Professor Bob Bowie

I have been invited to be apart of the “After Religious Education: Reimagining Religion and Worldviews Education” project led by Dr David Levin of Strathclide University. The project website has now been launched. It says: “

This project aims to explore the nature of the educational representation of religion(s) and to support the development of a new vision for Religion Education (Religion and Worldviews). The project draws attention to the limitations of the predominant world religions paradigm (WRP) in the educational representation of religion(s). Drawing on the expertise of academic specialists in Religious Studies and Education Studies along with skilled and experienced teachers, the project seeks to reimagine Religious Education by recognising the complexity of subject matter while acknowledging the pedagogical challenges.” (https://butterfly-butterfly-bnhl.squarespace.com)

I was really pleased back in Advent 2020 to have a conversation with David Lewin . I had been wanting to talk to David for a while, ever since hearing a paper he gave at a symposium on reduction and the curriculum. That might come as a bit of a shock for RE teachers where World Religions has tended to be seen as a more progressive approach than other approaches but perhaps Lewin is revealing that the school subject has more to learn from academic developments and Lewin’s own insights are interesting. In this video we touch on this issue and also a number of other related topics.

David’s related publications: 

Lewin, D. (2020) “Religion, Reductionism and Pedagogical Reduction”. In Biesta and Hannam (eds.) Religion and Education. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Sense. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004446397…

Lewin, D. (2020) Reimagining the RE/RS Curriculum, in The BASR Bulletin, the British Association for the Study of Religions. Available at: https://basr.ac.uk/2020/11/18/basr-bu…

Lewin, D. (2020) Between horror and boredom: fairy tales and moral education, Ethics and Education, 15:2, 213-231, DOI: 10.1080/17449642.2020.1731107 

Lewin, D. (2018) Toward a Theory of Pedagogical Reduction: Selection, Simplification, and Generalization in an Age of Critical Education. Educational Theory, 68: 495-512. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12326

David and I had a great chat about things related to this area on Youtube.