Joyce Miller retired in 2007 from the post of Head of Diversity and Cohesion at Education Bradford where she led a team promoting community cohesion, race equality and respect for diversity. This included responsibility for religious education and the Interfaith Education Centre.
She has been appointed to the Commission on Religious Education, 2016-2018 and is a member of the Advisory Group on A New Settlement set up by the Rt. Hon. Charles Clarke and Prof Linda Woodhead. She is a member of the International Seminar on Religious Education and Values (ISREV) and will give a plenary paper at its next conference in Nuremburg, July 2018.
She is a former chair of the RE Council of England and Wales and of the Board of Trustees of the Schools Linking Network. She chaired the monitoring and steering groups of the RE Quality Mark and the REsilience project, the Association of RE Inspectors Advisers and Consultants (AREIAC) and Bradford SACRE.
She was in the first cohort of B.Ed students to graduate from Warwick in 1969 and was the president of the students’ union. She completed a master’s degree by research in 1992, The Forest Hermitage: an ethnographic study of a Buddhist community in Warwickshire. Her Ed.D degree was completed in 2010 and included a practitioner research study in which she applied key concepts from the interpretive approach to teachers’ continuing professional development. She was a member of the community of practice, based at Warwick, that formed the English part of the European-wide REDCo project. In 2009, she conducted two of the qualitative case studies for the major report on RE resources, commissioned by the DCSF, Materials used to Teach about World Religions in Schools in England. She co-ordinated an inquiry on behalf of the All Party Parliamentary Group on RE into ‘RE and Good Community Relations’; her report was launched at Westminster on 17 March, 2014.
For seven years, she edited REsource, the journal of the (then) Professional Council for RE, on whose executive she sat for more than 10 years. Prior to working in Bradford she was a senior lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Wolverhampton after having taught religious education in secondary schools in Coventry and Northumberland.
At a recent RE research and policy conference #2020RE, Dr Wendy Dossett had the opportunity to chat with two of the Commissioners and authors of the Religion and Worldviews report, Dr Joyce Miller and Prof Eleanor Nesbitt, along with Religious Education sociologist (and convener of SOCREL), Céline Benoit. Their conversation ranged over some of the following issues: the rationale for the move from calling the subject ‘Religious Education’ to ‘Religion and Worldviews’; the inadequacy for the classroom of a world religions approach; the degree to which faith communities are entitled to influence what gets taught in schools; and the anomaly of the so-called withdrawal clause.
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