RELIGION AND PLANET VIEWPOINT DAY AT NEW COLLEGE

At New College, New Parks, early this morning preparing for "Religion and Planet: Viewpoint Day". This is a whole day activity, for Year 10 students (most of them 15 years old).

I'm here as one of a team of four facilitators, working together on different strands of the day's theme.

• Clare Carr, of Global Education LeicesterShire, is running a session modelled on "Philosophy for Children", using artifacts from different religions (most notably a "Jain cloth") as stimuli to encourage the students to come up with their own questions, developing skills of enquiry and reflection.
• Linda Harding, Leicester City Council Arts and Museums Outreach Officer, helps students explore the spiritual nature of our world in a "hands-on" session involving art objects - some of them created by the students themselves.
• Madeleine Coburn, freelance consultant currently attached to the Museums Department, helps students explore displays from the exhibition, "Our Leicester, Our Story", mounted in the school library.

In my sessions, I break the class (usually numbering 24) into eight groups of three (roughly), give each group a quotation from each of the religions who are members of Leicester Council of Faiths and ask them, first of all, to match their quote to the religion from which it comes.

• “Let your vision be world-embracing, rather than confined to your own self.” (Bahá'í)
• “Hatreds never cease through hatred in this world, through love alone they cease. This is eternal law.” (Buddhist)
• “God is love. Those who live in God live in love and God lives in them.” (Christian)
• “Where there is joy there is creation. Where there is no joy there is no creation. Know the nature of joy.” (Hindu)
• “Do not injure, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture or kill any living being.” (Jain)
• “Devote yourselves to justice; aid the oppressed. Uphold the rights of the orphan, defend the cause of the widow.” (Jewish)
• “We have created you from a male and a female and made you into different nations and tribes so that you may know each other.” (Muslim)
• “A place in God’s court can only be attained if we do service to others in the world.” (Sikh)

These are the same quotes that feature on the pop-up banners that were created originally for the National Inter Faith Week exhibition in 2009 at Highcross.

New College doesn't have the sort of obviously mixed student body as you find in city centre schools. There's not a large number of students from religious or ethnic minority communities. Many of the students wouldn't normally go to parts of the city where they'd see a gurdwara, a mandir or a mosque; nor can it be assumed that they'll have seen a public religious festival, such as Diwali or Vaisakhi. When I went round the different groups, asking which religion their quote comes from, the first response was almost always Christianity - said with certainty and conviction. Any that they didn't think was Christian was almost always Buddhist. 

When preparing for these sessions, I'd spent some time trying to find other quotes for today, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that it would be good to pitch caring about the planet as caring for other people. So the second part of the exercise was to get the groups to discuss how living according to these principles would change things in the world around us (assuming , of course, that they would affect change). Then I got them to recommend three changes they would like to see made in how we live, that would change the way people can share the planet with each other.

Many of the students were surprised (and interested) that the Council of Faiths has such a strong presence in social media. We picked up several new fans for our facebook page today.

Five one-hour sessions with Year 10 sudents: tough gig.