Read our news update from members around ISREV!
News from Dr Brian Gates, Emeritus Professor of Religion, Ethics & Education, University of Cumbria, LANCASTER. My continuing preoccupation is this: Worship isn’t peculiar to institutional religious expression. Its ingredients feature universally in human experience. www.commonwealthing.org explores how this might be enjoyably opened up in English schools and colleges. Please critique. Best wishes to all. Brian
News from W. Y. Alice Chan, PhD, OCT, Executive Director and Co-Founder, The Centre for Civic Religious Literacy – Le centre de littératie religieuse civique. It was a pleasure to meet many of you virtually at the ISREV conference this week. As most of Canada does not have any form of mandatory RE, our non-profit initiated a Civic Literacy Youth Network to support youth and young adult formation of religious literacy via a virtual network across the country. This fall, we will begin our second cohort.
EN: https://ccrl-clrc.ca/clyn/
FR: https://ccrl-clrc.ca/fr/rjec/
We welcome your feedback and interest.
Also, if you know of any secondary, college, and undergraduate university students based in Canada who would be interested in this opportunity, we would appreciate it if you could kindly share the call for applications with them. To do so, please feel free to copy and paste the first paragraph on our website, or forward details from our social media posts (linked in my signature). The deadline to apply is: August 21, 2023, 9 am Pacific Standard Time.
News from ISREV Member Denise Cush and the Big Ideas for RE team in the UK: Our free web-based curriculum for religious education https://bigideasforre.org/ is designed to meet the needs of ALL young people, including the massively growing number of those professing ‘no-religion’. The website provides a complete guide for those developing the RE curriculum for schools. New exemplars have been added in the last two days.
News from Prof. Dr. Ilona Nord, Universität Würzburg. Prof. Dr. Ilona writes: I would very much like to be among you now in person. Now I am sending an article that I was just able to publish online. It is the paper I had already announced for the ISREV-program. So all of you who are interested in the transformation of religious education in the realm of a culture of digitality, the article will provide empirical and conceptional insights from the German context. https://doi.org/10.25972/OPUS-32280.
With many good wishes and blessings, Ilona
News from Phra Nicholas, Associate Editor: Challenging Religious Issues: For those unfamiliar with this A-level Religious Studies teaching resource, I am pleased to introduce Challenging Religious Issues – an online journal (edited, not peer reviewed) supported by the St Mary’s and St Giles’ Centre and Saint Peter’s Saltley Trust.
If any ISREV delegates or members are looking for an outlet for their ideas or research on religion or religious education, and are able to simplify these to make them interesting for 16-18 year old Religious Studies students in the UK in a 2000 word article, please contact Phra Nicholas Thanissaro (nthanissaro@cst.edu) or Prof. Jeff Astley (jeff.astley.durham.ac.uk) to see about getting your work included in an upcoming edition, as we are always seeking new content.With all best wishes
News from ISREV Member Mualla Selçuk and the WEL Ankara Team: Learning in Encounter for Common Values in Diversity: Based on their long-standing expertise in intercultural and interreligious projects and programmes in teacher education, eight European universities and four schools have come together because they want to respond to the demands and the challanges of living within diverse societies.
Sharing Worldviews: Learning in Encounter for Common Values in Diversitywants to encourage respectful encounters between diverse religious or secular, collective or individuel worldviews. It provides teaching materials for schools and universities and an international qualification course for students to prepare future generations for peaceful coexistence.
Come and join us! Click https://sharing-worldviews.com/en
from ISREV Member Bob Bowie and the team at NICER in the UK: Project Name: The Beginning Teacher in the Science Religion Encounter. How can we help pupils to make sense of Science Religion encounters in the classroom, when so little dialogue and discussion happens at the planning stages of curriculum development? Find out about our research and try out out extensive free pdf resources for teacher development with an animation to watch as well. Go to: https://nicer.org.uk/science-religion-encounters