The return to worldview: Reflections from the UK

Abstract

My first degree was in the natural sciences, during which I accumulated knowledge but thought little about the nature of that knowledge. The normative view that I unconsciously absorbed was a positivist realism that simply assumed that the world was exactly as scientists saw it. And that was how I held my Christian faith as well. Truth was what I read in the pages of Scripture (or at least what I was told that I read there by my Christian gurus). The notion of interpretation in either science or Christian faith never crossed my mind. And then I came across Thomas Kuhn (1962) and his notion of scientific paradigms. My good fortune was to have the opportunity to study a module on the philosophy of science as part of my science degree. Suddenly it dawned on me that my assumed, common-sense realism might actually be naı¨ve. I was introduced to Imre Lakatos' (Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970) notion of a scientific research programme, which was his attempt to square the circle between Kuhn's seemingly subjective paradigm notion and Karl Popper's (1992) more objective idea of falsification. I even found out that there are anarchic philosophers who thought that science was a human construction (Feyerabend, 2010). Maybe what I thought were literal, objective descriptions of reality might be fictions of the human mind. As I moved from learning science to teaching science, two further challenges impacted on my developing thinking. The first was that education might itself be more problematic than I thought. When I was training to teach, my professor, Paul Hirst, was a leading figure in the London School that pioneered the notion that sophisticated education (the version he advocated) was purely rational whereas Christian education (the vocation that I believed I was called to) was primitive, because it rested on contested beliefs (Hirst, 1981). The second was that I did not yet know how to rescue my Christian faith from the bog of relativism into which it seemed to be sinking. My response was simply to get on with the job. I threw myself into extra-curricular Christian activity, invested time and energy in Christian schools' work organizations like Youth for Christ, and started to teach Religious Education as a way of sharing my Christian faith.

Religious education for spiritual bricoleurs? the perceptions of students in ten Christian-ethos secondary schools in England and Wales

“…The research findings presented here concur with Roebben that facilitating spiritual development is not about faith formation in a specific tradition; it is about enabling young people to participate in the dialogue between religions and basic life options. Another way of looking at this is that the task of RE is to help young people develop their personal worldview in encounters with an institutional Christian worldview (Commission on Religious Education, 2018, Cooling, 2019). The concept of spiritual bricoleur could help us to understand what is going on in that encounter between personal and institutional worldviews.…”

“…Here the RE or Worldview education classroom functions as a safe space for encounter and exploration of others beliefs, with an acknowledgment of a fluid, flexible and more eclectic approach to religious identity (Åhs, Poulter, Kallioniemi, 2016). It is a space where students are developing their personal worldview, in encounters with institutional worldviews, religious, and nonreligious (Commission on Religious Education, 2018, Cooling, 2019). The concept of NLS encompasses the understanding of spirituality identified by Hay and Nye, (2006) and Hyde, (2008), offers a space for developing a personal worldview, while recognising that young people's approaches are individualistic; undertaken in the way of a bricoleur, fluid and fragmented.…”

THE COMMISSION ON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION – a RESPONSE TO L. PHILIP BARNES

“…This, it was said, needed 'to move beyond an essentialised study of six "major world faiths" and towards a deeper understanding of the complex diverse and plural nature of worldviews' (CoRE, 2018, p. 6). In deploying the notion of worldview, I argued that CoRE's primary intention was to instigate a paradigm shift in the way RE is taught rather than to add additional content as Barnes interprets it (Cooling, 2019(Cooling, &, 2020Cooling et al, 2020).…”

A critical reflection on the Commission on Religious Education’s proposed National Entitlement to Religion and Worldviews in England and Wales

“…Cooling is resistant to a monolithic definition for Religion and Worldviews preferring Tharani's metaphor of a 'can opener' that 'opensup thinking through identifying family resemblances between different uses of the term' (Cooling, 2020, 47;Cooling, 2021, 12;Tharani, 2020, 5). Literature with genuine intention of constructively 'opening up' Religion and Worldviews as it relates to CoRE's proposed National Entitlement has acknowledged the legacy of Jackson's (1997) 'interpretive approach' (Cooling, 2020, 408); expressed a departure from essentialist representations of religions influenced by the world-religions paradigm (Tharani, 2020); expressed a need for authentic representations of human meaning-making that embrace dynamism and intersectionality (Cooling, 2019); and advocated a move away from content-heavy propositional knowledge towards constructive understanding of how religious and non-religious orientations 'work' in human life (Cush, 2021). To sharpen how the distinctiveness of Religion and Worldviews is expressed these, and likely other, attributes will need to gel through ongoing critical dialogue.…”