Religious Education and Social and Community Cohesion

This book will quickly become essential reading for anyone with a professional interest and engagement in RE.  Like its predecessor, Pedagogies of Religious Education, it will prove invaluable as a text for student teachers following a PGCE course in RE.

• Does knowing about religion encourage pupils to have positive attitudes to diversity?
• Do faith schools help or hinder social and community cohesion?
• Should RE be more closely related to citizenship?
• What contribution can schooling make to the creation of a just and equitable society?
• Does RE relativise and domesticate religious traditions by imposing an alien and secularist structure upon them in order to study them?
• Should RE be seen to be an ally in combating extremism? 

For his final book in a long and influential career in RE, Michael Grimmitt has commissioned fourteen chapters from distinguished educators and religious educators which address such questions as these and many more, not with the intention of closing down the current debate but opening it up and taking it further. In an Introduction and an Extended End Piece, equivalent to four chapters, he also provides a personal commentary on how during his career several stages in the metamorphosis of the subject have occurred with a new stage now emerging in response to the changed circumstances of globalised and politicised religion.

Contributors include: Vivienne Baumfield, Clyde Chitty, Terence Copley, Marius Felderhof, Liam Gearon, Michael Grimmitt, Joyce Miller, Audrey Osler, Richard Pring, Norman Richardson, John Rudge, Abdullah Sahin, Matthew Thompson, Geoffrey Walford, Simone Whitehouse and Andrew Wright.

'Religious Education and Social and Community Cohesion...is a scholarly volume which brings the "What is RE for?" debate up to date, from the advent of Tony Blair and the Human Rights Act to the arrival of the Coalition Government last summer. It is a fascinating portrait of how contemporary RE has been shaped by politicians' perception that society's greatest challenge is to ensure community cohesion rather than fragmentation...the book is an indispensable resource for academic research into the period in question.'

Dennis Richards, Head Teacher, St Aidan's High School, Harrogate.

Also available by Michael Grimmitt: Pedagogies of Religious Education