This cluster of questions focuses on how some of the insights about learning that arise in the social sciences can help us in religious education.

Here I'm going to ask you to delve more deeply into the social science and education lenses that we bring to religious education. There are elements of learning that spread further than religious community, forms of teaching that occur not simply in church but also in the wider world. This is the cluster where I’m asking you to pay specific attention to learning challenges, and learning design.

1. Start by considering whether any explicit teaching is going on. Can you identify a “teacher” and a “learner”? How is that teaching and learning taking place?
2. Next I want you to see if you can identify any of the implicit learning that is going on. Another way to think about “implicit” learning is to think about learning that is not necessarily intentional, but rather that occurs somewhat incidentally, or without intentionality. You’ve probably had the experience yourself of someone teaching explicitly that God is love, but treating you very disrespectfully. So that while the explicit message is one of love, the implicit message suggests that (for whatever reason) love does not come attached to respect.
3. Next try to identify unintentional learning, learning that takes place through absence, or taboo; the learning that is referred to as the “null” curriculum. Many middle class white people, for example, learn a lot about race through the null curriculum. Many of us have learned a lot about religion in public school contexts by its obvious absence (note: what we have learned may not be what religious communities would want us to learn).
4. After this brainstorming you have should have three kinds of learning lists that end up defining an explicit curriculum, an implicit curriculum, and a null curriculum in the focus situation. In what ways are those curricula coherent, and in what ways do they work against each other in this specific situation?
5. Next take the “Nurturing Faith” handout, and see if you can identify where in those ages/stages the participants of the focus situation would most likely fit. Does the situation contain learning support that’s appropriate for the ages of the people present?
6. Finally, compose a summary of your deliberation and post it to the course blog for this week’s focus situation.
7. For extra credit, you could look for resources that would help to shed light on the focus situation, or that would help an educator prepare appropriate interventions. Possible resource sites this week include: your denominational sites, Augsburg Fortress e-materials (accessible to you as a student), teacher handbooks from any curriculum you respect