dialogue australasia network teaching middle school re dr felicity mccutcheon 2012

Dialogue Australasia Network

Teaching Middle School REDr Felicity McCutcheon

2012

Religious Educators as Educators

Starting with Plato

“The mind (soul) must become capable of bearing the

sight of real being and reality at its most bright, which

we’re saying is goodness. That’s what education

should be: the art of orientation.” (Republic 518c)


Plato continued

‘Education should devise the simplest and most effective

methods of turning minds around. It shouldn’t be the art of

implanting sight in the organ but should proceed on the

understanding that the organ already has the capacity, but

is improperly aligned and isn’t facing the right way’ (Plato:

Republic, 518c/d)

Adolescence

Loss of childhood binary concepts

and innocent trust of authority


Adolescence

“As the roaring of the waves precedes the tempest, so the murmur of

rising passions…warns us of the approaching danger. A change of

temper, frequent outbreaks of anger, a perpetual stirring of the mind,

make the child ungovernable”. (Rousseau, Emile, NY: Dutton, 1955,

first published 1762)

Middle school teachers might be tempted to say: ‘make the child unteachable’!


Adolescence

It is naturally a time of disorientation and re-orientation.

This is what makes middle school teaching so full of

possibility. What matters is that we provide safe passage

for our young people from childish simplistic notions

towards being capable of the complexity and ambiguity of

human (and religious) life.


Adolescence

‘To become capable of reality at its most bright

’

To become capable of God

Heidegger: What is called Thinking?

Thinking is not merely having an opinion or an idea about a state of affairs. Thinking is not developing a chain of premises that lead to a valid conclusion…Thinking is not so much an act as a way of living or dwelling. It is a gathering and focussing of our whole selves on what lies before us and a taking to heart and mind these particular things before us in order to discover in them their essential nature and truth”.

Thinking

Thinking is the orientation of beings towards being

‘The Woodcarver’

Heidegger continued

‘Teaching is even more difficult than learning. We know that; but we rarely think about it. And why is teaching more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher must have a larger store of information and have it always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn’. (p15)


Adolescence and relevance

Postman and Weingartner playlet


Adolescence and relevance – ‘letting learn’

Postman and Weingartner inquiry method•Self-confidence in their learning ability •Pleasure in problem solving •A keen sense of relevance •Reliance on their own judgment over other people's or society's •No fear of being wrong •No haste in answering •Flexibility in point of view •Respect for facts, and the ability to distinguish between fact and opinion •No need for final answers to all questions, and comfort in not knowing an answer to difficult questions rather than settling for a simplistic answer

Education as attending to the essentials

Adolescence and RE

What is relevant? Why?(5 minute exercise – talk to

neighbour and draw up a list)


Adolescence – becoming capable of reality

To be ready to learn is to be ready

to die (Kafka)

Summary: the essentials for Middle School

•Uniqueness and importance of adolescence – embrace the questioning•Set high standards – demand of them intellectual standards (equivalent to other subjects)•Orientation – call them up, not so much to ‘beliefs’ but towards truthful being

Good news!

There is no perfect curriculum. There is no

Platonic Form of a Middle School Scope

and Sequence

[Why not?]

The essentials will include:

Religious Education

Biblical/Christian Church TraditionWorld ReligionsPhilosophyEthicsReflective Stillness


Remember:

•Curriculum documents serve our purposes.•We must not become slavish to them•We serve truth, reality and our students•When a planner or scope and sequence chart

becomes our master, we are now worshipping

an idol

Pursuing essentials in RE

Adolescence

‘The aim of this course is to help clarify

your thinking on matters of profound importance’


Clarity on matters of profound importance

What are matters of profound importance?

(5 minute exercise)



How much overlap between this exercise

and the previous one on relevance?


Clarity on matters of profound importance• What are major matters of profound importance to people?•Why are these matters of profound importance?•Is evidence needed to justify matters of profound importance?•What happens when we die?•Will we ever know the truth about the beginning of the world?•Why are we here?•How can there be so many different religions yet everyone believes that what they believe is the truth?•Why are people willing to sacrifice everything for their religion?•Why do we have differences if we were all made in God’s image? Should we accept these differences?•Why is God the way he is?•If we are supposed to follow laws/rules why do some people choose to break them?



•Is risking something small for a bigger picture worth it when it involves lives? E.g. War. Can it be justified?•Can one’s actions define them?•Is there a meaning in living and can it be verified? If not, what makes a person live on?•Why do some religions dislike certain people? •Why did some white people used to dislike black people?•Is there any proof that heaven or hell exists?•Is there a lot of room for interpretation in the Quran?•Are heaven and hell real places which you transcend to when you die or are they beliefs which guide your actions in life?

[these are the questions my year 10 boys wrote down in 2012]


Adolescence – enlarging their world

Spiritual

Theological

Philosophical

Ethical

Intellectual

Are we enlarging and enlightening their world or simply

adding more to It? (The tyranny of information?)


Adolescence – enlarging their world

“Infomania retards rather than

accelerates wisdom”.

(Michael Heim, The metaphysics of virtual reality,

OUP 1993, p145)

Are we enlarging and enlightening their world or simply

adding more to It? (The tyranny of information)


The computer does not enlarge

Claudia Koonz, from Duke University describes

her students thus: “They demand clarity. They

want identifiable good guys and bad guys…their

belief in the simple answer, put together in a visual

way, is, I think, dangerous.”

(Time Magazine 10th April, 2006, ‘The

Multitasking Generation, p 52)

Purposeful pedagogical tools

Aims of Middle School RE•To help make transition from 2 dimensional thinking towards complexity

and deeper truth•To enable them to encounter and engage with religious concepts

and language with open hearts and minds•To address their confusion and distortions about religion and God•To provide students with sense-making frameworks that encourage

understanding•To invite further questions whilst making it safe to live within them

To orientate them towards reality – to affirm and feed their desire for it


1. Spiritual Literacy – Year 9

Spirituality diagram

I – I AM

Metaphor and religious language

Finding your True ‘I’


Spiritual Literacy – ‘Salvation as…’

•Liberation from bondage

•Reconciliation from Estrangement

•Enlightenment from darkness (‘Amazing Grace’)

•Experiencing the love of God

•Knowing God

•The kingdom of God


Spiritual Literacy – ‘Salvation’•God wills our liberation, our exodus from Egypt

•God wills our reconciliation – our return from exile

•God wills our enlightenment – our seeing

•God wills our forgiveness – our release from sin and guilt

•God wills that we see ourselves as God’s beloved

•God wills our resurrection – our passage from death to life

•God wills for us food and drink that satisfy our hunger and thirst

•God wills our wellbeing and the wellbeing of all creation

In short, God wills our salvation, our healing, here on earth by

participating in the divine life


Spirituality is not the same as psychology

“Much modern therapy trains people to be rigid observers of themselves. They

never sleep on the job. Like heroic cowboys they manage to sleep with one

eye open. It is, then, extremely difficult to let yourself become a whole-hearted

participant in your one, beautiful, unrepeatable life. You are taught to police

yourself. When you watch a policeman walk down a street, he does it

differently. He is alert, his eyes combing everything. He does not miss

anything. When you police yourself, you are on the beat alone…when the

usual suspects surface, you will put them through the full process:

identification, arrest, conviction. You know how to ‘deal’ with them…We need

to rediscover the wise graciousness of spontaneity” (John O’Donohue Eternal

Echoes p.333).


Spirituality – Neither psychology nor morality

John Carroll: “Redeeming truths are

metaphysical” (Wreck of Western Culture p205).

Neither the trained mind, specialist knowledge nor

morality may transform spirit

Consider the Pharisees who are ‘morally righteous’ but lack love

Consider Mary Magdalene – morally unrighteous yet somehow closer to

redemption. She is aware of her “hamartia’ – ‘missing the mark’ –

salvation through encounter with Jesus’ pneuma


The Bible is not a morality tale

God doesn’t want ‘right behaviour’ or even

‘right thinking’ (the Pharisee problem).

“We might think that God wanted simple obedience to a

set of rules; whereas he really wants people of a particular

sort” (C S Lewis, Mere Christianity, Bk3 Ch2)


Neither object, person nor psychological technique can satisfy

spiritual hunger

‘Most of the really powerful forces in contemporary culture work to

seduce human longing along the pathways of false satisfaction. When

our longing becomes numbed, our sense of belonging becomes empty

and cold; this intensifies the sense of isolation and distance that so

many people now feel. Consumerism is the worship of the god of

quantity; advertising it its liturgy. Advertising is schooling in false

desire’ (John O’Donohue Eternal Echoes xxvii)

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless

until it finds its rest in you." (Augustine Confessions)


‘Behold, I Am the Ground of thy beseeching’.

Think about it – Science assumes a source but

doesn’t know the source. (Plato’s point!)

Psychology is generalised description

Spirituality is the lived experience of longing and

belonging – unique to each indivdual


Isn’t Theology a generalised description?

Yes and no; but it is a shared description designed to protect and

preserve the inner truth of the individual story. It is not the type of

‘objective’ explanations of science and psychology that that must deny

subjectivity or individuality to be valid. Abstract/3rd person vs lived truth

Put simply: spirit cannot be put under a microscope or

understood by research or presented in statistics

C.S.Lewis ‘Don’t go to sea without a map’ (in handout)


As Soren Kierkegaard put it:

“To be spirit is to be I. God desires to have I’s, for God

desires to be loved. Mankind’s interest consists in alleging

objectivities everywhere; this is the interest of the category

of race. “Christendom” is a society of millions – all in the

third person, no I.” (Journals, 4350)

This is his ‘Attack on Christendom’


Spirituality is not statistics

Only an individual can hear the divine voice:

“Come here to me, all who labour and are

burdened and I will give you rest”

Kierkegaard’s reflections on Christ’s words in Practice in Christianity

are some of the most beautiful and profound in all Christian writing


Spiritual Literacy

‘That to which your heart clings or

attaches itself, that is your god.’ Martin Luther

Student question: How does one distinguish between a

true God and idols or substitutes? Why does it matter?


Spiritual Literacy

Scientists are the Guardian of the Laws of the

Physical Universe

Religions are Guardians of the Laws of the

Spiritual universe

[ask students to identify some of these laws]


2. Biblical Literacy – ‘What God is…’

How would you deal with the following questions?

1.Why is God the way he is?

2.Why is the God of the New Testament so

different from the God of the Old Testament?


2. Biblical Literacy – ‘What God is…’ – Multiple metaphors

Political leadership – King, Lord, Warrior, Judge, Lawgiver

Everyday human life – Builder, gardener, shepherd, potter, healer, father, mother, lover, wise woman, old man, friend

Nature and inanimate objects – Eagle, lion, bear, hen, fire, light, cloud, wind, breath, rock, fortress and shield


Biblical Literacy – ‘Imaging God’ – Why it matters

King:

Grandeur, majesty, gloryPower and authorityLawgiver and judgeJusticeProtectionMale



Fire:

Safety, protection, warmthDanger, destruction, fearPurifying agentLightMysterious, wild, powerful



Mrs Beaver from Narnia:

‘Aslan is good but not safe’


2. Biblical Literacy – ‘Gospels as portraits’ – Perspective and truth

1. What does the word "gospel" mean?2. Why are the Gospels more like portraits than photographs? 3. Fill out the following table Gospel Date written For Whom Portrait of Jesus

Matthew Mark Luke John


2. Biblical Literacy – Perspectives and Truth - Suggestions

•Rewrite a story from the Hebrew scriptures from the ‘other’ point of view (for example, a resident of Jericho who survived or a citizen of Nineveh when Jonah turns up),•Examine texts where scholars suggest two traditions of authorship have been merged (for example, Genesis 1 and 2 or Moses crossing of the Red Sea) – see handout•Write an account of your time as a disciple of Jesus (Judas?)•Try to imagine being Saul, the good Pharisee, who undergoes the conversion experience on the road to Damascus and becomes Paul (could relate that back to and explore in terms of one of the ‘salvation’ concepts)•Visual: Analyse images of Christ across cultures and eras


3. World Religions and ‘Truth’

How religions begin and what they are:

‘The source, the bore, the well and the brickwork’ exercise

Philosophical approach to ‘truth’ in religion

Relativism, Exclusivism, Non-exclusivism, Pluralism

Acknowledgements

Authors Mehmet OzalpZuleyha KeskinHussam Deeb

© Affinity Intercultural Foundation 2009

Hajj – significant practice

49

Hajj is Abrahamic

Abraham was an exemplar model for monotheism and a mentor for all believers in One God. His faith and submission to One God was equal to the faith of a whole nation as described in the Holy Qur’an.

Hajj - Significant Practice in Islam

50


HINDUISM SHORT STORY (Could have any religion as focus) Write a short story in which at least one character is a Hindu. During the course of the story, you must display an understanding of at least 10 features of Hinduism. These must be footnoted and explained in the footnote. For example, “Indira’s grandfather died after a long illness. She wondered whether he had moved up in the cycle of Samsara or whether his Karma had not been good enough for this. Indira found the Hindu belief in reincarnation difficult to understand and yet at times, it also seemed to make sense.”


3. World Religions and ‘Truth’

Year 9 (girls) exam question: Short essay

“The soul of religion is one but is encased in a

multitude of forms”. (Gandhi)

Discuss with reference to exclusivism, non-

exclusivism and pluralism


4. Socrates and thinking well

Alain de Botton – Guide to Happiness


4. Philosophical thinking and reasoning

Arguments for and against the existence of God•Evidence

•Rational proof

•The problem of evil

•The limits of science

•Faith - ‘seeing is believing’


4. Philosophical thinking and reasoning

Robert Kirkwood books are an excellent resource

Looking for Proof of God

Looking for Happiness

The Confused Me

If I was God I’d say sorry

Peter Vardy resources too (books, p/pts and dvds)


4. Philosophical proofs – sample test question

1.The question of God’s existence can arise and be debated because life’s experiences are ambiguous with regard to whether or not there is a God.a)Explain what the word ‘ambiguous’ means in this context.b)When people ask for evidence of God’s existence, what kind of evidence do you think they mean?c)Would any evidence prove one way or another whether there is a divine being? Explain your answer.d)Could science ever prove God doesn’t exist? Explain your answer.


4. Philosophical proofs (con’t)

2.a) A German philosopher of the 19th century thought he could prove God didn’t exist. What was his name?

b) Why do human beings ‘project’ the idea of God according to this argument (you should provide and explain 2 reasons).

c) What kind of God do human beings ‘create’ this way?

d) Has this philosopher proved God doesn’t exist? Explain your answer.


5. Church history – People, Beliefs and Events

Remarkably, the existence of all any

Church school depends on (and is

historically connected to) the life of

Jesus


5. Church history – People, Beliefs and Events

Year 9 webquest – aimed at developing their understanding of Christian denominations and also deepening their grasp of history as the unfolding of a human drama – individuals, actions, conflicts, resolutions, decisions etc., ‘make history happen’

Introduction | Task | Process | Resources | Assessment | Conclusion

“…so what’s an ANGLICAN school anyway?”

A WebQuest

Introduction

Melbourne Grammar is an ANGLICAN school. There are more than 200 independent schools in Victoria from various Christian denominations just like our own and they are attended by about 30 per cent of all Victorian students. So, …why Christian and …why Anglican? How could the life and death of an individual who lived more than 2000 years ago be connected to the existence of some of the major schools in Australia?

In this WebQuest you will identify the major denominations of the Christian Church in Australia and the people and factors that led to their formation and come to an understanding of some of the forces that influence the development of any ‘institution’ over time.

This is what you will do:


Research in pairsYou will work in cooperative Expert Research Groups of two to explore each of the Major

Denominations in APS schools. The history of the denomination, the key individuals who had a major influence in its development, etc.

You MUST cooperate to:

• Read through the WWW files linked to your group plus other relevant resources ,

• Create a clear synthesis of what your group has learned in response to the focus questions

• You will present it visually using Inspiration, Powerpoint, Videostory etc to communicate the essential points in answer to your research questions

Schools in the APS are: Brighton Grammar School, Carey Baptist Grammar School, Caulfield Grammar School, Geelong Grammar School, Haileybury College, Melbourne Grammar School, Scotch College, St Kevin's College, Geelong College, Wesley College, Xavier College.

Resources


Roman Catholic: Xavier and St.Kevin’s CollegesUse the information in these websites and other sources to answer these Focus Questions:

• What Christian denomination does your school belong to?

• What is the specific history of this denomination? Here you must identify the founder and outline its development – historical events and points of theological significance

• How were they established in Australia?

• Who were the key individuals who had a major influence in its development? (In deciding on this your presentation must include a justification for your choices)

• Roman Catholic Church http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic

• Christian denominations (wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_denomination

• Xavier College – History http://www.xavier.vic.edu.au/AboutXavier/history.htm

• Society of Jesus (Wipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Jesus

• History of Jesuits http://www.sjweb.info/webguide/cat_list.cfm?SubCatLkUpID=24

• St Kevin's - History http://web.stkevins.vic.edu.au/stkevins/history.php

• Edmund Rice online http://www.edmundrice.org/

• Edmund Ignatius Rice http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13040b.htm

Roman Catholic | Baptist | Uniting Church | Anglican


5. Christianity and Church history

Recommended Resource (especially for year 7 and 8):

All about Faith 1, 2 (and 3)

Anne and Niall Boyle

Publisher: GILL & MACMILLAN DISTRIBUTION


An (important) aside….

•Choose real resources where possible (newspaper articles for example)•Bring the real world into the classroom where possible (real people and events)•Any meaningful examination of concepts, texts or people that concerns what it is to make sense of experience is fit RE fodder


For example•Year 9 – we do Rwanda (read article, watch film, explore themes)•In year 10 – we do suicide terrorism. Read article (arguing national identity not religion is primary motivator), watch dvd on psychology of bombers, look at what it means to be ‘economically, politically and socially disenfranchised’ (Israel/Palestine, South Africa apartheid)


Aims

•To understand why it is too simplistic to say ‘he did a bad thing because he is a bad man’.•To understand the complexity of forces at work in human lives in context•To deepen one’s understanding of what it means to be human (homo religiosus)•To promote historical and factual literacy•To help them grow up, orientated towards the light of reality (heliotropism)


In Sum

Not merely heliotropism but phototropism:

Phototropism is directional growth in which the

direction of growth is determined by the direction

of the light source. In other words, it is the growth

and response to a light stimulus (or source).

Purposeful unit planning session

Afternoon session ideas

1.Brain storm ideas. Groups to choose one and work together 2.Pick a topic from the ‘matters of profound importance’ exercise and construct a unit of work that will produce greater clarity for your students3.Work on a scope and sequence for a year level or across levels4.Take a theological concept (like salvation) and create a unit that develops an understanding across the 5-strands5.Work on a unit on biblical literacy.6.Construct a unit around a film study7.Art and image – how to incorporate into existing units?8.Work on a world religions unit

Purposeful unit planning session

Developing resources and expertise

Charles Sturt Graduate Certificate in Religious and Values Education: http://www.csu.edu.au/courses/postgraduate/values_education/course-overview

The course is being expanded to a full MA, available from 2013, and details will be available at the end of the year.

Dialogue Australasia Network

www.dialogueaustralasia.org

dialogue australasia network teaching middle school re dr felicity mccutcheon 2012

Documents

religious educators

educators adolescence

educators plato

cd slide

woodcarver slide

c slide

p15 slide

weingartner playlet