Year 7&8 RE Inquiry

[Jannath Participant]

Hi all, my apologies for cross posting this but I thought it would be valuable to create a new thread for this particular subject. This is what I posted under “Context in Year 10 Chosen Literature.”

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RE background: I will be given the summer term to do an inquiry project with Year 7. The teacher would like me to focus on the Construct part of the cycle. They would have studied all that they needed to know in order to complete this project and the teacher would like to use this as a form of assessment. I am a bit confused about which way I should approach this and how to present it. I would like to do something similar to the Year 9 booklet, however, I fear this may be overwhelming and too advanced for the students in the class.

The question we have chosen is: Why do people believe in God, and how do they express it? They will focus on Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism as this is what they would have covered already. We will ask them to choose and group up. They will be ‘villagers’ and, by the end of their project, will need to invite people into their ‘village’ to talk about their chosen religion. They can decide who they can role play within their own religion: for example, a priest, a churchgoer, a catholic, a protestant, a person who studies the bible etc. I will take the advice on the Construct page on board and not tell them that this will be the format of the assessment. This will be told once they’ve gathered all their information.  In terms of the Construct stage of the inquiry – I’m not sure how to lead them through it. Any help will be very much appreciated!

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An update: I have spoken to the RE teacher since and she’d like me to focus on the following skills –

Note-taking, finding relevant information, how to reference (specific to RE, has asked me to choose a method), summarising information, identifying and understanding the difference between primary/secondary sources, validating religious perspectives (cross-referencing with other texts), and directly quoting religious texts. 

I’m very aware that fact and opinion work very differently in RE, and the rules of validity vary when it comes to religious perspectives and philosophy. And I think that’s where I was getting confused. My MSc thesis was actually on religious information literacy, and now that I think about it… inquiry was heavily implied! So this is quite close to my particular interest and really would like to do this justice. I’ve always wanted to create a framework when it comes to inquiry in religious studies and think this may be quite a useful place to start.

Has anyone else done any RE inquiries? Planned anything? I will update here once I’ve created the resources.

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Thanks for separating the topics, Jannath – I was going to suggest that.

Thoughts on your initial post:

• Even if you are going to focus on Construct, I think there would still be value in starting with an overview of the Cycle for two main reasons and stepping them briefly through Connect, Wonder and Investigate. Firstly, as you pointed out in your Year 10 Context in Chosen Literature topic, the importance of establishing intellectual and emotional engagement during Connect cannot be overstated. Secondly, Construct is a logical stage in a learning process, so helping students to locate themselves in that learning process is important.
• The graphic organisers that we have developed for stages/ skill sets, which are freely available in Resources, as well as those that are freely available for individual skills through the Empire State Information Fluency Continuum (by Standard or Grade), serve as tools for instruction and/ or assessment. So, any graphic organiser(s) that you adopt and/ or adapt, for Construct could count towards assessment (see below). However, if they have already been taught/ learnt what they need to know – which would be unfortunate if learning important content remained divorced from the inquiry – then perhaps the focus should be on a culminating product in Express, which would include, more or less briefly, Connect, Wonder Investigate, and Construct.
• We have used inquiry journals very effectively to support students in Primary through all the stages in the process.

This leads to thoughts on your second post:

• The number and complexity of the skills that your RE teacher is looking for is ambitious for Year 7 (perhaps not unreasonably so, because it’s not clear how much time you have – number of lesson, length of lessons, and homework, or not).
• Most of these skills fall into Investigate skill sets (see below), with Referencing in Express/ Academic Integrity (although recording the bibliographic details is necessary in Investigate). So, from the skills it looks like the focus is Investigate, and there are graphic organisers to instruct/ assess those skills. However, the ‘talk’ about their chosen religion sounds like a culminating product, which is Express, and to get there they would need to meaningfully go through Construct.
• Given that it seems like they will need to progress through more than one stage, agreed clarity on the focus of the assessment will be vital.

Perhaps the most versatile graphic organiser, given the points above, will be some form of the Investigative Journal, which we have adapted for use in primary and secondary (both versions available in Resources), and I include an example below from our Year 9 Signature Work inquiry:

This could be easily simplified and, clearly, there are a range of skills implicit in this example, such as having been able to find the information that I am now working with.

We have chosen APA to base our referencing style on, mainly because at a school level it is essentially the same as Harvard (which is very common), it is simpler than MLA, it is available in Word (which we use in school), and it is the standard style we use for HPQ (Year 10) and EPQ (Year 12/13). This is how it is currently worded in our draft Academic Integrity Policy (which is adapted from the Framework of Skills):

• By the end of Year 2: With help, makes a list of the source(s) used with title and author 
• By the end of Year 6: Provides a bibliography of all sources used according to the primary school style format {details to be finalised in conjunction with Heads of Inquiry-Based Learning, ICT and Juniors as part of the Year 6 Signature Work} 
• By the end of Year 9: Cites all sources used according to the secondary school style format {in our case this is the fundamentals of the APA standard style format, with details to be finalised in conjunction with the Heads of Inquiry-Based Learning, ICT and English as part of the Year 9 Signature Work} 
• Over Years 10 and 11: Cites all sources used according to the secondary school style format {details to be finalised following the above} 
• Over Years 12 and 13: Cites all sources used according to the APA standard style format {details to be finalised following the above}

I hope that this help you somewhat in moving this exciting and important project forwards.

[Author]

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