RE:Connect

RE:Connect, which has been running since 2021, is jointly funded by Culham St. Gabriel’s trust and the St. Peter’s Saltley trust and was co-designed with Ian Jones. In British schools, learning about topics like climate change and care for nature are often limited to science classes. This project was designed to confront this problem, based on the conviction that it is also crucial to design learning on these topics as a part of our culture, values and worldviews in ways that humanities subjects, and RE particularly are ideally placed to support. In contrast to knowledge-exchange models, where teachers are given “content”, sometimes ready-made by academics, but poorly suited for classroom use, this project works through an innovative teacher fellowship model (one of the first times it has been used in TRS). Through our workshops and activities, teacher fellows are connected with cutting-edge research in religion and ecology, theological ethics and sustainability education, but the fundamental aim of the project is to empower teachers to draw on their own existing pedagogical expertise and contexts to develop new and innovative curriculum projects which are tailored to real-life classroom situations. You can see examples of curriculum projects by past project fellows and more on the project website.