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Pedagogic Approaches

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Special Religious Education in Australia and its Value to Contemporary Society

Abstract

While SRE can continue to contribute to social cohesion and a healthy society, pedagogic approaches need to be updated so that they can comply with current educational theory and government policy. This chapter will discuss key pedagogic strategies which need to be introduced. These include the need to combine both socialisation and education in the SRE/RI classroom; to foster a constructivist approach to teaching about the religion rather than an essentialist approach; to draw on the techniques of experiential and informal education; and to ensure reflective rather than an instrumental teaching and learning pedagogy, including the implementation of the interpretative approach as delineated by Robert Jackson. This will ensure that SRE/RI creates bricoleur teachers who draw on critical religious pedagogy, encouraging students to ask questions, express doubts and through a process of questioning and exploration pass through the threshold of liminality to have a transformative experience (Meyer and Land in Overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, Routledge, London and New York, 2006; Cousin in Planet 17:1–2, 2006; and Rymarz in J Adult Theological Educ 13:163–170, 2016). As well, there needs to be a higher level of transparency and accountability through clear and accessible curriculum statements, teacher accreditation and basic, mandatory professional development to enable this transition from a didactic, essentialist approach, criticised in academic studies, to a constructivist approach. We shall argue that SRE/RI teachers see their role as a vocation but if they can be assisted to incorporate these key elements of current educational thinking into their teaching and learning, SRE/RI classes will address current criticisms and be much more effective.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Zehavit Gross

  2. Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Suzanne D. Rutland

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  1. Zehavit Gross
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Correspondence to Zehavit Gross .

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Gross, Z., Rutland, S.D. (2021). Pedagogic Approaches. In: Special Religious Education in Australia and its Value to Contemporary Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67969-9_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67969-9_9

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