Religious education – Page 24 – Yet Another Unitarian Universalist

Education reform and technology

Are today’s young people, immersed in social media and similar technology, qualitatively different from the young people of twenty years ago? Many education reformers argue that young people are indeed different, and that we must reform educational practice so that we can engage them effectively.

However, Joe sent me a link to an online peer-reviewed journal article in which Grinnell Smith of San Jose State University “questions the validity of the claim that technology has changed our children in ways relevant to the way we should structure education” (“A critical look at the role of technology as a transformative agent,” THEN [technology, humanities, education and narrative] Journal, issue no. 8, winter, 2011). Smith begins by challenging the notion that children have been fundamentally changed by technology:

A typical approach to supporting the premise that children have been transformed by technology is not to refer to empirical evidence but rather to drag out a few suitably stunning statistics about the pace of technological breakthroughs or to provide a few overwhelming anecdotes illustrating the comfort of adolescents and young adults with regard to technology in the hope that the reader will leap to the “obvious” conclusion that today’s youth is qualitatively different….

Smith then argues that despite the prevalence of such anecdotes, there is little real evidence that young people are learning differently:

In the large view, rather than the creation of something entirely new, what our latest explosion of technological advances has done for us, by and large, is to provide us with new ways to do the same old things we’ve been doing since we drifted out of the Olduvai Gorge across the Serengeti and fanned out into Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Therefore, Smith says we should be skeptical of claims that today’s young people are all that different from the young people of a generation ago — and we should be skeptical of claims that we need extensive educational reform because of social media and/or other technological innovations.

Connected by water

Because someone asked, here’s the story we tell every two or three years as part of our Water Ritual service (a.k.a. “Water Communion”) in early September. I based this story on something Steve Hersey said in the Water Ritual service at the First Parish in Watertown, Massachusetts, circa 1995.

This story requires that you make two simple props. First, click on the images below, and print out the PDF files:

Now take the “602” sheet and tape 7 sheets of “,000” to the right hand edge; carefully fold the “,000” sheets behind the “602” sheet with an accordion fold. Then take the “22” sheet and tape 9 sheets of “,000” to the right hand edge; fold as above. Now you have the two props you will need.

Games sampler

A bunch of games for you to play, as presented at Pot of Gold Religious Education Conference today.

What are games? Games are FUN. Games have AN OUTCOME. Games are SOCIAL.

Some types of games useful in UU groups:
— Icebreaker and name games: for whenever you have a newcomer
— Classic kid games: for any age, just to have fun
— Fantasy games: unleashing fantasy and creativity
— Active games: get up and get moving
— Simulation or teaching games: learning by doing
— Theatre games: awareness of self, awareness of others
— Energy breaks: very short activities designed to regulate the group’s energy level

Every game-playing group of which I’ve been a part — from Sunday school classes with little kids to adult groups — usually has one or two games that they love best, and the group can play that game over and over again. My goal with every group is to try a bunch of games until I find at least one game we want to play over and over again. Of course I want to play lots of different games, but if there are one or two favorites, then when all other plans fail, we all know that at least we can play our favorite game. The games below marked “Fave Game” been a favorite game of at least one group I’ve led or been a part of.

Please note that rules of games are mutable — you may know one or more of these games with slightly different rules. The rules given here are rules that I know work, but you should change and adapt them as you wish.

Continue reading “Games sampler”

Easy bubble juice

I’m going to be leading a workshop tomorrow at the “Pot of Gold” religious education conference. For the workshop, I’ll be demonstrating bubble juice that makes medium (9-12 in.) soap bubbles. Below is a recipe, and instructions for making a bubble wand.

Easy bubble juice for 9-12″ bubbles

Ingredients:

4 oz. very hot (not boiling) water

3 oz. Dawn brand Ultra Concentrated dishwashing detergent

3 oz. personal lubricating jelly (K-Y Jelly or any generic brand)

water to make up approx. 1 quart, about 22 oz.

Continue reading “Easy bubble juice”

Religious education staffer: administrator, educator, theological resource?

Based on a conversation with a friend, here’s a question about religious education and the role of the religious educator in a congregation:

Should that person spend any Sunday morning time teaching?

This is one of those simple questions that produces a long and interesting answer.

Years ago, religious education theorist Maria Harris suggested that the duties of people doing religious education in a congregation can be divided up into three main categories: theological resource, education, and administration (see her The DRE Book [Paulist Press, 1976], pp. 1-12). Harris further implied that full-time religious education professionals might be able to carry out all three duties, but part-time staff might be able to carry out only one or two of these duties, depending on how many hours they work. I have found this a useful framework in planning out the duties of a religious education professional, both as a religious education professional myself, and as someone who has supervised a DRE when I was a parish minister. Continue reading “Religious education staffer: administrator, educator, theological resource?”

Summer Sunday school: Blob Tag and Jataka tales

From my teaching diary; as usual, children’s names are fictitious.

We’ve been getting 8 to 12 children in grades K-6 in our summer Sunday school class — a nice group size that allows children of different ages to get to know each other. Such a small group size makes it easy to change your plans at the last minute, too. At 9:25, five minutes before heading in to the worship service, Edie, my co-teacher, and I revised our plan. We were supposed to take a walk to the nearby city park, but neither one of us felt like dealing with the hassle of getting permission slips signed.

“Let’s stay here,” said Edie. “We can play giant Jenga.” Last winter, the middle school group had made a game based on Jenga (a trademarked game invented by Leslie Scott), using two-by-fours for the blocks. The middle school kids had played this game on the patio during social hour, and the younger kids were fascinated by it.

“Do you want a story?” I said. I had just gotten an old story book, More Jataka Tales by Ellen C. Babbit (1923), and there was one story I wanted to tell to children. Continue reading “Summer Sunday school: Blob Tag and Jataka tales”

UU kids and politics

I’m often impressed by Unitarian Universalist kids. They have this tendency to take our values seriously, and actually try to live out our values.

Here’s a video about the presidential election, from a second grader whose family is part of our church here in Palo Alto (her family gave me permission to share this on my blog). Whether or not you share her political opinions, she is articulate, personable, and fun — able to express her views politely and respectfully — just the way we want our UU kids to be. Nor is it surprising that a UU kid would get involved in politics at a young age — after all, we do encourage our kids to live out their values in the real world.

New publishing venture

A new publishing venture called uu&me Publishing has just issued their first book, About Death. It looks like a great book to talk about death with kids.

uu&me was a magazine that grew out of the work of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, and eventually was included as an insert in UU World magazine, until it was slashed in 2009 due to budget cuts. The current kids’ insert in UU World magazine recycles materials from curriculum books, and just isn’t as much fun. I have kept all my back issues of uu&me, and still refer to them (full disclosure: I had material published in the final issue of uu&me).

On their Web site, uu&me Publishing indicates that they will be collecting material from back numbers of uu&me for a new series of kids’ books. Let’s all buy their books, and encourage them, and maybe they’ll start producing some new material as well!

Music and empathy

The San Francisco Classical Voice Web site has an interesting article about musical activity and the development of empathy in children. Written by journalist Edward Ortiz, the article states:

The study defined empathy as a child’s having an understanding of the emotional state of another. A total of 52 children — 28 girls and 24 boys — were split, randomly, into three groups. One met weekly and was immersed in interactive musical games and was composed of 13 girls and 10 boys. A second undertook group activities that involved the use of written texts and drama, but no music. Another group took no interactive activities at all.

The children involved in musical group interactions scored higher on an empathy test given to all the children both before and after the activities. “The relationship between music and empathy seemed to be a particularly good match,” said [Tal-Chen] Rabinowitch, the lead researcher. [Link to full article]

According to the article, it may be that participation in other group activities could also result in higher scores on the empathy test; however, one of the control groups in the study did participate in other types of group interactive activities, with no increase in empathy scores. It also appears that individual consumption of music (e.g., listening to recorded music) or playing music as an individual (e.g., performing in a piano recital) would not result in increased empathy scores.

However, Ortiz writes, more research is needed: “Ultimately, the research can only be seen as preliminary because of the study’s small size, and must be tempered by the issue of confirmation bias….”

Transform and grow your RE program, questions

Below are the questions asked by participants in the workshop “Transform and Grow Your RE Program,” a workshop I led at the Pacific Central District annual meeting on April 28, 2012. (First post in this series.)

Questions about tracking attendance

(1) Under “policy governance,” should religious education [RE] attendance numbers be shared with the Board? (every month?) — the congregation? — or just the executive team?

I don’t think it matters whether you’re using “policy governance” or any other kind of governance, I believe we should share attendance figures as widely as possible. In my congregation, I report RE attendance every month to the Board, key staffers, the RE committee, and the Committee on Ministry. Attendance figures for the year always go in the annual report, which goes to all congregational members. I also sometimes report attendance to parents/guardians and volunteers.

One key strategy for transforming a congregational system is building in as many positive feedback loops as possible. Positive feedback loops are those ways that people learn how things are going, and that they receive good feelings when things are going well (negative feedback loops are destructive communications like malicious gossip, triangulation, scolding, meanness, etc.). So as a general principle, I say we should be building lots of positive feedback loops all the time, especially with crucial metrics as attendance figures.

(2) Can we see a sample of the spreadsheet you use to track enrollment and average attendance?

Here’s a PDF of our Excel attendance spreadsheet for April, 2012, at the UU Church of Palo Alto: REAttendSample.xls

Unfortunately, I cannot share the spreadsheet we use to track enrollment, as it contains the names and birthdates of legal minors. Continue reading “Transform and grow your RE program, questions”