Mags GarganMags Gargan speaks to the people behind Ireland’s latest RE programme for primary schools
After almost 20 years of the Alive-O series a new religious education programme is being introduced in primary schools this week. The ‘Grow in Love’ series has been developed from the new Catholic Preschool and Primary Religious Education Curriculum for Ireland (2015), which was approved by the Irish Episcopal Conference and the Holy See earlier this year and then published by Veritas in June.
This is the first ever RE curriculum for the island of Ireland and it was written and edited by Anne Hession, a lecturer in religious education in St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, after an extensive consultation period.
“RE was the only area of the school curriculum that we didn’t have a document for,” Ms Hession says. “It was becoming clear that a one-size-fits-all programme was not sustainable any longer. A small country school with strong home, school and parish links is very different to a big Dublin school where children are coming from up to 20 parishes. We have to begin to move towards adapting to different contexts and my hope is that now we have a curriculum standard document, the way is open for people to write resources and develop materials to suit different needs.”
Grow in Love is the first programme to put the new curriculum into effect through workbooks and online resources that can be used by teachers in the classroom, and by children and their parents at home.
The first book – written by Elaine Mahon, manager of catechetical publications at Veritas, and Dan O’Connell, a lecturer in religious education in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick – will be introduced to junior and senior infants this year. Successive books will be rolled out to other classes over the next four years.
The develoment of the programme involved a consultation process with teachers, priests, parents, children and diocesan advisors about what they would like to see in a new primary RE programme. The feedback was that people wanted more clarity of purpose and for the content to be more substantive, while keeping the popular elements of Alive-O.
Timescale
“The Alive-O programme has been in use for almost 20 years at the infant level of Catholic primary schools, a timescale much longer than any other series that is being used in the classroom. So the main thing that teachers wanted was to see it reflect advances in other curricular areas, particularly in the area of online resources,” says Elaine Mahon.
“We wanted to bring RE up to par with resources for other areas, so people don’t see it as a poor cousin,” says Dan O’Connell. “As Alive-O was in schools for so long it has become quite dated and so it has fallen behind the technology. At the same time we didn’t want to be led by the technology, it is just simply there to help with the learning.”
Each Grow in Love programme is divided into a number of themes which are designed to last between two and four weeks. Each lesson following a three-part structure which begins with the children’s life experience (Let’s Look), introduces them to some aspect of faith (Let’s Learn) and then helps them to apply this to their lives (Let’s Live).
“We look at the children’s own views of God revealed in everyday life to generate their interest and reflection,” Dr O’Connell says. “Then with let’s learn, we bring the faith tradition into that experience and open up scripture stories like Daniel in the lion’s den or the birth of Jesus, in imaginative and creative ways. Let’s Live is about what are the implications for my head and my heart – how to grow in empathy and understanding – and my hands – has this anything to do with my action? Am I impelled to share lunch with someone in the yard?”
The programme has been piloted in almost 100 schools around the island of Ireland and Eimear Buckley from St Patrick’s School in Bray says she found the programme “really child friendly, really colourful, very accessible”. “We got great feedback from the parents on the home school links and the children really enjoyed bringing home their workbooks weekly and doing their work at home with their mum and dad.”
Each week, parents and families will be asked to help their children to do something related to the programme at home, such as retell a story, colour in a picture or say a prayer. This is to encourage parents and children to talk and pray about what is being learned in school.
Complements
“We know that, in all things, including religious education, parents are their children’s first and best teachers. What is done in school and in parish only complements and builds on what they do at home,” Ms Mahon says.
“The school ought to connect with what is going on in the family and yet it is the other way around,” says Dr O’Connell. “Some work done in RE in schools should be done at home. It helps parents to be more familiar with religious education. I suspect loads of parents have no idea what goes on in RE until second class when it comes to the Sacrament of Communion. So when second class comes parents will now be far more informed about what’s going on in RE and have more responsibility towards it.”