“Covid made me think about…” What really matters in RE: a European research project

Abstract

Living and working through the challenges of a pandemic offered a unique research opportunity to engage with some core questions about what really matters in Religious Education (RE) in countries across Europe. The What Covid Reveals to Religious Education Specialists research project sought to provide a reflective space for RE specialists, drawn from the board members of the European Forum for Teachers of Religious Education (EFTRE), to consider their experiences of RE during the Covid-19 pandemic and to begin to articulate what they might want in the future for RE in light of their experiences. Areas explored in the online qualitative survey included: challenging questions and issues, social unrest, student–teacher relationships, learning scenarios, valued dimensions in RE, opportunities for the future, and ‘ideal’ RE. Respondents were from sixteen of the twenty-two countries present on the EFTRE Board, offering their individual perspectives from Western, Northern, Central and Southern Europe. Using the tool ATLAS.ti, an inductive analytical approach was employed; a number of key group ‘themes’ emerged from the responses, which provided a basis for further analysis. This paper will present some of the main findings in dialogue with the focusing research stimulus question: What does Covid-19 reveal to RE specialists about their subject? The project is a European collaboration involving researchers from Austria, Germany, Hungary, Ireland and Wales.