Concept Cracking:

An Approach to Teaching Religious Studies

Q: What do you see?

A: Bums in the air!

‘Bums in the air syndrome’

‘Bums in the air syndrome’ is a term used by Trevor Cooling in his paper ‘Concept Cracking: Exploring Christian Beliefs in Schools’ (Stapleford Project, UK) He uses it to describe his concern about an overly descriptive or ‘phenomenological’ approach to Religious Studies. This approach classifies the observable characteristics or ‘phenomena’ of religion into distinct categories such as ‘worship, rites of passage, festivals’. Typically students will describe, identify and compare these religious phenomena. The focus is on giving information about religions. This comes at the expense of exploring the religion’s meaning for

believers and of showing its relevance to students.

“I owe (bums in the air syndrome) to a Muslim friend, who complained that most school textbook photographs of Muslims at prayer are taken from the back of mosques. Of themselves such pictures do not help children grasp the centrality in Islam of belief in submission to Allah…the overall effect is often to leave children with the feeling that religion is very peculiar.” Trevor Cooling

Learning About, Learning From

Good Religious Studies comes from doing two things: 1. Learning about religion by focusing on meaning (window)

2. Learning from religion by making it relevant to the experiences of the student

(mirror)

Trevor Cooling uses the analogies of the window and the mirror to explain: Teachers should: • Create a window through which their students can peer and understand what it means to be a

believer. When understanding Muslim prayer, students need to understand the key concept of the centrality of submission to God in Islam. Looking at photographs of men praying should come towards the end of a unit on Islam, not the beginning!

• Create a mirror so that students can use the religion to reflect on their own experience of life. Western societies emphasise individual rights and freedoms. In Islam the emphasis is on submission and obedience to God. ‘Submission’ and ‘obedience’ often carry negative connotations in the West. Why? What can the West learn from Islam?

Concept Cracking and Christianity

‘Bums in the air syndrome’ is applicable to all religions, including Christianity. Many of the children that you teach will not be Christian. Christian ‘phenomena’ will seem as odd and irrelevant to them as photographs of Muslim men praying unless key Christian concepts are tackled or ‘cracked’ first.

What do we mean by a ‘concept’?

• Concepts are ideas.

• Beliefs are religious concepts that religious people commit to.

• Underlying all religious phenomena (including sacred texts and people) are beliefs.

• Christian beliefs often do not form part of students’ everyday lives so they can seem strange and irrelevant.

• The task of the Religious Studies teacher is to build a bridge between the religious concept and the child’s experience of the world so that it becomes meaningful and relevant.

• This is what concept cracking does: it gets underneath the phenomena and cracks the beliefs which underpins them. It then relates the beliefs back to the life experiences of the student.

Concept Cracking

“Concept cracking is a process that involves identifying main concepts in what you teach, selecting one, relating it to the pupils’ experience and using this experience as a bridge to the religious concept” Trevor Cooling Step 1: Unpack the beliefs in a topic

Step 2: Select one belief to explore

Step 3: Experience of the child (build the bridge)

Step 4: Relate the experience back to the concept and explore

1. Unpack the beliefs in a topic

Within any given topic there will be a number of concepts/beliefs.

Look at the topic to be covered and work out which concepts are in that topic.

Example topic: Creation

Beliefs embedded in Creation: God made the world, something coming from nothing, stewardship, temptation and sin, humankind created in the image of God.

It is important that you spend time identifying the beliefs so that you don’t try to teach them all at the same time.

2. Select one belief to focus on

A focus must be identified so that the teacher is clear about which belief is being taught at any one time. Two beliefs could be used.

Example: Stewardship

This belief is about God entrusting people in the world, people taking responsibility for the world, not dominating the world but looking after it on behalf of God.

Sometimes further unpacking is needed if the chosen belief is a complex one e.g. incarnation might be a concept identified in a unit on Jesus but incarnation itself needs more unpacking: identifying with humans, creator becoming part of creation, relinquishing power etc.

3. Experience

Relate the belief to the experience of the child.

This is absolutely essential in a society where religious beliefs do not form a part of the everyday experience of many children.

You need to build the bridge between the world of the religious belief and the world of the students’ experience.

This means taking ideas from the religious world and finding parallels in the students’ experience of the world. This enables them to make sense of the religious world.

Example: Stewardship: Students think about when they have been entrusted with looking after something precious – how did they treat it? Students think about when they have been responsible for something.

4. Relate and Reflect

Relate the experience of the pupil back to the concept.

Explore the concept, discuss it, complete activities and reflect

Example: read the creation narratives and explore what it means to be stewards of the Earth. Because they have already related this concept to their own experience, they will now understand it in its religious context.

Discuss: how does the concept of stewardship affect how people treat the environment? Animals? Other people? Is it our responsibility to look after the world? What happens when we mistreat it? How might this affect believers’ relationship with God?

Concept Cracking example topic 2: Laws and Rules

Unpack the topic: guides for life, a way to organise society, setting boundaries, sin, obedience to God, authority, freedom

Select a concept to focus on: guides for life and authority

Experience of the student: what rules do you have in your life? Rules at home, between friends, at school, rules that you set yourself. Explore secular laws and what authority they have – what happens if you break the law? Who has the authority to make laws and enforce them? Set up a thought experiment – imagine you are stranded on an island. What rules would you set up? Which reality TV shows use this idea? Are rules subjective? Why do people disagree about right and wrong?

Relate and reflect on the concept: What rules are there in (the particular religion that is being studied). Where did they come from? What gives them authority? Why do believers accept them?

We will return to concept cracking when looking at the concept of God (Philosophy of Religion) and a unit on Buddhism (World Religions). Now it is your turn to crack a concept: Forgiveness Sin Judgment Love

Unpack Select Experience Relate and Reflect