TEACHER’S RESOURCE BOOK – SAMPLE CHAPTER
1. Introduction Course Outline Junior Cycle Religious Education has been designed for a minimum of 200 hours of timetabled student engagement across three years of Junior Cycle. The ClassroomBased Assessments (CBAs) and externally assessed final examination will be set at a common level.
Strands There are three strands in the Junior Cycle Religious Education Specification: Expressing beliefs, Exploring questions and Living our values.
Expressing beliefs This strand develops students’ ability to understand, respect and appreciate how people’s beliefs have been expressed in the past and continue to be expressed today through lifestyle, culture, rites and rituals, community building, social action and ways of life. It enables students to appreciate how people express and live out their different beliefs – religious or otherwise. It also focuses on understanding and appreciating that diversity exists within religions.
Exploring questions This strand enables students to explore some of the questions of meaning, purpose and relationships that people wonder about and to discover how people with different religious beliefs and other interpretations of life respond to these questions. It focuses on students developing the knowledge, understanding, skills, attitudes and values that will allow them to question, probe, interpret, analyse and reflect on these big questions. It will help students to develop these attributes in dialogue with each other.
Living our values This strand focuses on enabling students to understand and reflect on the values that underlie actions and to recognise how moral decision-making works in their own lives and in the lives of others based on particular values and/or beliefs. It also enables students to engage in informed discussion about moral issues and to communicate respectfully and explain their personal opinions, values and beliefs.
Learning Outcomes Each strand contains ten Learning Outcomes (LOs). These learning outcomes are at the heart of the programme. The LOs do not have to be taught in any particular order. Some chapters in the textbook will cover or incorporate several learning outcomes. Most LOs will be revisited in later chapters. It is not intended that students will fully cover one LO and move on from it. Some of the LOs are more demanding than others. Remember, it is a three-year programme and therefore students are not expected to fully grasp any specific LO until the end of the three years. Teachers must decide which LOs should be studied at what stage of the three-year cycle. This will depend on the context and on the students’ ability. An example of this would be in Chapter 1, which covers (among other LOs) LO 1.1, which is ‘present the key religious beliefs of the five major world religions found in Ireland today’. You might only cover two of the five major world religions’ beliefs as presented in one year and come back to the other three the following year if you feel it is too much for students to do all five religions at once. 4
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