Suzanne Rosenblith

Cultivating a Religiously Literate Society: Challenges and Possibilities for America's Public Schools

Abstract This article presents a rationale as well as a proposal for a religious literacy curriculum in U.S. public high schools. Relying on the Religious Education curriculum currently in use in the United Kingdom, the authors sketch a religious literacy curriculum designed to help students thrive in a pluralistic and democratic society. In order to help young citizens develop the skills, dispositions, and knowledge to thrive in an increasingly global, pluralistic, and democratic society, they need to become religiously literate. For students to be religiously literate they must learn to respect the religious other as well as understand the role of religions in contributing to civic life.

Comprehensive Religious Studies in Public Education: Educating for a Religiously Literate Society

This article aims to enlarge the conversation about religion and public education by inviting readers to think about the benefits to be gained in society by providing a comprehensive religious studies curriculum in our public schools. In such a program, students will develop knowledge and understanding about various religious traditions, forge greater respect for the religious (and nonreligious) other, and think through existential concerns that have interested human beings for thousands of years. While recognizing that such a program is deeply contentious, we nevertheless reason that students, as participants in a democracy as well as members of a global community, must have the skills, tools, and knowledge to function in a religiously diverse world.

Addressing Orthodox Challenges in the Pluralist Classroom

The American public landscape has shifted in concert with a newly emboldened political right, and the public school has again become an important battlefield in the latest culture wars. In addition to confrontations over educational policy issues is a largely untheorized area where the everyday classroom takes center stage: Teachers face a difficult situation when it is students’ spontaneous utterances, rather than curricula or policy issues, at the center of religiously rooted controversy. How teachers respond to these situations, and the basis for their responses, is crucial as they continue to navigate the increasingly problematic relationship between the religiously orthodox and pluralist public schooling. Pushing the conversation into the everyday workings of the real, live public school classroom is critical to liberal theorists if they are to significantly impact discourse related to the purposes and aims of public education in pluralist societies.

Picturing a Classroom Community: Student Drawings as a Pedagogical Tool to Assess Features of Community in the Classroom

ABSTRACT Community in the classroom remains critical for a successful classroom climate. However, assessing classroom community features can be challenging, and P-12 students’ voices are often left out of the discussion. One way to examine student perceptions of classroom community is through the use of student drawings. In this Pedagogical Implications article, the authors provide (1) a discussion of research on classroom community and the use of P-12 student drawings, (2) a framework teachers and teacher educators can use to investigate community features in their classrooms with student drawings, (3) the Picturing Impressions of Classroom Community Tool to interpret student drawings, and (4) a framework to use student drawings to create change within the classroom. The authors aim to demonstrate how student drawings can act as a pedagogical tool, providing insight into student perspectives on classroom community. The authors provide examples of elementary student drawings collected to illustrate how teachers and teacher educators can implement the process.

Testing the Limits of Free Exercise and Establishment: Collective Religious Identity in South Carolina

The tenuous relationship between religion and public schooling illuminates the dangers presented to the democratic, pluralist state when collective religious identity trumps democratic and pluralist commitments and indeed violates the time-tested protections of the First Amendment. In this article, the authors provide a brief overview of the religion clauses in the First Amendment and explore 2 examples of how collective religious identity challenges the boundaries of free exercise and establishment. Exploring the impact of collective religious identity in relation to the religion clauses of the First Amendment should allow the reader to see how the prioritization of religious goals over civic obligations by school leaders can undermine legitimate purposes of public education, especially the aim of cultivating citizens capable of thriving in a pluralist state.

Using Children’s Drawings to Examine Student Perspectives of Classroom Climate in a School-within-a-School Elementary School

This study examines student perceptions of classroom climate at a school-within-a-school (SWAS) elementary school located in the southeastern United States. The elementary school contains a school for students identified as highly gifted within a neighborhood school. Researchers utilized drawings to determine students’ perceptions of their classrooms using an intentionally open-ended prompt that allowed students to focus on the aspects of their classroom they found most compelling. Classrooms with a climate that fostered community proved to be important to students, and they made connections between community and active engagement in academic tasks. Students in the 2 SWAS programs perceived the nature of a community-focused classroom climate differently; in the gifted program, collaboration and group work were privileged, whereas those in the neighborhood program expressed like-mindedness and/or a notion of group connectedness.

Beyond Belief: Epistemic Evaluation of Religious Experiences

In this response, the author argues that to include religion as a subject of study without treating it as a possible contender of truth by evaluating religious claims in a public manner unfairly prejudges their epistemic status and is patronizing to the variety of religious worldviews; it also disrespects the institution of public schooling by making light of its responsibility to explore questions of truth based on relevant evidence. The alternative view that I propose insists that genuine respect is achieved neither through inclusion or exclusion per se, but by offering students opportunities to subject religious claims and experiences to rigorous epistemic analysis. In this approach, religion is treated as a contender for truth, and students are helped, in this arena as in others, to develop habits of mind and skills that will enable them to become reasonable, thoughtful, and autonomous thinkers.