to lead readers into faith, it is a sign (i.e. miracle) from the Gospel writer point of view. It’s our intention to avoid catechizing children. Nonetheless, it could be achieved from an incidental point of view using parables. One distinctive aspects of parables from miracles and other passages from the Gospels is that parables can be fully understood from a non-theistic point of view, as they enhance universal values. We will provide two examples: one parable and a short story. Let’s take the parable of the two sons (which is really short); it serves as a way to introduce children into prompt responsibility, which is a universal attitude to life. And so could be done with all the parables. If we choose one of the short story we propose to be used, we will get the same outcome. Let it be Peter’s denial of Jesus, after he was arrested. Isn’t it an excellent way of talking about friendship and loyalty? The absence of faith in the children of their belonging to any other religion or confession wouldn’t be any obstacle to work with this texts. The aim of RE is to develop the ability to ask relevant questions not only about religion but also draw on that they read and learn and make critical questions about the real world they live in (Teece, 2012). Despite what we’ve just stated, we should recognize that the Gospels are a whole and any text needs context to be fully understood. Some of the stories we will select have some degree of dependence on the context and will have to be introduced. This is the case with stories like Peter’s denial of Jesus, John the Baptist death or the last supper. Should we discard this stories for this reason? Europe has been, up to some degree, a Christian civilization; even the western civilization in which we have been grown up is a Christian one. It is known the Roman expression: “the Christian roots of Europe”. Therefore, our use of parables and the short stories we will select comply with the condition of being fully open to all and embedded in our cultural background.
2.2 Positive criteria. We will select texts that fit into the children’s level of English, are suitable for classroom use and have a narrative structure. In accordance with our project, passages should meet the following requirements to be selected: - Length. Any parable or story should have a manageable length for classroom use. The whole passion of the Lord could be considered a single story with narrative characteristics and target grammar structures, not to mention its core role in the Gospels; but it’s too long to be selected. And some other stories, like “The cure of Peter's Mother in Law” in Mt 8, 14-15, may be too short for our purposes. Some of the texts in our final selection will need more than one teaching period while some other won’t deserve a second. - Narrative structure: A narrative text is an account -written or spoken- of connected events in order of happening (Axelrod & Cooper, 2010). In order to achieve our aims, our text should have several clear elements: 16
