I am currently in the Religion unit of our curriculum. I found an excellent article from this past summer (June 2009) that ties directly into what my students have been pondering - the role of religion in culture and how being an "American" or whatever nationality one may be ties in with being "Christian" or "Muslim" or so on. We've talked a lot about the seperation of church and state, the fact that our money says "In God We Trust," and that our pledge says "One nation, under God."
Yet I find that when we take the situation away from something so close to home, my students understand it better. In fact, when talking about immigration, I used Eastern European immigrants flooding the Western European countries post-Soviet era (thinking back to my Geography 101 days and "the nurse and the plumber" ads from France) to explain one side to immigration policies (immigrants taking over jobs). Once it was seperated from America and the students were forced to think about other countries as the involved parties, they could be a lot less biased and a lot more academic.
The same goes for religion and state. This article:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/06/30/france.burkas.al.qaeda/index.html
is about France debating forbiding French Muslim women from wearing a burqa. It tells France's viewpoint as well as al -Qaeda, who apparently released a statement regarding the matter. I plan on printing it out and having my students read and discuss it. Just wanted to pass it along!
Posted by Kathryn Jasper, Central HS
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