Religion, Belief and Faith identities website

I find that this website deals with faith in a largely academic and conceptual way.  I am a technician so interact on a more practical, physical level with students and ,as such, I feel I would have a hard time integrating this material into my work with students.  However, there are students who choose to create work with content related to faith and issues surrounding Faith.  The website could be a useful source of information to which to refer them.  

I liked the pragmatism of the “Pen Portraits” case study.  Angela Drisdale Gordon’s down-to-earth and open approach to discussions of faith with her students appeals to me.  I can imagine having informal discussions with students regarding  faith-related content of their work.  The simple acknowledgement of the content as a legitimate area for discussion with a technician would perhaps help to insure that it is taken as an  acceptable topic in an art-school context and among peers.

I do feel that while the esoteric content of the website is valuable, that it would be useful to have some slightly more pragmatic content.  Perhaps a section related to the challenges of combining Faith and arts education as a student.  Just last week I witnessed a student who was struggling to balance his intense course commitments with his commitment to observe Ramadan.  Exploration of this kind of issue would be positive for students and staff alike.

‘Religion in Britain: Challenges for Higher Education.’ – Modood and Calhoun

Interesting to learn how  the relationship with faith in young people varies quite dramatically dependent on cultural background.  This has real implications with how we relate to our students and the varying views of faith that they might have.  Also,  interested how secularism from country to country does vary,  even among western European countries.  For example,  France has a much more stringent separation between church and state than Britain.

Both authors bring up the topic of “religious literacy”.  I think that this is a valuable term for us as educators.  I believe that we all need to develop a “religious literacy” in order to engage with students on topics of Faith in their work, and indeed even related to pastoral issues.

Lecture –     Kwame Anthony Appiah: Mistaken Identities

I was quite intimidated by the fierce intellectualism exhibited in  Kwame Anthony Appiah’s lecture,  by him and also by the questioners he engaged with.  Perhaps it is actually hearing someone speak this way rather than seeing it in writing, but this mode of thought and expression feels very different from my own, and from the way that I interact with my students.   That aside,  I found that the lecture was a compelling expression of Appiahs belief that Faith is a flexible, ever changing phenomenon.  He downplays any notion of Faith being fixed  and permanent.  Even when discussing fundementalism he observes that fundamentalist movements appear from nowhere as new movements but paradoxically attach themselves to historical dogma.  His suggestion seems to be that Faith is constantly shifting and that everything is negotiable and changeable dependant on the society of the moment.  Ultimately this feels like a message of hope,  that our sometimes tense negotiation with multiple faiths will somehow work out in the end.

Aalimah’s case study

One aspect of this really caught my attention.  This was the fact that Aalimah’s artwork and the subsequent criticism of it had become a personal criticism  of her identity.  This is complex.  Students often choose to use elements of their own identity as subjects of their artwork.  I expect it is part of being a young artist and finding your voice.  This will inevitably mean that when their work is critically evaluated, by peers and tutors,  that this will very much feel like a personal critique.  

How do we responsibly  facilitate critique of work dealing with people’s identity?  

I really liked OPTION 1 as a set of exercises to establish a positive critical framework with a class group