From Sir, With Love: Glimpses of Faith Through the Classroom Window by Ken Edgecombe (Ark House Press: 2022)
Ken Edgecombe worked as an English teacher for twenty-five years before becoming the National Director of Scripture Union in New Zealand, a role he held for ten years. After finishing at SU, he returned to teaching and spent the next two decades teaching Religious Education at Queen Margaret College, a Presbyterian girls’ school in Wellington, New Zealand.
Although Ken was an experienced teacher, he hadn’t taught RE before arriving at Queen Margaret College and had to put together a teaching program largely from scratch. In what will be a familiar story for those of us who teach the subject, Ken found himself under resourced and having to draw on his wisdom and experience to put together an engaging curriculum to connect with a group of largely secular students.
Ken’s book is a reflection on his twenty years in the school and is structured around taking the reader through the RE program from Years 7 through to Year 12. In the book, you learn what was taught, how it was taught, and gain insight into the classroom conversations and discussions that were generated. Ken is clearly a thoughtful and caring educator, and this is reflected in the way that he runs his classroom.
By taking us through his RE program, Ken provides a genuinely helpful resource for those who teach RE. You will be able to relate to a lot of the content and, by providing an account of how he went about teaching it and the examples he drew upon, you will find plenty of ideas to spark inspiration for your own teaching. He helpfully includes a Notes section at the end of the book, making it easy to follow up on the resources and ideas he refers to.
As you read, you will discover plenty of common ground in both the joy and the challenge of teaching RE in an independent school. If your experience is anything like mine, you will often find yourself smiling as his stories resonate with your own classroom experiences.
Although the structure of following an RE curriculum could risk becoming dry, the book is full of Ken’s engaging insights and reflections. His gentle wisdom and humour permeate every page.
Topics covered include many of those familiar to RE teachers such as
- Does God really exist?
- Why do bad things happen if God loves us all?
- How do we know the story of Jesus is true?
- Do science and religious beliefs ever meet?
- Can Christians believe in any other religion as well as Christianity?
- Is the Bible true?
The most often sung hymn when chaplains gather is that well known lament ‘But we have no resources.’ In sharing his wisdom – shaped by more than twenty years of classroom experience – Ken offers us a rich treasure.
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