An interview with Tina Painting, Teacher
Please introduce yourself and tell us something about your involvement with Carpenters School.
My name is Tina Painting. This is my first year of teaching and I’m looking after a Year 2 class. It’s very hard work but it’s going well. My children are fantastic. I was in this school for my final teaching practice, and actually worked with these children then. I’m looking forward to seeing how it feels to have worked with a class of children over a full year as opposed to a 4-week block or an 8-week block of teaching practice.
RE is one of the subjects you have to teach. How do you approach that?
I try to approach all the subjects with enthusiasm. I approach it in the same way as I approach any subject. I don’t approach RE in a different way to how I would deal with teaching geography or science. Any subject can be quite tricky and I want to make them all interesting for the children.
I feel slightly disadvantaged being in this community and not having any knowledge of so many things the children have a lot of knowledge of. For example, I know that children in my class go to Muslim school after they’ve been here all day. And I know that is very important for them and their families. So when it comes to teaching their religion I’ll probably be quite apprehensive because I don’t want to say the wrong thing or to embarrass myself. So far I’ve taught Judaism to the children which they seem to enjoy as much as I enjoyed teaching it to them.
Obviously, around here, there is a massive cultural diversity, so, when it comes to teaching Christianity we have to avoid imposing any ideas on the children. I try to present the facts. My job is to get the children to understand that whatever you believe is valid but some people believe other things. Politically speaking, in our world today, religious differences have caused so many problems and, personally, I prefer to take a neutral standpoint and present the facts while, at the same time, trying to make things interesting for the children.
There are certain things which are demanded of you by the curriculum. What do you want the children to get out of RE projects?
I want them to articulate their thoughts because, even though they are very young they have some quite profound ideas sometimes and I want to help them to explain those. They know they live in a culturally diverse society and I think they need to realise it’s fine for all these different religious beliefs to exist at the same time.
I don’t really have any particular religious beliefs of my own at present but, even if I did, it’s not my job to tell the children what I believe. My job is to show them what’s in their world and let them decide for themselves.
What kind of preparation did you do for the visit to St. John’s church?
I worked closely with my parallel year-group teacher and also with Kathryn Wright, the RE Advisory Teacher for Newham. We’ve had quite a few brain-storming sessions which have really helped me structure my RE lessons, to make sure I get a balance of discussion time and thinking time as well as recording. It’s been really good not to sit by myself, looking at a unit of work, wondering what I’m going to do with it. There’s always been a group of four or five people involved in the meetings so we can bounce ideas off each other and, as a consequence, I think we’ve put together an exciting scheme of work for the children.
As an NQT, the support from other people, including Kathryn Wright, is invaluable because in my previous school, on teaching practice, I didn’t actually teach RE because they had a specialist teacher who came in and taught RE to the whole school.
It is also lovely to work with David Richards, the Vicar of St. John’s Church. The children know him because he does assemblies here sometimes and they like him. He has lots of experience of other schools visiting his church and he’s very good at sharing his ideas of what works best. We’ve been able to adapt his suggestions to suit our own needs.
We were required to carry out a risk assessment before taking the children out of school. Montserrat and myself went to the church to do that. We went around and looked at the health and safety aspects. There were quite a few of them actually. You have to be aware that you’re visiting a place that might have quite a few steps or may have wooden things that might splinter. But a church being a church there’s not much you can do about it. You just have to be aware and prepare the children to be careful.
What are you hoping to get out of the visit?
We’ve designed the activities to get the children to be really active in the environment they’ll find themselves in. Not just looking at things but also listening carefully, so that they can experience the sounds in the church. They’ll listen to the organ of course, which I hope they’ll enjoy but we’ll also try to get them to listen to the silence of the church, the quietness inside the building. Living in London they don’t get to experience silence very much. We’re also going to get them to lie on the floor and look up at the roof so they can get a sense of how big the building is. They don’t get to experience vast open spaces too often.
We also want the children to come away from the visit with a better understanding of what actually happens inside a church. We’ll show the children a video which shows a church full of people so that they can see some of the activities that occur in churches. The children are preparing some questions to ask the vicar and overall, I hope they’ll learn a lot and have an interesting and valuable time there.