“Faith matters: Rethinking home learning of children from different faiths”

Faith and religious belief have been traditionally considered a private and individual matter. They are an important force for learning and provide many children with a sense of belonging to a community of shared values and beliefs. Recent events, though, have catapulted religion into the centre of public debate about democracy, pluralism, social cohesion and citizenship. As schools in the UK are becoming increasingly more linguistically and culturally diverse, the role of religious education in fostering mutual respect and tolerance raises an important question. Given its potential to spread understanding of the values underlying a multi-faith society, how much should teachers know about the home learning of children from different faiths? Our research project, ‘Becoming Literate in Faith Settings: Language and Literacy Learning in the Lives of New Londoners’, sought to document how children from different faith communities learned through their faiths. Our guiding assumption was that if we aspire to nurture the wealth of our students' languages, literacies and identities then we cannot ignore the home learning of children from diverse faiths