Landscapes, Real and Imagined: ‘REforREal’

This chapter is based on research undertaken in 2014-15 called REforREal. Wordplay aside, the name makes a serious point – that RE and the real religion and belief landscape have been somewhat at odds, and that this is largely because RE has got stuck in a policy framework which is hopelessly muddled and outdated. The need for an urgent conversation about this is outlined elsewhere (see Brine, above) but the muddle can be characterised as a 20th century settlement for a 21st century reality. This is set against a growing vigour of debates about religion and belief across a range of academic disciplines, public settings and sectors (see Baker and Dinham 2018). It is largely driven by new laws against discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief, and by anxieties about migration and extremism. The question of what to do about religion and belief in general collides with the issue of how best to educate in this context. Is the current RE landscape up to the challenge? How might it be re-imagined, and what might the alternatives look like? REforREal was deliberately designed to join and invigorate a national and international conversation about this, and to point towards the future of teaching and learning about religion and belief – not only in RE itself, but elsewhere in the life and curricula of schools.