The RE Podcast
The RE Podcast
S15 E6: The One About The Scopes Trial
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If you have not ever heard of this trial or it's significance to the RE classroom then don't miss this episode. It underpins our teaching of fundamentalism, science and religion, diversity of worldviews and curriculum freedom. It also shines a light on global issues and polarisation.
As we approach the 100 year anniversary of this trial (10th July 1925) listen to Ruth Marx speak passionately about John Scope!
Here are the many links to things referenced in the episode
Charter for compassion
https://charterforcompassion.org/
Dawn Cox' blog
https://missdcoxblog.wordpress.com/
Sarah Silverman - we are all human and deserve love (warning, some people might find this language and humour offensive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahdR6aHQvMQ
Karen Armstrongs ted talk on charter for compassion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJMm4RAwVLo
Smithsonian Institution Archives
The Leopold And Loeb Trial: An Account
Big Ideas lesson plan and resources on the Scope trial (monkey trial)
Find out more;
Twitter: @TheREPodcast1
Insta: @TheREPodcast
Webiste: www.therepodcast.co.uk
Welcome to the R.E. Podcast. The first dedicated R.E. podcast for students and teachers. My name is Louisa Jane Smith and this is the R.E. Podcast. The podcast for those of you who think R.E. is boring, which it is, and I'll prove it to you. My guest today is probably one of the coolest people in the R.E. world. And I consider her a friend, even though we've never actually met in real life. Yet. But she pops up on my screen regularly and is always full of passion and knowledge. And she's here to tell us about something which I must admit I know nothing about, but I think learning about it today will impact my teaching in a really profound way. So welcome for the first time to the podcast, Ruth Marks. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01:And I've heard those introductions you've done for everyone and seen how lovely they are, and I didn't expect to feel yeah, to have such a lovely introduction from you. Thank you. It's very kind.
SPEAKER_00:Well, you are such a valued member of the RE community, and you know, every time I I'm on a call with you where you are leading it or contributing to it or whatever, you're just such a positive encouragement to all, and you know loads of stuff.
SPEAKER_01:You know, I think a lot of us are self-proclaimed RE nerds, aren't we? Sort of geeks who love reading and love finding out more, and it's a subject that just doesn't ever stop really. You can just go further and further into learning more, which is I guess why I wanted to talk to you today about this thing that sort of I loved learning about and it's just followed me through my career.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I'll tell you what, before we get into that, do you want to just introduce yourself, like what you do, who you are?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so I'm Ruth Marks. I was an RE teacher in real life in the classroom for about 20 years, trained in Durham, and then moved to London and taught for 17, 18 years there, in East London in Tower Hamlets. And then through that I've also been involved with my Sacray, and I'm now the chair of Tower Hamlet Sacray, and did other projects like a Farmington Fellowship, the Leadership Programme with the Cubs and Gabriels, and yeah, other bits and pieces, and also set up a Facebook group and sort of support group for teaching A-level at Islam because I've really enjoyed teaching Islam. When teaching available led me to what I'm going to speak to you about today. But then three years ago I moved out of the country for various reasons, and I now live in France and I do basically a lot of the things I was doing before but remotely. Um and it's opened up a lot of different opportunities where I can support the different schools, academy chains, boroughs on anything to do with RE remotely, basically. And sometimes in person when I can convince the family I've got to leave them and come over to a conference or two. Yes. So yeah, so it's amazing really. And I'm getting to see a lot more of the kind of the national picture and just different settings and different places. When you step out of the classroom, sometimes you can, you know, get engaged with a lot of things that I might not have been able to for the last, you know, 20 years or so.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah, that's me. Yeah. And so, because actually where we're gonna meet, we're gonna meet at the Ariak Oray Conference at the end of June. Yes. Down in Exeter. Yes. What's your kind of role within those organisations?
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah, so I'm the co-vice chair of Ariac as well, which I took on after being secretary and after getting involved from the leadership programme. And being on that association has meant that I've had the chance to get involved with helping run the conference. Last year we did the first one where we did it combined with OLRA, which is the Association of University Lecturers in RE. We are the Association of Religious Education Inspectors and Consultants, but are kind of advisors and support people. So the two associations are coming together to run a joint conference to see where we might be going in this kind of exciting time for RE. Although I kind of feel like the whole time I've been an RE teacher, it's always felt like an exciting time, but right now it feels like a really exciting time. And I just love so many of these conversations, and we thought how amazing if we could just bring lots of people together and hear from lots of different voices lots of the projects people have been doing. So I've had a like a sneaky peek at some of the proposals that come in, and my word, it just looks, yeah, some of the things look fascinating that what people are doing, both in universities and in the classroom. Yeah, so we're kind of coming together in June to do that conference and then um see where we're boldly going. Which is the name of the conference. Well, you know, it's gonna be really good, and it's gonna be fantastic to see people in real life who have obviously spent a lot of time with online, but to see people in the flesh is gonna be brilliant, yeah, priceless.
SPEAKER_00:And I think you're right. I think, you know, I've been in this game for about 25 years, and I think it does feel like we know we've kind of had some big, really exciting changes in terms of approaches to teach in RE, in terms of this kind of worldviews approach, and with the sort of curriculum and assessment review and a lot of really shaking things up and looking at what we're doing and working with the government to see how we can do it better moving forward. Yes. I think you're right. I think this is it is a really exciting time to be part of the RE world. Yes. Yeah. So we're here to talk about the scopes trial, and I may be the only person in the world that had never heard of it. Um but I don't know if this is kind of common knowledge or not.
SPEAKER_01:I don't know. Some people know about it, some that don't. Some people have seen the film Inherit the Wind that was made based on this trial. So people know that film but don't necessarily know that it was a real event that it was based on. Other people know, uh, so for example, there's a Simpsons episode where they parody it and Lisa is like doing the scopes trial to do with her school, and it's kind of like when it gets to that level, you think, oh maybe people do know about it, but I had no idea about what it was until I came across it when I was preparing some A-level work that I was doing, which I can tell you about in a minute, and then it just blew me away and made things make a lot more sense for me. Okay. And what I was teaching and when I was looking at how the world is. So do you want to just then tell us briefly what it is? So the Scopes trial was a kind of test trial that happened, which I'll come into the sort of significance of this later on, where there was a law in Tennessee, and this happened in Dayton, Tennessee, in the United States of America. In 1925, the law was brought in actually in March 1925. I was just checking the dates earlier, so and that this trial happens in July, so it's quite fresh law that's been brought in to say that you cannot teach. No teacher can teach about evolution in the classroom and can teach anything other than the fact that humans were sort of made as is written literally in the Bible, literally from God directly, no evolution from any other life form as well. It's dubbed the monkey trial because a lot of that misunderstanding of evolution was used within the trial that we came from monkeys, we didn't come from monkeys. So this was the law that was brought in, and then the ACLU, which is uh American Civil Liberties Union, said that they would fund any teacher that was willing to sort of stand and say that they had broken this and taught evolution, if they were then taken to court, and then there could be a test trial to sort of show this law being basically what they felt was an unfair or unjust law. So kind of to test that law, and they asked for a teacher to be a willing participant, uh sort of a volunteer to sort of own up and say, Yes, I've taught evolution. And so John Scopes was that teacher who was actually a teacher from there. He said, he actually said he couldn't remember if he had exactly taught evolution, but the textbooks that they had in the school had evolution in them. And so he said, Yeah, I'm sure they've looked at that page, I'm sure they've seen it. He then got three of his students to basically stand up in court and say that he'd taught evolution. So he was a very willing participant in this trial. And some students said yes, they had been taught evolution by him. And this was the trial was to say, had he broken that law or not. So this is the trial that happened. Now, it was the first trial that was broadcast on the radio. This is in 1925, so when I used to teach about this years ago, so it was a bit like the TV or the internet, but now I'd say it's like the live streaming of the day. If you imagine this court case was being live streamed and anyone could hear it or listen to it that had never had access to that kind of thing before, and here it was debating the big question of the time, this is 1925, when many people were feeling was religion beginning to lose some of its position in society, if you think about some of the things that were happening in the 20s, but also it wasn't that long since the evolution theory and Darwin's work, etc., had kind of come out and was starting to be accepted, so it was a real like pinch point for this. So everyone wanted to know. So the whole nation was listening in on the radio. People flocked to this little town in Tennessee, wanting to watch and sit there, so they had to move the trial out into the grass in the heat. So there's all these photos you can look online of people like fanning with the papers because they're boiling in heat and there's hundreds of people there. There's protesters, the anti-evolution protesters are there talking about the Bible. So it was just like it was what you might say a media circus spotlight on this little town. So the court case happened, and two big names were the two lawyers. There was Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, one who'd been a presidential candidate, uh, Secretary of State at one point. Clarence Darrow was the lawyer who had been in many big sort of court cases. There's another one that we use in Ailable quite a lot about determinism with two boys who murdered anyway, Spit Group. Anyway, he'd been in some very big court cases that people have known about, and these are like the two big names fighting it out over this did this teacher teach evolution or not? Now, he did teach evolution, and the test was that he had, and so he was found guilty for teaching evolution and fined, I think it was a hundred dollars. But really, it was as if this town the media at the time said, You've won the court case but you've lost the argument because they had been ripped to shreds and just humiliated by the media about this little town that wasn't letting the teachers teach about evolution and how sort of backward and ridiculous is this when perhaps us from the northern states or different parts of the United States, we're so much more involved, aren't we? And you can't control that in the classroom that they can't be learning about this. And so it was that spotlight that was put on them that really then influences the development of Christian fundamentalism had already started to develop-ish, like the word fundamentalism had been coined two or three years previously, but this was at the very beginning of fundamentalism for Christianity, and it really kind of shaped and influenced the way that it grew and had that kind of knock-on effect, this sense of that kind of embattled, threatened, or modernity's coming to get us, and we need to kind of like hunker down and secure the window, secure the battlements, keep ourselves safe from this modern secular world that's coming to get us, and it just really that moment it shows that mindset or that worldview a little bit, helped me understand more what that was, and then the effect that that could then have on politics and things ever since then. Yeah. And so that was the trial. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The law was created in support of fundamental Christians who were feeling a little bit oppressed. Yeah. But am I getting a sense that public opinion didn't sympathize with that feeling?
SPEAKER_01:I think in Dayton, Tennessee, there were many people that were in support of that law because there was the Anti-Evolution League, the parents against teaching about evolution, you know, the there were parents who went and testified against it, say we don't want our children to learn about this. But in terms of the national and then international interest was that it didn't agree with this law being there. And it was showing up this community as being perhaps backward or anti-education or not keeping up with the times or being anti-science. Because it was pitched as religion versus science.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And this is going to solve which is right religion or science. Whereas actually that wasn't well, I guess that was what was happening, but it was the law itself that was being debated over.
SPEAKER_00:And actually, was it almost the point at which science and religion began to be set against each other that these are like polar opposites? Because actually science and religion before this period were quite similar in that they felt that they were answering and asking the same questions.
SPEAKER_01:I look at Charles Darwin's interest, I've always believed in science, was because he thought he was going to be a clergyman and he was like, well, many of the clergymen were scientists because it was understanding God's world and knowing about God's world and sort of documenting the wonders that God had created and what God had made. But what is interesting is the whole trial was sort of pitched as religion versus science. But actually, and this is why for me it links to what we look at in worldviews or different interpretations, you know, there were religious people who testified to say he should have taught evolution, and religion isn't necessarily against evolution. Yeah. There was a rabbi who testified to say the word yom, which I use to this day whenever I'm talking about creation, you know, to say that the word yom could be translated as period of time, not necessarily 24-hour period, and it's how we translated that word. And he he was on the side that was supposedly anti-religion, and he's a rabbi, you know, and there were Christians also who testified to say that they didn't take that literal interpretation. So whether it was religion versus science or whether it was more literalist interpretations versus something else.
SPEAKER_00:And it's interesting that a hundred years later, because this literally happened a hundred years ago. Literally, yeah, yeah. You know, a hundred years later, we're still debating that same thing about the interpretation of individual words in that Genesis account of creation.
SPEAKER_01:And we're still, for me, when I'm teaching about evolution and religion and you know, origins of the universe and life and religious studies, still lots of students have that same misconception of, well, I didn't come from a monkey. Still, you know, in the Scopes trial, the prosecution actually brought a real life monkey to the trial. And again, you can look at photos if you want to, dressed him up in a little suit and everything, brought him to the trial and had him sat there to say, Isn't this ridiculous that we came from monkeys? You know. But sadly, he actually passed away from heat exhaustion because it was so hot and because they put him in the middle of the phone. The monkey monkey did, yeah. I'm really sorry, it's a horrible thing to say. But I mean I'll talk later about how I use the but even that helps the students go, oh no, it's not that we came from monkeys, is it? We've got the same distant ancestral cut. Yes. But that misconception still comes time after time, I find. I don't know if other teachers find that as well. So that's why I've used this trial when I've enacted it with students to bring home that point a bit and really help them understand, you know, that that's not actually what the theory of evolution is.
SPEAKER_00:And I want to come back to that because I think there's so much you're saying that one mirrors a lot of discussions that are happening today about science and religion and generally about progress and science and religion. But I want to kind of go back to the context of your discovery of this because I think that's really interesting. So you mentioned there that you were doing some research for a lesson and you kind of happened upon this. What were you actually researching at the time and how did you come across this trial?
SPEAKER_01:So I was teaching A-level, this pre-reformed days, where it was a synoptic unit for AQA on fundamentalism. Although actually, once you've taught it, you think it should be called fundamentalisms instead. But anyway, it was a unit on fundamentalism that I absolutely you know, some things you teach. It was really hard because no one I just said, Oh, I'll do that unit, that looks good, because I was the one teaching that part of the course. I couldn't find anything online, there was no textbook, there was no resources, all you've got is those other teachers might have seen this as well in life where you get like four or five spec points and then you've got to create a whole course on it. And it was scary and daunting, but I just I love learning about and teaching about fundamentalism as a thing. And so I said, Okay, I'll do it. And one of the readings I read a lot of Martin Appleby who do about the nature of fundamentalism, but the main person I was reading was Karen Armstrong's work around fundamentalism, the Battle for God book, for example. I was Googling before this, so which bit did I read from her? And almost everything she writes, she references the scopes trial, every single article was finding her, coming back to this moment. And so yeah, it was really reading the work of Karen Armstrong that made me under and listening to podcasts with her, and there's just a way that she has such a kind of I find it very em don't I say empathetic or just an understanding of the way things are and why people may have these different viewpoints that at first seem one way, but you can kind of understand a bit more when you look at the reasons behind it. So yeah, it was reading her work, particularly The Battle for God. Yeah, that got a bit obsessed with Karen Armstrong. Actually, went to listen to her give a talk and met her and got her to sign a book and a photo with her and everything. So yeah, she's one of my big heroes. And it was from reading that that I engaged with that. Because it's so fundamental to the development of fundamentalism. And until that point, I've known about fundamentalisms, but then if you say to the kids you're teaching, what does a fundamentalist notarily look like, but what religion might they be, what part of the world are they from, we've got our awareness of, oh, is it connected to the Iranian Revolution or the Taliban and this? But this is a different I don't know, it's not something you always necessarily think about with the development of fundamentalism, that it came from this root in the 1920s in America, you know. And then she writes about how before that the fundamentalists had been sort of on the left of the political spectrum and had been really involved with a lot of social action on the ground, helping these kind of newly industrialized cities, many of the poor people who were living in them. And she writes that after this, the sort of humiliation and the shame that they faced and the kind of the world pointing and laughing at them and using them as this media circus, it sort of went more underground and then shifted more to the right. And okay, well, we'll keep ourselves to ourselves and be safer over here, and we can just protect what we need to for our faith.
SPEAKER_00:That's so interesting, because I think that model is repeated in so many times where you know fundamentalism in itself isn't wrong. No, you know, if you're fundamentally for supporting the poor people and standing up against, you know, the patriarchy, you know, that sort of fundamentalism where you're supporting causes that are altruistic would be great. And it feels very similar to other contexts where shame, guilt, marginalization create a fundamentalism that is more harmful for society.
SPEAKER_01:And an outward attack on things, you know, she writes about how it's where in Iran the enforced secularization that was brought in before the Iranian Revolution of the Shah, like women's headscarves were being ripped off their head because it was banned and they were like literally getting cut up in front of them by soldiers. And then this is actually an attack on the things that people held dear as but part of their religion for what they were. So we sort of say, Well, you feel like you're under attack. Well, actually, sometimes people have been, you know, they have literally, it's been we're going to force you to be more secular. So then people swing to, well, I'm gonna cling onto it, you know. Yeah. And that's a little bit like what I've seen in the scope. For me, it's the humiliation I think people must have felt, and I can see that happening more, even now with like thinking about social media and what we have online, if people feel there's this like circus around, it can make you you've got to clasp more strongly to it.
SPEAKER_00:And am I right in understanding just from what you've said, that this was really the birth of the kind of modern version of fundamentalism that we see today happened in this in this trial.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the word fundamentalism was coined. Oh, this is really going back to when I taught this unit. I think it's either 1919 or 1920 when the word is used, about a pamphlet that was a group of sort of Christian leaders who'd come together to say, well, what are if people are going to start questioning this and that, and it was kind of the rise of high biblical criticism and non-literalist readings of of biblical texts, what do we think we have to kind of cling on to? You know, what's the fundamental things that we have to say if we're Christian, this is what we believe. So that's why people who said we cleave to this and this is what we're holding on to are called fundamentalists, and that's when the word is first used. Right, okay. And Karen Armstrong's argument is that you didn't really have that approach to things, that sort of literalist reading of the Bible as a sense, like originally. It's a very modern way of thinking about things, and this is a whole other podcast episode that we can go over what truth is in those biblical texts and what truth are we reading into it now, and we read it with very different sense. But I don't know, she just like the way she talks about mythos and logos and how we read when texts like the Bible were written, it was about mythos truth, that kind of truth you get from Ah, that's what I meant to say about the context of the scope's trial and how it the kind of horrors of World War One led to many people rather than retreating from God, saying there must be some meaning, and there was a bit of a resurgence in people were like, Is that where we're gonna go if modernism, you know, is that it's gonna take us to the horrors of World War One? We need to have a different path. So that's why people were like went back into religion. Yeah, the horrors of what had happened in World War One sort of shocked everyone. Is that where we're headed if we go down this path of modernism and a modern world? Surely something's not quite right. So it kind of that meant many people wanted to go back into some kind of or had that happened because people had lost the religious way.
SPEAKER_00:So they were nervous that if we modernised that it would lead to Just modern society.
SPEAKER_01:If we go too modern in society and we lose religion, I guess, was the idea. Maybe we need to return to religion. And there was many people who, you know, a lot of people had lost their lives. So there were a lot of people left behind, they were no longer there. So you had this kind of, I believe, a kind of resurgence in you know ideas of like spiritualism and connecting with the dead because people have passed on, and it's like that, is that pain, you know, trauma. And so there was that fear that as an approach to not necessarily just religion, but life, modernism, and this idea that we're gonna kind of just march on to progress, and part of that was secularism, and part of that was losing religion. You know, where are we gonna end up, you know? Sexual promiscuity, there was a lot of like cocaine going around in the 1920s as well, wasn't there? And there was like, you know, the skirts are getting shorter and shorter, and kind of is this the world we want for our children? No. Okay, well, but let's not teach about evolution to make sure it doesn't happen.
SPEAKER_00:And I think there's still, even a hundred years later, I think there's still a belief that you can't be a moral person unless you're a religious person. Yeah. I think we're only just beginning to kind of understand the context of morality is outside of religion.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Because I think that was the thing, is that actually there's either religion or there's evil. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, that there's that dichotomy as well. So I think that's really interesting. You know, and there's another false dichotomy. Yeah. That if there's a God, there cannot be evil. Yeah. And that actually if you experience suffering, you're not going to believe in God, where actually evidence is, it often brings you closer to God.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I've lived in places where people are suffering greatly, and there's some of the most religious people that I've ever met in my life. So prior to that, people had been reading their holy books in a mythos way, so there was this truth that was like So yeah, she writes about how religion can help you deal with some of these great sufferings, a bit like artwork might be able to, or literature or poetry, like there's a truth there that's not like a literal truth on the page. And that's what she was saying is what was kind of the original truth meant in these texts. But as we became more modern in society, we wanted a kind of more scientific literal understanding, and we applied a logos understanding of truth back. But what Fundamentalists in her view or other fellow scholars have said are doing is they are saying, well, maybe that was how it was meant originally. We're not applying a modern way of looking at it, we're actually just reading as it was originally meant. But that might be a whole other podcast. Done. Done. You heard it here first. All the scholars I read about fundamentalism were saying, you know, it's a very modern phenomenon. We wouldn't have fundamentalism without the modern world.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I want to move on to the relevance of this story for us today. But there's just one thing I want to ask. What I'm struggling to understand is why Scope agreed to do this trial. Why he agreed to kind of go willingly on trial for breaking a law.
SPEAKER_01:Well, this is also how we use it in class when we're talking about when is it right to break the law. You know, I'm sure lots of us have done that with our students thinking about why some people might deliberately break laws that they feel are unfair or unjust. I was reading something earlier in preparation for this that said that he had said, well, this is in the textbooks that were issued to us by the state. So every single teacher is going to have broken the law because it's in the very textbooks that you've given us. Right. Remember, the law only came in in March. This trial happens in July, so it's very quickly. I guess it'd be like for us if suddenly the law was changed. Okay, I can't teach this anymore everyone, we'd be like, oh, but that's kind of what's literally in my textbook, or that's like in the worksheet already printed for Monday. So I guess he felt this sense of, yeah, I should delve into more why he was willing to do it. I've just kind of focused on the fact that he went into winning me. He must have just felt that it was a law that was wrong. And it was a test case for the law, but it descended into is evolution right or wrong? Is it right or wrong to read the Bible like this? Is it right or wrong to do this in the class? Remember, also in the US you've got that idea of religion not being in the classroom, so this is part of the debate, that kind of separation of religion and state. And the judge even, and this is I can tell you about how I use it in the classroom, but the judge even has to stop it and say, Look, we're not here to debate evolution, we're not here to debate the Bible, we're here to see did he break the law? This is what we're here to see. Did he teach evolution? And he said he has, the students have said he has, he's guilty.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So let's talk about this. I mean, it's already fascinating, and my mind is kind of sparking. Let's think about why this trial a hundred years later is still relevant in a context of teaching about religion and worldviews.
SPEAKER_01:I think it can help us understand, like you've said, there's still these debates and questions going on around not only to do with science and religion and evolution, the place of religion in the classroom or the religious views of a particular state, on the questions we have around what content should be involved or not in the classroom, but also things like as an example of the influence that the media can have on the way that people might feel about how they're being portrayed in the media, to do with stereotypes, to do with people's perceptions of different groups of people, but also, like I've said, to do with using it as an example of how some people might choose to break the law to kind of make a point about that law is an example I've used with students where we've then done about Bonhoeff or Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks, for example, then students who I've done this with us, oh that's like John Scopes who deliberately tested that law to see because he thought it was an unjust law. And I think it can just help us understand a lot of the discussions that are happening at the moment around religion and worldviews in the world, some of the political events. And it can help with not always othering, is that the right word? Othering this thing, but it's like other religions or other people who have this sense of fundamentalism or would have these sensations as well. It's something that's found within many different worldviews in Christianity as well, with this one. It links directly to lots of the content we teach to do with, you know, evolution, to do with different interpretations, textual interpretations. For me, what I really like about the worldviews approach, although I've often found when I've tried to describe it to people that it's kind of a lot of what good RE has always been, or some of the things we've always done as good re in the classroom, this sense that there could be a spectrum of people there who were on both sides arguing these different points from religious and non-religious viewpoints, and within even the religious viewpoints, some were on one side of the argument, some on the other, can really help to show that you have these different worldviews, even within the same group here on this one topic. So I think it can help exemplifying that as well.
SPEAKER_00:Do you know what is really interesting? Because I think we're recording this in April 2025, and the context in America at the moment is a lot of the kind of anti-trans rights being taken away, you know, their access to sort of healthcare and you know, identity and all these kinds of stuff. And I think it's really interesting that what has happened over the last five years, I think, is this polarization of ideas, you know, that there is pro-trans and anti-trans. Yeah. And both think the other people are wrong. Yes. And actually, one thing then we can learn as we're approaching these kind of ideas is how to see the nuance within those discussions. Yeah. And to truly try and understand the other person's points of view, because I think they're portrayed in the media in quite a black and white way, and quite sensationalised. And get more clicks, don't you?
SPEAKER_01:Well, this is exactly what it was with this trial. I can just kind of put myself back there. It would have been like, have you heard the latest from the scope? It's so we're going to decide between science and religion. And it gets more clicks, it's more exciting. It's much and that's what we know that this is how it works with algorithms and the things that crop up on your social media. It's going to be things that you're either going to, isn't it? Like either you're either going to agree with or actually get really annoyed with, and then you get more engagement with it, don't you? Yeah. And yeah, I do often think, especially when I came across that work from Karen Armstrong, of like trying to understand more why people have got these different perspectives and sort of get behind it the initial phrase. We see it all the time with different things to do with different conflicts to do with the trans discussions, and you know. What I also love about Karen Armstrong is she's got her charter for compassion.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:She's got a really good TED talk on this. In fact, this whole podcast is turning into me just like fangirling.
SPEAKER_00:Fangirling Cavan Armstrong.
SPEAKER_01:She's got a really good TED talk on this, where she's basically kind of revamped the golden rule for our age, and she just says, Charter for compassion should be I vow not to cause pain to someone else of something that would cause me pain. She kind of rephrases it in a way that I vow not to cause pain to someone else that would cause me to pain. And I just think, yeah, that compassion that she has. You know, I went to see her talk after there had been, and I'm not trying to conflate fundamentalism with extremism, but she did talk, and there had literally just been an attack. It might have been the one in Manchester, Ari Ariana Randy's concert, yeah. Concerts. It was literally the day after, and so there was this sense of us trying to like understand the world, and she just spoke with such compassion about world events that it really moved me.
SPEAKER_00:I'll find that and I'll put a link in the show notes if you can find that. Let's talk about really personally about, you know, you've kind of hinted at this quite a lot, that this really impacted the way that you teach. Yeah. Just talk us through some of those changes that you made and those impacts that finding out about the scopes trials had on you.
SPEAKER_01:Well, one thing I did is, and actually did come along at quite a good point when I was doing this fundamentalism unit, but I was also doing something called the Outstanding Teacher Programme. I don't know if some people have done this on here before, where you went off to do all this sort of teacher training, but you had to work with another teacher who was doing it from your school, and mine was the biology teacher. So it was Mr. Chaplin, if you're listening, and the two of us together had to plan work to do together around a topic. And I said, Look, I've just learned about this scope trial, you're a biology teacher, can we do it? And I could really delve into the science behind it and get my head around, well, why is that a misconception that it's obviously I kind of knew, but I didn't know how he taught it, and I watched him teach actually evolution in the class, and it sort of changed the sort of science side to what I was teaching when I was doing my kind of quick glib, like, oh, evolution versus science kind of lessons, to be a lot more, I suppose you've used the word nuance, but also detailed and kind of scientifically grounded so that the students were not still coming in with those misconceptions and misunderstandings of evolution. But then also together the two of us created a pack of cards so we could literally re-enact the trial in the classroom. And I actually found 25 different people who there's some amazing again, I'll send you the links you can put up. There's some amazing resources from different sites in America where they like documented the trial and named all the people who were there who took part in it and what they said. So I managed to find pictures of them all, and like each child gets to be a person who is in that trial. I bring a monkey toy in, because they've had a monkey in as well. I bring a hammer in for the judge at the front, and each child gets to be a character and reenact it and really kind of embody their person as much as they want to. And I don't tell them the outcome. And we go through the trial and then they judge and they decide. And the same thing happens where it descends into religion versus science, and the judge always, every year I've done it, something like bang, bang, bang. No, we are not here to debate religions, we're here to debate the law, whether he broke it or not. And it just, well, number one, it brings a lot of joy into my teaching when I did that, but also that experience the students had, and I know experiential RE has kind of always been a bit a thing in itself, and that's something I am drawn to, but them actually delving into the real history of it and re-enacting it there. I just saw it transform the way we then talked about so many things later. So there's classes I did that with in year nine, I used to do it in year nine part of our GCSE Origins of Life, part of the GCSE course that we were doing. And then we would come back to again in year ten and then in A-level as well. So I just saw it trickle with the students, this enactment that they've done.
SPEAKER_00:I was just gonna say the importance of story. Yeah. You know, that actually this is a story on which you can hang some key ideas and concepts. And it's stories that stick with students, and therefore, if they're linked to these big ideas and big concepts, then actually it's much more meaningful. Yes. Because they're seeing it play out rather than them being quite abstract ideas. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's amazing. You sort of talked a little bit there about the sort of students reenacting this. Did you sort of have any idea of their reaction to learning about the trial?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, first of all, some of them quite nervous to reenact it and to do it, but then the way I did the cards was to have something they could just literally read or they could embody it. And then I saw them, I think like we said there about it being a story and real characters, really kind of come to life. And when I do the trial, you can be quite clever with who you allot the different characters to. So you can make sure you give the lawyers to your kind of strongest, if you want to, you know, your strongest oresty kind of students, and it's their time to shine. But the way that I've seen it influence them as students is their understanding that there is that nuance, you know, if they're here on one side and they're sat as a team, but we're the against side, aren't we? How come you're sat here and you're religious? Or we're the foreside, and how come you're not religious and you're still doing this? And they could just delve into those different perspectives of the different people that were in the trial because it was so varied in some ways, you know. And then the way that they could then see these things happening today, or through the kind of groups that we've looked at and the different interpretations, the way they could link it. What I love about it is it's a concrete historical example that we can sort of look at together, you know. And maybe the fact that it happened that long ago is is easier in a way, because it's not necessarily touching on a lot of the that emotion and the emotive thing. The emotional, yeah, sort of sensitive side. Yeah. Like the kind of controversies where we have got that polarization of controversies. I'm not saying we can't talk about them, but sometimes it's good to be able to have a debate about something else that was controversial and sort of see the different sides, different sides to the argument, try and understand why a group that we might say, well, of course they should have lost or whatever, you know, why they had that and why they felt that that passionately. So in the character cards, I had, you know, the reasons why a mum was like concerned about her son learning about evolution and what she thought it might lead to and what the worries were, rather than it just being like, Oh, these people are against it, type thing. Trying to bring a bit of life into these different perspectives.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So actually you're removing that emotion that goes when you're talking about something that is currently live. You're slightly disconnected, so you can learn the skills and you can learn the concepts in a place that isn't going to be traumatic for children or create those kind of dichotomies within the classroom. Yeah, that's really interesting. We kind of hinted at this a bit as well, in terms of like its relevance, this story is relevant to a lot of the things that's going on today.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:How can this trial really help us to understand things that are going on today?
SPEAKER_01:I think it can help us understand the debate around education. It's not new, the debates for us as educators about what we can and can't have should or should be saying in the classroom and who gets to sort of decide that. But for students it can help them to understand some of the different approaches to religion that they might be learning about in the classroom and what things might have informed that or shaped that, why certain groups or people feel that they need to cling on to their faith in a certain way or hold on to or to retain certain practices and beliefs so strongly, when maybe students I've taught have thought, well, you know, we live in a free country and you're free to do this, you can do that, and you know, they might not necessarily understand that there is this kind of history across different fundamentalisms or different approaches to religion, where people have felt that that's threatened and it could be taken away, and when they've taken steps to try and not make that happen, the whole world came and pointed and sort of laughed at it, the argument would be that you know everybody came and maybe did try to pull it away from them. So that's why people feel that need to cling on and hold to it more strongly. So when we look in the classroom at different approaches to reading text or different approaches to religion, and for my students sometimes they can it's kind of easier to think of all Christians or all Muslims or all Jewish people or they all kind of approach it in this way, but this can actually help them to see that there are different ways and why there might be those different ways, and why there are people who feel that they need to cling on to these different interpretations of their text in a certain way, and the processes behind it that have led to that more.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And it's really interesting, just as you were speaking, I was just reminded, like obviously, again, the current administration in America is trying to stop EDI being part of curriculums and things like that, and Stanford University have kind of fought back and said, actually, no, it's not up to the government to decide what we teach and we're going to carry on teaching it. So I think it's really interesting that a hundred years later there's still these same conversations.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And again, it's that reminder, isn't there, to look at the nuance and understand the positionality behind the views that are are often presented in a cartoonish way without that nuance and that depth. I think that's really interesting. One thing you mentioned earlier, which is really lovely, is the work you did with the biology teacher.
SPEAKER_03:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And I think this is something which I think probably 15 years ago was huge, this kind of cross-curricular idea. And I think because I think what's happened is there's been a massive move to these knowledge-rich curriculums, so we've got huge amounts of content, we often forget to kind of utilize the sort of expertise in other subjects. So that was a really good example, I think, of that sort of cross-curricular. If you're teaching evolution to grab hold of the science teacher and work with them.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, how is it being taught in other parts of the school? And then how what are the kind of misconceptions that they're finding students come up with and how do they address them? What are the misconceptions we might even have as teachers when we cover some of this content that we can have clarified? Yeah, it's something I've always wanted to reach across and do across curricular work because I I was once doing some drama teaching and I realized for Key Stage 3 that the drama content had things around enslavement at a different point of the year when we were doing, but we never knew that they'd covered this and that we'd covered this, and all the students have done this in this subject. And I realized that to map it, because that student is the one student who goes through the day, you know, we've got our subject. This is at secondary, obviously, we're focusing on here. We've got our subject that we go head into, which is brilliant. But then what are the things that they're going to pick up across the different subjects and how can they build that schema, you know, across the subjects? I did some work with United Learning a year or so ago, and we had curriculum writers on a team together, so we could sort of chat to each other. Oh, how did you cover this? How'd you cover that? And make sure we had some common definitions for terms, for example, or if they're different, why they're different, perhaps it's a disciplinary thing in our different subjects and they need to be different. Yeah, and that kind of reminded me of what I'd done with this with the scopes trial when I'd had the space with Toby to sort of have that common language about something. It's much better for the students, isn't it, to be able to kind of embed that and see how they then might use it differently in the different contexts.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And it reduces that cognitive load on the students. Yeah. And I think this is just the nature of the way that the education system is set up in Britain, in that we have these different subjects and timetabled in the different areas of the school. And actually that it's all quite discrete from each other.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But I think it's really powerful. For me, I've just found out one of the schools I work in, the history department, teach the Mughal Empire. Wow. And I was like, oh brilliant. So I can connect that when we're looking at the birth of Sikki. I can go back to kind of the context of like, you know, 15th, 16th century India and kind of use that information. Yes. And I think with the scopes trial, I think that obviously it has that link to the science curriculum. But also probably in terms of citizenship and PSHE and things like that, you've got this idea of law and law breakers and trials and justice and all of those kind of big ideas as well. And probably also if we're looking at English and we're looking at analysing texts and you know, newspaper reports and all that, you know, there's so many links you can make.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, there's so many. And I watched some amazing clips from history teachers who is part of the history curriculum, I think, in the US, to cover it and how it can be linked into the different big sort of themes there are in history around change and continuity and you know, that period, that decade, what was happening and what was going on in that decade in the 1920s can be a real like capturing of the moment, which I think can be really powerful to see how these things covered with that. Well, now we're talking about lenses, aren't we? Kind of different approaches that we can look at with something. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And it's so interesting for me, because I think, you know, when I think of 1920s America, I'm thinking prohibition and you know, like Long Island iced teas. Sometimes we think that one historic context is happening in any one decade. And actually the sort of like tapestry of history is really, really interesting. You mentioned just earlier before that there are resources, I'm presuming set in the context of American history education.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it was kind of like archival library type resources where you can kind of read about it and find out about it is what I went to, which I can send you the link to. But I also have the reenactment cards that I made and different resources that go along with it. So the lessons that Toby and I put together had lots of different things that could help them help students explore the trial. But then for the hundred years for the scopes trial, I did some work with Dave Francis and Denise Gospel Faith around the big ideas, and it was a kind of science and religion project that they did, and they were focusing on the scopes trial. So they have a huge wealth, and they had some biology teachers put together lessons on evolution, the way that they would kind of do them in a biology classroom, and then included lots of information and resources from the big ideas team, and then I put in my reenactment cards as well for people to be able to use. So that's a free resource that anyone can use if they want to delve into scope strike.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, because we've had Dave Francis on and he was talking about, you know, see a face more generally, but mentioned the Big Ideas website as well. So I'll put another link to that because I think people will be familiar. So I love that. I didn't realise there was a link between that, but that's really fantastic.
SPEAKER_01:Well, when I'd met them, it doesn't take long for the scope straw to come into conversation with me for some reason. And I had said something about actually by the way, I'm really obsessed with the soap straw. I love teaching about it, and I just think it's really interesting. And then uh he got in touch and said, Oh, would you like to help us with this? We think you might like to. And I was like, Yes, please.
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. Very happy to.
SPEAKER_01:Amazing.
SPEAKER_00:I'm surprised that we've known each other so long and it only came up in conversation.
SPEAKER_01:Oh no, no, it's it's a sign of um and then I said to a good friend of mine, Miss Boyson, if you're listening, RE teacher, and I said, Oh, we're gonna go to the podcast to talk about the sculptural. I said, Oh yes, I remember you. Always talking about the sculpturer. Just get the kids to reenact it with the monkey and the I love it.
SPEAKER_00:Do you feel that there's kind of anything else you sort of want to say just as we close that you've not had the opportunity to, or just maybe some final thoughts you want to leave people with?
SPEAKER_01:Just that I find the way that RE is going at the moment is really exciting, which we spoke about earlier on. And I guess even though this is something that I delved into 15 years ago, I feel like it taps into so many of the things that are happening in the RE world at the moment, particularly around worldviews, and we'd mentioned disciplinary learning and different lenses. And then when you mentioned stories there as well, it really resonated with why I find it so powerful to teach about the Scopes trial and other like key stories like this. And I have to just take a moment to thank people like our wonderful Dawn Cox for the work she's done in bringing those kind of approaches into the narrative for us as RE teachers and really publicising them and the work that she's done in in supporting that. And I encourage anyone to have a look and read her blogs as well around storytelling and lenses because it's really really articulate for us to get into and know how to do that more in the classroom because it is really powerful and it's changed the way that I teach. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And we'll put a link to Dawn Cox's work because I think you know we want to celebrate her as much as we can. And so we can put a link there so people can kind of engage with that and sort of be aware of the amazing contribution she's made to the RV community. Ruth, can I ask you if you would wake up tomorrow and one thing was different about the world, what would you want it to be? Oh gosh.
SPEAKER_01:For everyone on whichever side of the different polarizing debates to just take a moment to breathe and just try and understand the other person a bit more.
SPEAKER_00:Do you find that easy? Do I find that easy more taking a breath and having a thing? Just taking that step back to listen to ideas on the surface are quite offensive to you. Because I find it really impossible.
SPEAKER_01:The thing is, I may have been that person in the past that said really offensive things to people 'cause I've changed a lot in my life. And I think I would find my 15-year-old self very difficult to have a conversation with, you know. And um I have to think that people have got all sorts of reasons why they say the things that they do. And okay, there might be I don't know. I don't know, this is very difficult, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It's very difficult. Yeah, I feel the same way. And I think for me, curiosity and contact and talking to people and conversation is so important. Yeah. And I really wish that more people would do it, but I always find that idea a real challenge to me because there are certain ideas that I shut myself off for because I find them so offensive that I don't want to hear about them. Yeah. Therefore, I'm guilty of the very thing that I sometimes criticize other people for doing. Yeah. You know, you need to just listen to these people, and if you listen to them, you wouldn't have the views you've had when actually, you know, I feel a bit of a hypocrite because I'm not always able to engage with ideas that I find morally abhorrent.
SPEAKER_01:Well it was a Sarah Silverman sketch, right? I won't tell you the whole thing, but she is talking to an unnamed holy figure, and she like says, Holy figure, like what should I think about people who think this? And the holy figure says, Well, the people who think that are wrong. And Sarah's like, Oh great, yeah, and she looks really happy. And he's like, But Sarah, yes. The people who think this is that are wrong. But the people who think that are still people and we need to love them. And I just thought it was really powerful the way that it's like, yeah. It's hard, but I don't know. Obviously, there's a line where it's kind of, you know, I'm not saying we should welcome people inciting violence or that kind of thing. We're not gonna progress if we don't understand what people's genuine concerns are, or if there are or not, or how are we gonna have that conversation? We're just gonna become more and more polarized.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And just if I don't even want to look at or read something I don't agree with, then how am I gonna understand? It's not gonna be like, oh, Ruth's not liking my post. I'm gonna not think this anymore. Like that's you know, but then it's obviously you've got to take care of yourself as well. Yeah. So it's hard, it's difficult. Yeah. In the classrooms, students have said things that I might not think are, you know, the right interpretation, but I'm not gonna say you can't think that and just want to talk to them about it, they can explain to me, we can have a conversation, you know. Just like I was that 15-year-old who would have really wound me up.
SPEAKER_00:And actually, listeners, Rhys and I have had long chats about our kind of upbringing and our, you know, religious and moral kind of beliefs at certain parts of our life and the sort of evolution of those into kind of the people that we are now. And and I think, you know, the reality is we wouldn't be, we wouldn't have the views we had now without that context, because we are people that are constantly evolving and making the best decisions that we have with the knowledge that we have.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. The last thing I guess I'll say is I think that context of my upbringing, or not necessarily my upbringing my upbringing, but also the things I got myself involved with and you know, a lot of the Christian activities where I felt we I had to like have this fervor to convert to as many people as I could and, you know, help the faith. I think when I learned about the scope to trial, it made me understand more where some of that might have come from. I personally have never faced any discrimination or anyone trying to stop me doing this, but there was this sense that not saying from my family or even a specific church, but there was this sense of the modern world is against us kind of thing, or we cannot be in modernity. And when I learned about the scope, that was, you know, a hundred years ago, the scopes trial and the effect that that had on many different Christian groups that were impacted by it, it made me understand a lot more that sort of chain down to some of the activities that I was involved with as a Christian.
SPEAKER_00:So let's end on that famous Mary Angelou quote. Oh, yes. So do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. That's brilliant.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That's quite in this moment. Ruth, thank you so much. I cannot like listeners, you won't know this. This is the third time that we've attempted to record this. And even today it almost didn't happen because I Ruth couldn't hear me. So I think sometimes the right episode comes out at the right time, and I'm so glad that eventually we've got an opportunity to talk about this because I think it's been amazing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm really happy. Yeah, thank you so much. And thank you for the podcast. I just love listening to it, it's brilliant. Often when I'm chopping vegetables.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, Ruth, I can't wait to meet you. I know it's too much.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's been really good.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I can't wait. Thanks, everybody. Brilliant. Thanks again, Ruth. My name is Louisa Jane Smith, and this has been the RE podcast. The podcast for those of you who think RE is boring, but it's not. It shines a light on the heroes who bravely challenge the status quo and allow us the freedom to teach the big ideas. But thank you so much for letting us bore the life out of you.