50 years on: the Shap working party on world religions in education and its publications

ABSTRACT

The Shap Working Party on World Religions in Education celebrates its 50th anniversary in April 2019. In marking this event, the present article offers a summary of the history of the Shap Working Party in relation to its publications. The overview includes material published by the Shap Working Party itself and material published by members of the Shap Working Party which reflects Shap’s general approach and values. Many Shap publications and articles about Shap are available with open access, on the Shap website – http://www.shapworkingparty.org.uk/ – and more will appear in celebration of the Working Party’s 50th Anniversary. The present article is dedicated to the memory of Professor John Hinnells who had a key role in establishing the Shap Working Party and who died in 2018.

KEYWORDS:

• Shap Working Party
• world religions
• religious education
• RE
• religious studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The increasing secularisation of western societies was reflected in the writings of American (e.g. Tillich 1962; van Buren 1963) and European (e.g. Robinson 1963) Christian theologians.

2. According to the 1944 Education Act, ‘Religious Education’ included both the subject ‘religious instruction’ and ‘collective worship’. By the 1960s, schools widely used ‘religious education’ or ‘RE’ to refer specifically to the school subject. ‘Collective worship’, regarded as a separate activity from ‘RE’, was commonly called ‘assembly’.

3. Brian Gates studied at universities in both England (Theology at Oxford, postgraduate teacher training at Cambridge) and the USA (Social Ethics at Yale). He worked for eight years at Goldsmiths College, London during which time he completed his doctoral thesis on religion and children’s development (supervised by Ninian Smart). He taught at St Martin’s College/University of Cumbria over the next 30 years, mainly as Head of Religion and Ethics, and subsequently as Professor (Emeritus since 2008). He was Chair of RE Council of England & Wales 1984–90 and 2002–11, and is a former Chair of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Moral Education. He was awarded the MBE in 2013 for work nationally in RE and for Inter-Faith Relations.

4. Edwin Cox wrote the influential book Changing Aims in Religious Education, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Following his retirement from the post of Reader in Religious Education at the University of London he worked as an Associate Fellow in the Department of Arts Education at the University of Warwick (Jackson 1991).

5. Harold Loukes, then Reader in Education at Oxford University, published his study Teenage Religion (London, SCM Press, 1961), based on research in secondary schools which captured the authentic voices of young people expressing their own views.

6. Ninian Smart set up the first Department of Religious Studies in Britain in 1967 at the University of Lancaster. He was Director of a Schools Council project on RE which published the influential Schools Council Working Paper 36, Religious Education in the Secondary School (Schools Council 1971).

7. Eric Sharpe was the author of Comparative Religion: A History (London: Duckworth, 1975). He was Reader in Religious Studies at the University of Lancaster before being appointed as founding Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia.

8. Geoffrey Parrinder was Professor of Comparative Religion at King’s College in the University of London, and a prolific author in the field of religious studies. He collaborated with others on various publications on RE in schools, including Something After Death? – Slides and notes on beliefs and customs associated with death in world religions, compiled by the present author (Rickett Encyclopaedia of Slides S. 1077, 1976), and published in conjunction with Parrinder’s book Something After Death? Denholm House Press, 1976.

9. Donald Butler was Head Teacher of West Denton High School, Newcastle upon Tyne.

10. Owen Cole, at the time of the formation of the Shap Working Party, lectured at a college of education in Newcastle upon Tyne.

11. Riadh el Droubie was born in Baghdad, and acquired British citizenship in 1982. His early publications under the ‘Minaret House’ title were virtually the only resources for schools about Islam to be written by a Muslim. He contributed to the Ward Lock series on ‘Living Religions’ in the 1970s. He was a founder member of the Shap Working Party in 1969.

12. Harold Blackham, a former teacher of RE, played an important part in the formation of the British Humanist Association, becoming its first Executive Director in 1963.

13. In 1972 it is stated that the aim of the Shap Working Party (which at that time had 30 members), ‘…is to bring together specialists from the various branches of education who are interested in world religions. The working party membership includes: eight schoolteachers, eleven lecturers in colleges of education, five university teachers of world religions, and seven individuals who while members in their own right also represent the viewpoints of the Spalding Trust, the House of Lords, the Campaign for Moral Education, the Education Department of Newcastle University, HM staff Inspectorate for RE and the Schools Council Project on Religious Education in State Schools. The group embraces a wide spectrum of belief, from evangelical Christian to humanist, so that a variety of viewpoints is represented. The co-chairmen are: Professor N. Smart, Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University; Professor E. G. Parrinder, King’s College London University; and Mr D. Horder of the Schools Council Religious Education Project at Lancaster. The vice chairman is Mr J. R. Hinnells, Department of Comparative Religion, the University of Manchester; the Treasurer is Mr E. Hulmes of Didsbury College, Manchester and the Secretary… is Mr P. Woodward, Department of Religious Studies, Borough Road, College, Isleworth, Middlesex.’ (‘Report of the Shap Working Party’, in Woodward 1972, 115).

14. Robin Richardson is a former Director of the Runnymede Trust, and former Co-Director of ‘Insted’, an educational facility supporting equality and diversity in education. He continues to manage the ‘Insted’ website on equality and diversity in education (http://www.insted.co.uk/).

15. Richard Tames was Director of the Extramural Division of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He is a prolific author of books for children and young people, and has also written texts for teachers, including Approaches to Islam (Tames 1982).

16. Raymond Hammer was an Anglican theologian, Director of the Bible Reading Fellowship and an expert on Japanese religions, who also wrote supporting a broadly-based form of RE (Hammer 1978, 1982).

17. Richard Gombrich was a member of the Shap Working Party. He was the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford (1976–2004). He is Founder and President of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. Gombrich conducted a major ethnographic study of contemporary Sinhalese Buddhism entitled Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon (1971). This study emphasised the compatibility between Buddhism as represented in canonical texts and the contemporary religious practices of Sinhalese Buddhists. Gombrich gave me much encouragement in my own work on Hindu communities in Britain and its relevance to RE.

18. It should be mentioned that a few members of Shap were highly active in promoting the study of religions in schools, but wrote little for its publications. One of these was Rabbi Hugo Gryn who made many important contributions to the working party’s activities. Hugo Gryn gave me much encouragement in my own work. For more on Hugo Gryn, who was an Auschwitz survivor, see http://www.hugogryn.com/about-hugo-gryn/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Jackson

Robert Jackson is Emeritus Professor in Religions and Education at the University of Warwick, UK, and a Visiting Professor at Stockholm University. He is Founding Director of Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit. His books include Religious Education: an Interpretive Approach (1997) and Rethinking Religious Education and Plurality (2004). He has contributed to the educational work of the Council of Europe since 2002 and he wrote Signposts: Policy and Practice for Teaching about Religions and Non-Religious World views in Intercultural Education (Council of Europe Publishing, 2014) as part of this work (translated into 12 languages). His new book Religious Education for Plural Societies: The Selected Works of Robert Jackson, is published by Routledge. He received life membership of the Association of University Lecturers in Religious Education (UK) and the William Rainey Harper Award and life membership from the Religious Education Association (USA) in 2013. In 2017, he received honorary doctorates from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, and the Norwegian School of Theology (MF, Oslo) for his contributions to religious and intercultural education internationally.