4 Using the clippings to teach about religious toleration and peace
You will now look more closely at some clippings in order to explore how these can effectively be used in teaching and discussion. You will begin with an historical example in Activity 4.
Activity 4
The clippings collection is intended to stimulate innovative ways of thinking about the past and its relationship to the present. In this activity, you will look at an extract from the writings of Roger Williams, the seventeenth-century Puritan founder of the state of Rhode Island, who you met in the animation earlier in the course. Look at this clipping now and think about how you might help young people to engage with it and be inspired by it. If you see challenges in doing so, how would you hope to overcome them? Make some notes in response to these questions in the text box below.
Roger Williams and society as a ship clipping [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]
Discussion
It may well be that you have little knowledge of the seventeenth-century background and unless the young people you are working with have chanced to study that period of English and American history, they may also know nothing about it. For your purposes here, however, that should not be a problem.
The commentary on the website provides some essential context, particularly in pointing out that Williams’s ideas were unusual for his time and contrasting them with the then dominant ‘old European’ way of close identification between church and state. A historian might instinctively want to focus more on the context of English Puritanism and the early settlement of North America, but one does not need to know about this background to appreciate Williams’s vivid image of society as a ship.
When introducing this clipping to 16-year-old students in a London school the RETOPEA project team did find, however, that they needed some help in understanding the seventeenth-century language and that a ‘translation’ into a more contemporary style was helpful to them. Once that was done, they became excited by the idea, and started to apply it to their own highly diverse context as you saw in Video 1 at the start of this session.
The questions included with the clipping suggest some other possible directions for discussion. The participants in richly multi-cultural London took it for granted that religious diversity is ‘a good thing’, but it is possible that young people living in regions where one religion still dominates, or in a divided society such as Northern Ireland or North Macedonia, might take a rather different view. The hope is that the clipping, precisely because it comes from a historical context remote from their own experience, will be an inspiring stimulus to open discussion of different views. The question raising the very topical issue of the public wearing of headscarves seeks to suggest another route to explore the enduring contemporary relevance of Williams’s ideas.
This approach to historical texts might be criticised as liable to lead to anachronisms. It is of course no substitute for more systematic historical study. It is, however, designed to prompt young people to think differently about the past, challenging their often one-sided and limited perception of religious diversity in history. In this way, the past becomes a potential inspiration for thinking and action in the present rather than assuming its irrelevance and inferiority. By offering them short ‘clippings’ accessible online – some of which are visual as well as textual – rather than extended conventional textbooks, the aim is to accommodate for limited attention spans.
Now watch Video 2 about this clipping, which was made by the young people at the school in east London mentioned above. As you watch, notice how they have applied ideas in the clipping to their own school and community context.
Transcript: Video 2
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The collection also includes a substantial proportion of clippings that relate to contemporary and near-contemporary contexts. You will look at examples of this next in Activity 5.
Activity 5
You are now going to take two clippings that reflect strongly contrasting views of Islam. The first is the hostile propaganda of the German right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) (which of course in no way reflects the views of OpenLearn nor the RETOPEA team) and the second is a video about the Liverpool football star Mo Salah, whose Muslim faith has proved no obstacle to his popularity in his adopted city.
Look at these clippings and then spend some time thinking about how you might use them to stimulate constructive discussion and reflection among both Muslim and non-Muslim young people. How would you handle polarised reactions of agreement or outrage at the poster? What are the advantages and risks of drawing contrasts between the two clippings? In what ways is history still relevant to this contemporary material? Make some notes in the box below.
Discussion
Islamophobia is a sensitive topic, but one that must be engaged with if young people are to move beyond the natural tendency of Muslims to feel threatened and offended, and the tendency of non-Muslims to be too easily swayed by images such as the AfD poster. In managing such a conversation, it is essential to step back from inevitably polarised positions of ‘agreement’ or ‘disagreement’ with the image to discussion that probes its assumptions on the lines indicated in the questions that accompany the clipping. For example, participants might be prompted to discuss whether ‘Christian’ and ‘Islamic’ values are really polarised in the way that the poster implies. Both may in fact be challenged in similar ways by the increasing dominance of secular values and policies.
The alternative perspective presented by the Mo Salah video is also important to bring into the conversation, as it is compelling evidence that hostility to Muslims can be overcome by positive encounters and role models. On the other hand, superficial assumptions, such as that north-west England is somehow a more ‘tolerant’ region than southern Germany will need to be challenged.
While these clippings are contemporary in their content, they also have a historical dimension. The AfD poster makes implicit (and contentious) assumptions about the German past; the Mo Salah video alludes to the longstanding presence of Islam in Liverpool, as one of the earliest Muslim communities in the UK. These clippings, like many other contemporary ones, also provide a prompt for discussion of how the past is viewed and whether the ‘presentist’ assumptions that are widespread among young people are valid.