End of Term Intrinsic Value / Pragmatism & Reflection

7

learning resources

End of Term Intrinsic Value / Pragmatism & Reflection

This learning resource is based on the video below. Watch it as a group or individually before starting the exercises.

End of Term Watch the video

These exercises are “traffic-lighted”Green means the exercise is easy to understand and take part in.

Amber exercises might require a little planning, both in terms of equipment, and mental preparation for the learners.

Red means exercises that tackle difficult or sensitive topics, and take more work, resources and time.

Teamwork!Divide students into pairs or threes, and give each group a word [a concrete object or action] on a folded piece of paper. Without speaking OR writing (or texting each other), they have to devise a brief charade to illustrate the word for the rest of the class to guess. A second or more complex round would see them having to devise and perform charades for abstract nouns or adjectives.

Discuss afterwards what it is that we use speech, writing and established sign languages for? What do they help us do? Why are they valuable? What does it feel like to be silenced?

Ask the students to reflect (in discussion or in your own writing) on the experience of using only body language: how do we reach agreement with each other?

Speaking TogetherDiscuss and practise body language for agreeing, disagreeing, interjecting, pausing, etc.

Have a look at Occupy Together’s Hand Gestures for large-scale conversations

Ask students to devise their own silent gestures that could be useful in the classroom, beyond raising a hand, e.g.: a gesture for ‘pause’ or ‘clarify/more information, please’ or ‘I feel excluded or insulted’ or ‘I’m listening’.

Exercises

It’s Good to Talk (Faith)While the media presents us constantly with examples of all faiths and beliefs - including humanism and atheism - as being militant, intolerant, uncooperative, exclusive, argumentative and full of enmity towards each other, the history of all our faiths shows evidence of communication and collaboration being regarded as intrinsically good: both debates within the faith, and between them.

Given the atmosphere of suspicion generated by the media, how can we talk to each other? Leonard Swidler’s “The Dialogue Decalogue” (1983) proposes ten ground rules for interfaith conversation:

1. The purpose of dialogue is to change oneself and not to change the other person.

2. Dialogue has to take place within the faith in order for it to take place in the interfaith community, and vice versa.

3. Be honest with yourself about what you believe and feel, and trust that the other person is being honest, too.

4. Don’t compare your idealised best behaviour with how the other person actually behaves; compare how you behave and they behave.

5. It is your right and responsibility to define yourself - what does your faith mean to you? It is also your right and responsibility to listen carefully to how other people hear and understand that definition.

6. Don’t assume where, or if, you will disagree! Listen carefully before you say “I disagree!” and when you do say it, explain why without insulting the other person.

7. We have to see each other as equals, or we won’t be able to listen to each other and learn from each other.

8. Start from common ground: where do we agree? What do we share? Enjoy this part! It leads to discussing difficult questions. Remember the common ground.

9. To have a good dialogue, you need to be able to admit your doubts and criticisms without feeling that you are betraying your faith, or that you will be mocked.

10. Once you have listened, can you imagine what it would be like to live as another faith? You don’t have to want to convert, but you do need to be open to seeing the world through another point of view.

It’s Good to Talk (Faith) continuedImagine and create a situation where these rules are put into practice, following the example in the video. The student group should have to reach an agreement about the use of shared facilities or a shared event that’s relevant to the school, community or locality, and where faith perspectives might be in disagreement.

Regardless of the students’ own faiths, ask them to imagine and discuss the perspective of different faiths on the issue, and discuss how they would go about reaching agreement. Even if there are disagreements at the end of the dialogue, how would the group take action together on the issues that concern all of them?

Here is how the EU is working on bringing faiths into politics

Examples of significant interfaith leaders (in historical order):

Born in al-Andalus, or medieval Islamic Spain, Ibn Rushd (known as Averroes in Christian Europe) (1126-1198) is known as the founding father of secular thought in Europe. He was a Sunni Islamic theologian and philosopher, who wrote important texts on Sharia and theology, as well as medicine and astronomy – but he also wrote a series of commentaries on the work of the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, whose work was unknown in Western Europe. He argued that studying falasafa (Greek philosophy) was consistent with Islamic principles, particularly its emphasis on education and analytical thinking, as well as equality for women. His writing was controversial with some in Cordoba because of its humanist rationalism, but its translation into Latin (some via Hebrew translations by Jacob Anatoli) kickstarted the changes in Western Europe that would become known as the Renaissance.

For most of their history, Jews have lived as minority communities in countries of other faiths around the world, and participated in interfaith dialogue and learning while preserving their own traditions. Ibn Rushd’s contemporary, the famous rabbi, doctor and philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) was also known as Musa bin Maymoun. He studied at the Islamic University of Al-Karaouine in Morocco and became the court physician of the Sultan Saladin, while also being the spiritual leader of the Jewish community in Cairo. He wrote a treatise on logic that conversed with the works of the pre-eminent Muslim philosophers.

It’s Good to Talk (Faith) continuedSwami Vivekananda, born in Calcutta in 1863, drew great respect at the first Conference of the World Parliament of Religions in 1893. There’s even a street named after him in Chicago! Vivekananda is credited with bringing Hinduism to the West through the Vedanta Society, which introduced Indian philosophy, yoga and meditation to the US. You can hear his first speech which explains the inclusive nature of Hinduism here. In India, he is celebrated as a saint, while his teachings on the four principles of Yoga are used around the world.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the longest serving First Lady of the United States of America. You might know her name from her famous introduction to The Diary of Anne Frank. She was an active member of the Women’s Suffrage Movement and a supporter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in an era when racism was still common in the USA. She was elected a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly and was part of the committee of nine that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Roosevelt was a practicing Episcopalian. Her experience as First Lady during WWII highlighted the importance of interfaith communication. She said, “The vital thing which must be alive in each human consciousness is the religious teaching that we cannot live for ourselves alone, and that as long as we are here on this earth we are all of us brother, regardless of race, creed, or colour.”

The first black South African Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Mpilo Tutu brought the anti-apartheid struggle to global prominence through his high profile and advocacy of non-violent resistance, including disinvestment and reconciliation, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. Since the end of apartheid, Tutu has been an international human rights campaigner, as well as forming the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa and addressing the problems of sexism, homophobia, transphobia and racism that continue to fuel the AIDS/HIV epidemic in Africa. He has been particularly outspoken in solidarity with Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim, and against the Iraq War.

The first Iranian to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (in 2003, beating Pope John Paul II), Shirin Ebadi is the founder of the Defenders of Human Rights Centre in Iran. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, she was demoted from her position as the first woman judge in Tehran by conservative clerics; she returned to practice in 1993, and works to defend minority communities such as the Bahá’í, refugees and LGBT people. At the World Social Forum in 2004, she supported a girls’ school that proposed an International Day of Non-Violence in honour of Mahatma Gandhi, now ratified by the UN for 2 October. She has said, “from the day I was stripped of my judgeship… I had repeated one refrain: an interpretation of Islam that is in harmony with equality and democracy is an authentic expression of faith.”

“Everyone Has the Right”The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically includes the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion and the right of freedom of opinion and expression.

You can read the whole declaration here, but the relevant articles are:

Article 18

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

The UDHR was adopted by the UN in 1948, after the events of WWII, with over 50 member states participating in the drafting, assisting the nine members of the drafting committee. You can see film footage of the process here.

Discussion topic:

Almost all the nations in the world are signatories to the declaration, meaning that they are supposed to uphold these rights. Are there times when these rights clash with each other? For example, some countries that are theocratic or have a state religion have opted out of Article 18 in order to uphold their faith, while some people in the UK feel that freedom of speech clashes with freedom of religion and vice versa.

For more on Article 18:

The European Council of Religious Leaders Vienna 2013 declaration concerns Freedom of Religion and can be found here.

For more on Article 19:

London-based international NGOs Article 19 and English PEN monitor and defend many cases to do with legislation, media, governments, defamation and censorship.

Exercise Your Rights!Collect examples from around the world of these rights being exercised despite and in the face of repression - for example, contemporary examples such as the use of Twitter in the Green Revolution in Iran or in organising the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt; or recent historical examples such as the experience of religious communities in communist eastern Europe and the USSR, or civil rights protestors in the USA.

Ask each student or group of students to pick an example and imagine why those who spoke up did so; what motivated them; how did they go about it; what did they gain; what was the outcome. Ask them to present this material as an imaginative first-person letter, diary or blog account of being involved in a protest action.

There are lots of examples of diaries, letters and blogs to draw on, such as:

Matthew Cassel, Layla Al-Zubaidi, Nemonie Craven Roderick, eds. Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus

Barbara Harford and Sarah Hopkins, eds. Greenham Common: Women at the Wire [diaries] and Your Greenham

Rosa Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Rigoberta Menchú, I, RigobertaMenchú

Jawaharlal Nehru, Toward Freedom

Samia Mehrez, ed. Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir

Samar Yazbek, A Woman in the Crossfire

Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

CreditsThis learning resource and video were written by Tehmina Kazi, Sophie Mayer, Bharti Tailor and Mark Vernon. The video was directed by Azhur Saleem. “Faith in Free Speech” is an English PEN project, funded by the MB Reckitt Trust. The project engaged young people, teachers and faith and secular organisations to explore attitudes towards faith, free speech, identity, censorship and cooperation.

Design and photography: Brett Evans Biedscheidwww.statetostate.co.uk