Where did the ideas for our project come from?

Project Investigator Dr Mary Woolley tells the origins story:

About 5 years ago I became involved in a research project with one of our university research centres, NICER. The research explored beginning teachers’ experiences of science religion encounters in the classroom. We ran focus groups with 75 student teachers across 6 universities in England. We then put together a big survey on the subject which was completed by nearly a thousand teachers and student teachers.

We found out lots about the kind of science religion encounters that beginning teachers experienced, and about the science religion encounters that teachers wanted to see more of. We define a science religion encounter as when science creeps into an RE lesson or when religion or ethics creeps into a science lesson. Some of our project findings are reported here and here.

During the focus groups we noticed that teachers of science seemed to have a different conception of the purpose of RE to teachers of RE. The same was true vice versa. It got us thinking about how often such teachers get the chance to talk to one another, especially about the purpose of what they teach and the substantive subject matter they teach. Read more about this here.

In our survey, we asked about purpose, but we also asked about how teachers perceived the relationship between the science and RE departments in their school. We used terms adapted from Barbour as possible descriptions of this relationship: conflict, independence, dialogue and integration. You can read more detail here, but we found lots of participants chose the word ‘independence’ to describe the relationship between the departments and far fewer chose the words ‘dialogue’ or ‘collaboration’.

Through the project findings we came to suggest that dialogue and a shared understanding of purpose might be important preconditions of effective interdisciplinarity in schools. When we presented this finding at a UCET conference, Dr Tom Breeze and Emma O’Dubhchair approached us from Cardiff Metroplitan University and suggested that some of our ideas might apply to the new Curriculum for Wales, which encourages both disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches.

Our interest was piqued. We designed a research project to explore the teacher-teacher dialogue happening in Wales. We decided on a focus of sustainability and climate change education. More about that decision later, but it was for us it was a topic where an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approach seemed crucial, despite all of us agreeing the importance of disciplinary knowledge in schools.

Templeton World Charity Foundation agreed to fund the project in July. We have three years to explore substantive teacher-teacher dialogue in Wales. We’re launching with a survey for secondary school teachers in early January 2025 so look out for that and tell your teacher friends. We have a pilot project planned for a school in June 2025. Then in 2026 we’ll be launching a professional learning programme which plans to explore, inspire and, if necessary, deepen, interdisciplinary conversations between teachers of different subjects.

We have a wonderful research team of experienced teacher educators from both CCCU and Cardiff Met. We’re excited to build up networks, to read and learn and share our findings.

Thanks for reading this far. If you think you could be interested in the next stages of our project, do come to https://nicer.org.uk/cultivating-dialogue and click on the ‘get involved’ button at the bottom of the page.

Author: Dr Mary Woolley