I am really pleased to be able to publish this special Advent conversation with Dr David Lewin of Strathclyde university. 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. More recently he got in touch about a project he is working on looking at religious education in schools might learn from the movement away from the world religions paradigm of teaching in higher education. 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