Civic Dilemmas

1. Civic Dilemmas

2. Essential Questions • How do issues of religion come up in school in your community? In the curriculum? Informally? • Should respect for religious diversity be promoted in a secular school? • What is the danger when citizens are unprepared to negotiate religious and cultural differences in a consecutive manner?

3. Overview • As we have seen throughout this workshop, religion is an important component of identity for both individuals and communities. Recent studies suggest religion has become an important element in the way people define themselves and others, in part as a result of several decades of wide-spread immigration and globalization that have brought previously unfamiliar cultures into close contact with each other. While religion often unifies people, it can also be a source of conflict. In this section, we will focus on the particular challenges contemporary students, parents, and educators face when teaching and learning about religion.

4. #1 Reading • We begin this session with a reading from Stories of identity: Religion, Migration, and belonging in a changing world. In the reading, Eboo Patel, founder and Executive Director of Interfaith Youth Core remembers the silence in his own school and among his own friends when one of them was subject to religious prejudice.

5. #2 Discussion • After reading the piece above, please enter the discussion forum to respond to the question. • What is the danger when citizens are unprepared to constructively discuss religious and cultural differences?

6. #3 Religion and School: Three Scenarios • These next slides are three stories about religion and schools. None of them is entirely fictional and each presents a specific dilemma that has been reported on in the press. Please read them an consider how issues of religion arise in your school or community setting. The goal of this exercise is to think of strategies you might use to resolve conflicting values and to facilitate mutual understandings between different groups in your community or school.

7. Scenario #1 • A devout Muslim boy from Sunni tradition has enrolled in a World History class where the teacher discusses the history of Islam. The student is only Muslim in the class, and one of two in the school. The teacher has a strong mastery of both the historic and religious aspects of the tradition and is especially well educated about the different denominations within Islam. The student finds the teachers’ academic and nonsectarian approach offensive and is constantly challenging the instructor in a polite, but persistent way. How should the instructor respond?