Reflections on Religion, Belief and Faith identities UAL website
On the Religion, Belief and Faith identities site I was drawn to the Pen Portraits case study. A crucial thing that I have learned so far on the PgCert Inclusive Practices Unit is about creating space for conversations, and the Pen Portraits case study again highlighted this for me. It pushed me reflect on this question – How do you create space within your teaching practice to have difficult conversations?
At first glance I loved the initial simplicity of the activity, easy to set up and quick to get going. But in fact it was actually a great activity to get students engaging with one another, share surface level aspects of their lives and begin to introduce discussion around belief. This is the perfect activity to be introduced as an icebreaker with lots of different groups of students that I work with. I think it would best suit my MA Fashion Design Management group early in their studies when I first start to work with them. I often like to feature a quick ‘off topic’ activity or ice breaker after the midway break in a 3-hour seminar so this would be the perfect fit. It’s a great starting point for further discussion or to help facilitate these discussions regarding faith and belief between students themselves outside of a classroom setting.
Reflections on Religion in Britain: Challenges for Higher Education
Multiculturalism:
In this article I learned that multiculturalism is beyond neutrality and involves active support for cultural difference, I liked the ‘active element’ of this being discussed in the article. Secondly, I learned about the different ways that someone can ‘respect’ something from respect for difference but also through learning, listening and funding all building together. Something that stood out for me in this first article I read was ‘creating a sense of being French that Jews and Muslims, as well as Catholics and secularists, can envisage for themselves’, it made me consider what it means to be British and how people from different backgrounds might view being British and how they would describe it.
Minority identities:
Here it was interesting to learn about what it means to be Christian and how there is a shift in understanding one another’s religion when it is expressed only in terms of personal beliefs – as opposed to how you dress or diet etc. In addition to my first point it was also interesting to learn about how a sense of belonging fits into people’s faith and the outward expression of their faith. The article makes me question how people would describe their belonging to Christianity and whether they associate certain outward decisions and portrayals as part of this.
The ‘vaguely Christian’ UK:
It was interesting to learn here about the hundreds of small sects and new religious movements in the UK which I was unfamiliar with, and how these often are well attended and ‘architecturally unassuming’ a term I like. Before reading this article I wasn’t familiar with how religion is taught in schools and universities other than my own experiences in a UK school, so it was interesting to see that it is unevenly taught and knowledge is generally poor. From this article I would question why religion is something that is so ‘unevenly’ taught where in most schools there will be a diversity of different religions and often Religious Studies is offered as a GCSE option.
Religion and knowledge of religion in UK universities:
Here I learned of the need to develop broader learning communities in which religion is a central topic for discussion and enquiry and how this can sit alongside work on ethics and values which is a substantial feature of my IP teaching. Additionally, this section helped me to understand the wider and important role of Chaplains within universities as prior to reading this I was aware they existed, but I wasn’t totally aware of the full scope of their provision of support. This section makes me consider, if it’s not chaplains or academics who are providing students with the pastoral support and engagement with their extracurricular life then who is it?
Kwame Anthony Appiah Reith – lecture on Creed
It was extremely interesting to listen to Kwame’s lecture on Creed. One of the key elements that I took from this podcast was the explanation of a balance between scripture and practice and how these can be managed in different ways in life, and also what this means to others and how they find their balance. In all honesty I think that it would difficult to directly apply this resource – e.g. asking students to listen to it – within my own teaching practice. In a wider sense of the subject and topic areas within my own teaching I think exploring ones background and the complexities within it that inform your own practice are ever important in IP management. From the combination of resources that I have explored for the blogs posts this week I think viewing belief and religion alongside values and ethics will be an important shift following these learnings in my PgCert.
Higher Power: Religion, Faith, Spirituality and Belief – Saffron Mustafa (pp. 28-31):
I chose to reflection on the Interview with Saffron Mustafa within Higher Power: Religion, Faith, Spirituality and Belief. Of the interview my favourite question was ‘do you feel like religion increases creativity or decreases it?’. It was integrating to read Saffron’s response to the question as she first recounted a story of her mum and the impact that religion had on her art practice before considering its impact on her own. As I discussed in my positionality statement, for me personally, religion doesn’t form a substantial part of my life so it was interesting to hear about the impact Saffron considers it to have on her practice in art. How mythologies, symbolism and belief can be questioned and represented through the different ways that she works.
I chose this resource because I thought it could help me to reconsider some of the questions I ask graduates in Intellectual Property support 121 meetings. I often explore what inspires their practice and ask them about the role of culture within their work or businesses. Prior to reading this article I hadn’t considered the impact that religion and belief may have on students and their creative practice so I will consider these elements to inform my future 121 discussions. Sometimes conversations around culture and appropriation come up in IP discussions (in classroom sessions and 121) so having a collection of resources such as this one that refer to inspiration can be really useful to refer students to for further reading.
31st May 2022 @ 9:46 pm
It was interesting to read your response to the materials this week. I too was very taken with the idea of the Pen Portrait as an icebreaker activity near the beginning of the year. I agree that the diversity of question types really encourages a wide ranging conversation. I was curious by what you said about how these conversations might facilitate questions outside of the classroom. That is not something I had considered. I wonder if this is the case, whether we should consider how we can try to support these conversations in being constructive and not descending into discrimination?
I found your response to Saffron Mustafa’s article really interesting and helpful to me in considering how I might use this resource with my students. I briefly glanced through several of the articles but found them very British-centric. I think that your way of using them as a source of inspiration for the students when considering their own beliefs and practices as fashion students is a really powerful way of sharing community and, despite the references to programmes such as Songs of Praise, they would be able to take something from each one. I found the question about whether religion increases or decreases creativity really engaging as well.
Finally, I found your response to the Reflections on Religion in Britain article really compelling. We seem to have very different backgrounds in terms of our experience with religion and it was interesting to see what you picked out from the text. I believe that the British attitude to religion at a state/media level is very different to that of France. This is why the debates on niqabs and hijabs, thankfully, don’t go very far. But I agree, it would be interesting to see how someone who is not of the Christian faith identifies with their identity as British. However, I think that the intersectionality here is very important, the fact that if you are of a different faith you are likely to also be a person of colour must be impossible to separate (although this is not necessarily true for Jews).
28th July 2022 @ 11:56 pm
Hi Eleanor, it was intriguing to hear about the pen portrait on the ‘Reflections on Religion, Belief and Faith identities’ UAL website in your and Janice’s blogs. Still not quite sure how it works as I focused on the case study of the ‘quiet room’ at CSM when I first visited the site. Then work happened and I didn’t get back to the site until the third week of June, by which time the site had been taken down due to inactivity since 2018…
Which in and of itself raised questions about where this community had disappeared to and started a detective journey across UAL sites as documented in my blog about faith…
Would have loved to read about the pen portrait exercise though as it sounds like a writing exercise that can work as an ice breaker. That’s an interesting pedagogical concept in a teaching environment with many international students and many students whose neurodiverse abilities do not easily lend themselves to writing… Even more interesting in the context of opening up conversations about faith, belief, spirituality and ethics with students.
Saffron Mustafa’s account of her upbringing and her subsequent journey in relationship to faith also caught my attention. Her inherent access to Islamic mythologies, symbolism and beliefs as a child and her questioning and representing these as a young woman who has now chosen her own relationship with faith really intrigued me. I was wondering how her parents’ conversion to Islam and subsequent crisis in this faith had affected her own relationship with Islam and faith or belief in general.
Conversations about faith have so far not really happened in my teaching, however, issues of cultural appropriation often come up, including the use of religious symbols. These often leave me wondering whether and where to draw a line.
For example, one of my students was wearing pendants representing three different religions over the course of one week: a cross, a star of David and a small Buddhist statue respectively. The student was non-religious, these were simply decorative items to her/him/them, her/him/them claimed not to be aware of the religious connotations and did not see an issue with wearing the items.
This sparked a long debate about cultural appropriation…. Whether it had any impact remains to be seen.