Tuesday 23 June 2026 9:00am to 3:35pm
Jesus College, Cambridge
What if the pedagogical methods of religions, when shared outside the confines of religious communities, could provide a richer, more inclusive learning experience, and one that promotes even greater understanding?
About
A quarter of a century has passed since Michael Grimmitt published the seminal Pedagogies of Religious Education. This influential volume summarised the various approaches to religious education generated in England after the 1988 Education Act, which first made the inclusion of the ‘world religions’ statutory.
Grimmitt noted that all the classical pedagogical models, though fundamentally different, shared the same secular and foundational assumption: the methods for religious education must lie outside of religious traditions. At a time of whole-scale review of the RE curriculum, these workshops take a different tack.
What if the pedagogical methods of religions, when shared outside the confines of religious communities, could provide a richer, more inclusive learning experience, and one that promotes even greater understanding?
This one-day symposium is organised by Dr Daniel Moulin, University Associate Professor (Faculty of Education) in partnership with the Cambridge Interfaith Research Forum. Moulin leads training for specialist teachers of Religious Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Schedule
09:00 Introductory session: Pedagogies of Religious Education: A REprise
Daniel Moulin (Faculty of Education)
09:20 Workshop 1: Exploring the Rabbinic imagination
Shoshana Boyd Gelfand
10:50 Coffee break
11:15 Workshop 2: Qur’an and Education: awe and wonder through sound, language and meaning
Farah Ahmed and Dunya Habash (Faculty of Education)
12:45 Lunch
13:45 Workshop 3: Finding God in all things: sacred and secular examens
Paul Nicholson SJ
15:15 Concluding session: group reflections
15:35 Close
Workshop 1: Exploring the Rabbinic imagination
This workshop will invite participants into the world of the Rabbis who lived in the first century CE, whose teachings and texts continue to form the basis of Jewish thought and practice today. We will study a biblical text of through the eyes of these Rabbis, getting a taste of the Jewish interpretative tradition — known as midrash — that they created.
In addition to reading the biblical text and the rabbis’ midrashic interpretation of it, we will experience the Jewish pedagogy of chavruta (learning in dialectic partnership) which continues to be one of the signature pedagogies of Jewish learning today.
About the speaker
Shoshana Boyd Gelfand is a rabbi, author, radio broadcaster and philanthropic advisor to Pears Foundation in London, where she currently serves as Director of Leadership and Learning. In addition, Shoshana is intensely involved in interreligious work as a Visiting Scholar at Sarum College (a Christian theological seminary), and a founding faculty member of Faith in Leadership, providing leadership training to senior Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders in the UK. She is also past Vice-Chair of IJCIC, the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (which liaises on behalf of the global Jewish community to the Vatican, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the World Council of Churches, and other global faith bodies).
Shoshana graduated magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr College and was ordained as a rabbi in 1993 at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where she also received her Doctor of Divinity honoris causa.
Workshop 2: Qur’an and Education
This interactive workshop introduces key features of Qur’anic learning, including recitation (tajwīd), memorisation (ḥifẓ), and circle-based dialogue (ḥalaqah). In doing so, it highlights the foundational threads of sound, language and meaning in Qur’anic learning. Through guided listening to a classical recitation of the Qur’an and facilitated dialogue, participants will explore how Islamic education begins in sound, moves through embodiment, and leverages language to build relational meaning.
The workshop invites participants to engage with how awe, affect, physical response, and collective contemplation shape Islamic religious learning. Finally, it asks what this might mean for contemporary Religious Education.
About the speakers
Farah Ahmed is Assistant Research Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She convenes the Cambridge Dialogues: Renewing K-12 Education in Islamic contexts academic network. Her current project is Reorienting Education in Muslim Contexts towards Awe and Wonder. She is founder of the online Islamic Educator Learning Community, which partners with Camtree and supports online educator professional development.
Dunya Habash is a Gerda Henkel Reseach Scholar and a Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Dunya works on the ‘Reorienting Education in Muslim Contexts towards Awe and Wonder’ research project, where she has helped theorise awe and wonder by building on classical Islamic educational theory. Her own interdisciplinary research explores the intersection of aesthetics, the arts, forced migration, integration, and education in post-conflict settings.
Workshop 3: Finding God in all things
This workshop offers a practical introduction to a key prayer exercise of the spiritual tradition originating with Ignatius of Loyola, a 16th century Christian priest, founder of the Jesuit order. The exercise invites participants to notice paths of “consolation” and “desolation” experienced in their everyday lives, and to use these to draw closer to the divine.
In recent years this exercise has been built into the daily timetable of those schools for which the Jesuits take responsibility. We will also consider how analogous exercises can be employed in non-religious contexts to build on whatever is most life-giving in individuals’ experience.
About the speaker
Paul Nicholson SJ is a Roman Catholic priest, and a member of the Society of Jesus, a religious order popularly known as the Jesuits. He is currently based in central London, working as Director of the Jesuit Institute, leading a team which co-ordinates work in Ignatian spirituality around Great Britain. After studying zoology at the University of Durham, he joined the Jesuits in 1978, and, having completed studies in philosophy in Dublin and London, and theology in London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, was ordained priest in 1988.