about a variety of cultures.

School CCAF (challenging, creative and fun) and school HEBS (hard/easy, boring, scary)

To gain an understanding of creative teaching and learning in practice we could transport ourselves to two hypothetical schools in the UK where the children are engaged in learning. From the very first moment the children enter the classroom, in school CCAF (challenging, creative and fun), the enthusiastic teacher engages them in creative learning, see Table 1.2. Children experience a vibrant classroom environment with interactive displays and activities which encourage them to generate novel ideas or ways of working. Both the teacher and the children are having fun but are also challenged. If you have read Hooray for Diffendoofer Day (Prelutsky and Smith 1998 but inspired by Dr Seuss) you may have some idea of what this exciting classroom looks like and what its mirror image in Dreary town is like too (which I call HEBS – hard/easy, boring, scary). Both the teacher and children will look forward to coming to CCAF school most of the time. Things do not always run smoothly in our hypothetical classroom – which is, after all, in the ‘real’ world, but there is usually an excited ‘buzz’ and any visitor will instantly know that learning is taking place.

Table 1.1 Definition of creativity from National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE 1999:29)

Table 1.2 Characteristics of caricatured CCAF and HEBS schools

CCAF (challenging, creative and fun) school	HEBS (too hard/easy, boring, scary) school
Children and teachers are challenged, have fun and are creative at school.	Teachers and learners find school too hard or too easy, boring or scary.
Children possess the magnificent eight qualities of a powerful learner (Claxton 2007; see Table 1.3) – curious, imaginative, disciplined, reflective etc.	Children are unmotivated to learn, get upset when they make mistakes or fail, are bullies or victims of bullying.
Teachers enjoy the challenge of planning, teaching and assessing. They have positive relationships with their pupils and find their jobs tiring but rewarding.	Teachers put minimum effort into planning, teaching and assessing. They dominate or are scared by their pupils. They are miserable, feel powerless and only work to pay their bills.

The learners at CCAF (challenging, creative and fun) school would possess characteristics which Claxton has defined as the ‘magnificent eight’ (Claxton 2007:123), listed in Table 1.3.

So the teachers in CCAF school build their children’s ‘learning muscles’ and ‘learning stamina’ (Claxton 2007) to achieve the magnificent eight characteristics of a powerful learner. But Claxton (2007) warns the teacher against being overly stringent in ‘building learning power’ – the children are not to be seen as mini athletes who must be challenged almost to the breaking point. Elton-Chalcraft and Mills (2013) state that learning should be challenging and yet also it must be fun. But it is a tall order for the primary teacher to plan and facilitate lessons which will allow children to be creative, use their imagination, be challenged and also have fun. However, these are not mutually exclusive. If children have a positive mindset towards learning then they will be intrinsically motivated to learn – the fun will spring from the satisfaction of struggling with a task but eventually making some progress. Creative teaching and learning can be fun if both the teacher and the children gain satisfaction from the challenge, if they know what it is like to feel exhilaration after a struggle. The children at CCAF (creative, challenging and fun) school enjoy the challenge of learning compared with their counterparts in HEBS (hard/easy, boring, scary) school, who are bored. While this is an exaggerated caricature, nevertheless these two schools illustrate two opposing approaches to learning. Similarly children may display opposing characteristics as learners. Two characters in the film version of the Dr Seuss (1997) book The Cat in the Hat demonstrate this point – a sister’s over-cautious disposition and fear of fun are contrasted with her brother’s reckless risk taking and fun-loving disposition. By the end of the film both children have moved from their polarised positions, realising that fun and risk taking (the characteristics of creativity) are necessary but in moderation. Their opposing characteristics were measured on a ‘phunometre’ (fun measurement) scale. Elton-Chalcraft and Mills (2013:2) adopt this fictitious ‘phunometre’ scale to evaluate teaching and learning contexts – the learning environment (for example interactive displays, working wall, mind mapping, use of stimulating resources) and planned activities (problem solving, open-ended investigation, creative thinking strategies). See Table 1.4.

Table 1.3 Guy Claxton’s ‘magnificent 8 qualities of a powerful learner’ (Claxton 2007:123–6)

Table 1.4 The ‘phunometre scale’ used by Elton-Chalcraft and Mills (2013) for measuring fun and challenge for both the learning environment and planned activities

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Why is it Important to Teach Creatively and Teach for Creativity?

First I argue that it is more fulfilling to work and learn in a school which exhibits creative and challenging learning and teaching. Second I argue that teachers who teach creatively, and teach for creativity, move beyond a transmission model to a powerful and transformative model of teaching, thus the curriculum is more meaningful. In the third part of my argument I suggest that a creative and transformative model of teaching and learning provides the children with resilience and learning power to prepare them for their future lives.

1. Better to work and learn in a creative school

Our two schools, CCAF (creative, challenging and fun) and HEBS (hard/easy, boring, scary), may be caricatures; however, they show the extremes of two opposing philosophies. At school CCAF there are enthused, curious, resilient life-long learners working with motivated, hard-working and happy teachers dedicated to building the children’s ‘learning muscles’ and ‘learning stamina’, thus avoiding ‘learned helplessness’ (Claxton 2007, 2008). In contrast school HEBS is populated with bored and disaffected children frightened of failure with scared, demotivated and unhappy teachers. In reality most schools have elements of both these characteristics, but the aim would be to strive to be school CCAF. Thus it is important to teach creatively and teach for creativity so that both the teachers and the children feel fulfilled, enjoy the learning and experience a sense of achievement. Cullingford (2007) has argued that children need extrinsic rewards if the curriculum is sterile and boring, and behaviour management strategies are needed to keep children on task, whereas if children are given more ownership of their learning in an engaging and creative curriculum they are more likely to be motivated to learn.

2. A meaningful curriculum

Educationalists such as Bruner (1996) and neuroscientists such as Heilmann (2005) and Claxton (1997) have all argued that children are more motivated by a creative curriculum which makes sense to them, includes problem solving and child-led investigation and develops their thinking skills. Neuroscience teaches us that knowledge makes more sense when it is contextualised (Heilmann 2005). Teachers who are skill and concept builders play a crucial role in making the curriculum meaningful as opposed to task managers and curriculum deliverers who merely transmit knowledge or keep children busy with tasks (Twiselton 2004). Task managers are described by Twiselton (2004) as teachers who view their role in terms of task completion, order and business with little reference to children making sense of their learning. Teachers who are curriculum deliverers also lack an understanding of a meaningful curriculum, seeing their role merely as delivering an externally decided set of skills and knowledge (Twiselton 2004). Skill and concept builders on the other hand see the ‘bigger picture’ and endeavour to design a meaningful curriculum which makes sense in terms of principles and concepts (Twiselton and Elton-Chalcraft 2014). Thus a creative and effective teacher is also a ski...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of contributors
• Series editor’s foreword
• SECTION 1 Teaching religious education creatively: aims and principles
• SECTION 2 Creative approaches in religious education
• SECTION 3 Covering controversial issues creatively
• Afterword
• Index