The Belief in Dialogue conference of the AULRE will be held on 1 – 3 September 2015, at Mary’s University Twickenham.
The full details are listed on the new Association of University Lecturers in Religion and Education website including the link to book http://aulre.org/conference/. The conference is open to all, academics, researchers, teachers, education professionals, advisors, students and others who share an interest in the interface between religion and education.
Farid Panjwani will be talking about reforms in the Muslim educational movement, internal diversity within Muslim communities and the implications for freedom and autonomy. Farid recently was part of the team that organised the conference on Education, extremism and criticality in London and will bring important insights from that event and his long work in the field. He is relatively unknown to the “religious education community” and this oversight needs to be rectified.
Tania ap Sion will be talking about evidence from the Qualitative strand of the Warwick research notably the impact of religious schooling on attitudes to other faiths and the effect of RE of community cohesion and the common good. This is particularly relevant given the ongoing discussion around, so called “faith schools”, now arguably a problematised term despite its ongoing use in many debates.
The incoming Chair of the REC, Trevor Cooling, will be talking about the idea of Christian approach to teaching RE. This builds on his major study of schools negotiating a Christian approach to teaching in general terms. His thinking will challenge some of the categorisations that have been used in RE discourse that espouse ‘neutral secular’ RE over ‘biased confessional’ RE.
And finally, outgoing Chair of the REC, Joyce Miller, will be sharing her wisdom, expertise and experience about RE and extremism and the religious, education and professional life.