It’s a deadly waste of effort if you spend all the energy that it takes for your pupils to be out on a visit to a church or mosque and all the learning that happens is “the naming of parts”: font, pulpit, altar or minaret, minbar, mihrab.
Brasenose Chapel's (Oxford) medieval timber roof is concealed by a magnificent plaster fan vault of 1659 © Sacred Destinations (flickr.com)
Far better to use the space and time of a visit to explore the sacred in an open hearted and broad minded way. The key to this is to make sure that you plan for learners to be thinking about their own spiritual ideas as they visit. You might try some of the following ways.
Thinking about the purposes of sacred space
Before you make the visit, ask learners to think about the places in school that they like best: Where in our school is a good place to be happy? To be sad? To be friendly? To be thoughtful?
If your pupils can agree on these places, then go and do something friendly in the friendliest place, something happy in the happiest place, something thoughtful in the thoughtful place. The aim of this is to create a small shared experience that is akin to the way sacred space works: places of worship have many purposes, but these usually include community, praise and thanks, deeper thinking and reflection.
So then when you arrive with your class, whether it is at a Quaker meeting, in plain and simple style, or a Hindu mandir with ‘bells and whistles’, you can ask the pupils: what has this community done to make this place suitable for being happy, sad, together, and thoughtful? Ask them to choose, in pairs, the places in the building and grounds that are most suitable for deeper thinking or shared praise and say why.
Taking on responsibility for explaining the sacred space
Pupils will approach a visit with responsibility if they are willing to be enquirers themselves. Set up a task in advance that asks them to create a website to encourage others to visit this synagogue or that cathedral.
They will need to think about the main features of the building. They might take digital photos that show aspects of worship, and create a ‘through the day’ or ‘through the week’ sequence.
Ask them to choose and use scripture from the religion to make sense of what is going on, and to recount stories that they hear at the place of worship, or create interviews with different people they meet.
Liverpool Cathedral © il_coopino (flickr.com)
In Liverpool Cathedral recently we set up this activity:
- Choose eight words from a list of 30 that might say what matters here at the cathedral.
- Spend 20 minutes with a camera looking for photos that sum up what these words mean.
- Then create a PowerPoint presentation that shows what the cathedral is all about in relation to your eight chosen concepts.
Learning from the sacred space is powerful where pupils are making choices, not where they fill in the blanks on a factual worksheet.
Places of national religious significance
The English National Framework for RE says that pupils aged 11-14 should, where possible, visit a place of national religious significance.
What would such places be? We gave pupils a debating activity. From a list of 12 possible places of major national significance, small groups of pupils prepared a 90 second speech to justify the place of one building on the list, and heard each other’s speeches.
They voted on the most significant places. We included three cathedrals on our list, but also one building from Hindu tradition, one mosque, one Buddhist centre. And we included Stonehenge and Mount Snowdon: sacred for many people. Wembley stadium didn’t make the cut.
The debate and discussion was compelling learning: pupils who tried this out for us said, ‘We enjoyed the work a lot: Really, really fun and exciting, especially “design your own” sacred place.’
The last part of the work involved asking them to create a design for a new British national sacred space and justify their choices for this. Another pair said, ‘We liked the fact that it gets you thinking, uses imagination, is about what matters and so it has an impact on what you think.’
Decoding the symbolism of sacred space
Symbols of rock, fire, water, growth, life and death are common in many spiritual places. The meditation room at the United Nations General Assembly building (in Manhattan) has a large stone slab table, a slit for light to come in and a bowl of water. The symbols carry many meanings in a universal language.
Ask pupils on a visit to a local church to find as many crosses, uses of light, key words and Bible references in the building as they can. At a synagogue, look for connections to the Torah, the books of Jewish writings, the land and the community.
Places of worship are more than enclosed space: they contain symbolic reminders and reference points. Pupils who deepen their understanding of this are learning a lot. Ask them to design some symbols of their own: what would you suggest, design and use in a spiritual space? Find some examples to inspire you, and design your own.
Stained glass ideas, for example, look beautiful made of tissue and sugar paper, and are satisfying to create.
Jennie, 14, created "He lies within you" in coloured glass for RE and art and design. © NATRE
Use bigger questions
One way of making better RE is to enlarge the questions young people think about. Instead of counting the hassocks, ask them: can God be found more easily in a church or on a mountainside? Instead of drawing the font, sit in the aisle and have a discussion: if God is everywhere, why do Christians build churches and call them the houses of God?
Space for all? Think about inclusion
Shared holy space? One of the hardest challenges for new buildings and old in plural Britain is to deal with religious diversity. Is a space sacred only to one religion? Can a space be sacred for people of any religion? How do people from different religions feel when they visit each others’ sacred space? Can Muslims and Buddhists worship together? Would an agnostic or an atheist find a mosque or church a calm and reflective space?
These six ideas for energizing the school visit are all very flexible. I think the key to success here is never to imagine that the learning is finished until you have asked the pupils: what do you think?
Lat Blaylock is an RE adviser and editor of RE Today magazine.
