AREIAC and AULRE Joint Annual Conference: 2024: “RE Futures?”
Hosted by Newman University, Birmingham Conference: Thursday 20th -Friday 21st June 2024 Conference theme: “RE Futures?”
Consilience is the idea of a unity of knowledge, a drawing together into a single theory of everything across the different disciplines. Teachers encounter in one subject, knowledge from other subjects. Trespass is inevitable risking a degrading, as one subject’s value hierarchy might overstep into the space of another. Big questions in life such as climate change education and personal relationships education require knowledge to be drawn together but this is difficult in practice as both involve engaging with distinct fundamental beliefs about the human and nature. Bringing subjects together can lead to turbulence, and they may resist cooperation. Religious education is focussed intrinsically on the pursuit of truth but also civically, on the project of living differently together well. In the post Truth convulsion, the toxicity in public and social debate make these aims elusive yet vital.
Associated article: Bowie, R.A., Aantjes, R., Woolley, M. et al. Making sense of big questions that require multiple subjects: preliminary theorisation of an integrative philosophy of knowledge and empirical indications of a lack of subject connection within school curricula. j. relig. educ. (2024). Available online here https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40839-024-00237-0