Poster Session
Please be sure to visit these posters during our poster session from 1:30-3:30pm on Saturday. If you can’t make it then, the posters will be on display all day Saturday.
Elizabeth Corrie (Emory University)
What do these Stones Mean? Developing a Curriculum for Teaching Peace in East Belfast. During the opening worship for the Skainos Centre building of the East Belfast Mission in Northern Ireland, Skainos director Glenn Jordan placed the story of the Skainos Project within the framework of the Israelites creating a memorial of stones on the bank of the Jordan River to evoke questions from future generations. In so doing, he encouraged the congregation to make the Skainos building itself a resource for religious education. The presentation seeks discussion of how best to design this curriculum for both spiritual formation and peacebuilding within the congregation and the larger community.
Hannah Adams Ingram (Iliff School of Theology, University of Denver)
Does Higher Education Risk Class Violence?. This research examines the largely unquestioned narrative of the goodness of higher education and its redemptive power in combating poverty. It looks towards what might be sacrificed in families and communities when members pursue college degrees for the first time. While educational research documents the conflicts that first-generation students face when they attempt to integrate their new college discoveries with who they are in their communities of origin, educators and administrators may not take this dual mediation of cultures into account when determining what unique support 1G students may need.
Jichan J. Kim and Robert D. Enright (University of Wisconsin - Madison)
Inoculating Children Against Violence through Forgiveness Education. How can we prepare our children for the violent world ahead of them and help them grow up as those capable of loving others despite injustices in life? Forgiveness education may be the key to inoculating them against violence because forgiveness not only directly deals with the issue of unhealthy anger, but also helps individuals develop positive attitudes toward others. We will present our empirical studies that implemented forgiveness education in classrooms, highlighting its process and results, and discuss the use of forgiveness education in the context of religious education.
Lynn Revell (Canterbury Christ Church University)
The Marginalization of Violence in Bible Story Books for RE. The poster examines the way Bible story books for children address issues of violence and conflict. The analysis, based on 95 textbooks, argues that there is an increasing trend by authors to ignore, decontextualize or marginalise violence in the Bible. Although this approach may make stories more "child friendly," it can also have an impact on the way children understand the nature of conflict and can diminish both the theological, social and cultural engagement of children with the relationship between violence and religion. Not only do these books present an idealised version of sacred story, but they also assume a character that appears distant and alien from the conflict and violence of the "real world."
Edwin van der Zande (Utrecht University of Applied Sciences)
World View Education: A Promising Perspective on the Moral Dimension of Professional Development. This presentation informs about the preliminary findings of qualitative research on the moral dimension of professional development of students in Higher Professional Education. These students participate on a voluntarily basis in a course on world view education, in order to stimulate their reflection on the moral dimension. Generally, this stimulation is needed because students' reflections are often experienced as rather trivial and shallow by their teachers. Teachers might facilitate these reflections by asking relevant and topic related questions. These questions, rooted in world view education, are developed as an instrument to stimulate students in constructing their own authentic world view including a moral perspective. The articulation of the moral dimension is complementary to the instrumental dimension which is an alternative to a slightly violent and dominant preoccupation with the instrumental dimension.
Janieta Jesuthasan (Institute of Catholic Theology at Dortmund University in Germany)
Mission (Im)Possible: Coming Together Instead of Divisive Violence?! Empirical Insights into Adolescent Concepts about Peaceful Mission of Faith. During the spiritual event of World Youth Day in Rio 2013, Catholic pilgrims were faced with (violent) protests about social problems in Brazil. When theologically reflecting about new mission in their everyday life, they were affected by these impressions. Home again, they looked into the mission of church in its historical context. Confronted with their findings, they established concepts of un-making violence by peaceful mission. Our research team evaluates to what extend these efforts became real in the lives of young people and draws some data-based conclusions for peaceful pedagogy and theology.
