Religious Education Summer School 2022

Do you teach Religious Education (RE)? Would you like to develop your subject knowledge? Would you like the guidance and support of a specialist Personal Tutor from Edge Hill University? Our Religious Education Summer School may be for you.

Following on from the hugely successful ‘Text and Story’ week of 2021, we are delighted to be able to offer a free summer school for a limited number of teachers of RE (primary and secondary) to improve their subject knowledge. Thanks to the generous support of Culham St Gabriel’s Trust, this year we are able to make this a residential summer school at the stunning Edge Hill Campus in Ormskirk, running from Monday 25 Friday 29 July 2022.

The theme of the summer school is ‘Challenges and Controversies in Contemporary Religion’.

We are delighted to be able to welcome Professor David Aldridge to be our Keynote Speaker on the Monday and have invited Professor Bob Bowie to present a keynote seminar on the first day too.

Through the week there will then be five seminars from our expert team of Religion specialist tutors, two meetings with your allocated personal supervisor and a field visit to a religious community, as well as plenty of time and space to work on your own question/area of development. On the Thursday evening we have included a visit to see the musical the Book of Mormon in Liverpool. The Friday will be an opportunity to present the fruits of your week’s labour to your peers and the tutor team. This will very much be a ‘work in progress’ and we would expect your completed project to be sent to us by 5 September 2022. We hope to publish some or all of them on the Edge Hill website, and there may be opportunities to further disseminate your work.

Who should apply to the Religious Education Summer School?

The week is open to all teachers of RE and will be fully residential. All teaching, food, accommodation on our campus and travel to the field visits during the week will be included, thanks to the generosity of Edge Hill’s Faculty of Education and the Culham St Gabriel’s Trust.

During the week all attendees will be working on a ‘project’. This research topic could be practical or theoretical, so for example you might look at putting a scheme of work together to teach about the challenges of science and evolution to religious belief. Or you might want to do a more ‘academic’ in-depth analysis of Christian theology from a queer perspective. We are really interested to hear your ideas of how you would like to develop your subject knowledge as teachers of RE.

Application process for the Religious Education Summer School.

To apply for one of these limited number of free places on our summer school we ask you to write a short paragraph in answer to each of two simple questions:

1. How would the summer school help your subject knowledge as a teacher of RE?
2. What question or area of development would you like to work on during the week – and why?

Application is by completing this online application form before 12pm on Monday 16 May 2022 together with some personal contextual details.

Submit your application

What happened last year?

Text and Story was a brand new CPD initiative for Teachers of RE at Edge Hill University.

Teachers applied and spent the week producing some sort of ‘project’, either a piece of academic work or a curriculum initiative.

A week-long programme of seminars was designed and offered by Edge Hill University Religion and Worldviews subject specialists.

The programme included a day of visits to local places of worship, connected with the summer school theme.

Edge Hill experts acted as tutors, providing one to one tuition during the week to support participants’ chosen curriculum development project.

On the final day, participants presented their curriculum development work to each other. They then put together their project and we have edited the best of them and put them together in this pdf format.

We are delighted to have helped a small number of Teachers of RE develop their subject knowledge and in some cases re-written their entire Key Stage 4 Curriculum.

We are delighted that we will be able to run another Subject Knowledge School for Teachers of RE in Summer 2022

Read the findings from the papers