- Quote du jour: Thought flows in terms of stories - stories about events, stories about people, and stories about intentions and achievements. The best teachers are the best story tellers. We learn in the form of stories. ~ Frank Smith
The curriculum committee and I are busy working on the selection of core narratives (stories - but core narratives sounds so much more 'official') for next year's primary grades Rotation Workshop. We have developed a sequence and scope for the year, and on the surface it looks like a framework much as we have in secular education. But it's not. The questions we ask as we develop program content and lesson sets are as church centered as the answers to them.
What do we need from our church? What do we wish to have for our children? In answering those questions, I developed three core assumptions about the content of Sunday morning programs. First and foremost we must create community. And for the kids, that's not a one shot deal, but a weekly practice. Every time a group gathers, with even one new face, or one missing face – it's a new community to be built in that day! As adult leaders, we should consider ourselves leaders and guides, as we help children find ways to form relationships, see and be seen, develop awareness of the social contract and practice being with each other in whole and supportive ways.
Secondly, we learn to live as Unitarian Universalists. We don't have enough time with our children on Sunday morning to create religious scholars. What we do have time for is to recognize and guide people who can practice inclusion, accountability, compassion and a healthy curiosity about their world.
And thirdly, we must offer ways to make meaning. Few of us can find meaning in the pages of a book until we have the life experiences that make those pages relevant. We can create those life experiences with worship, with story, with service to others, and with encounters with the mystery (that some people call god and others understand differently). For our children, although I think it vital to include the religious questions of the faiths and the world they encounter every day, it is equally vital to help children become aware of their ability to ask their own questions, in ways that are responsive, not reactive. Notice I say very little about 'curriculum'. The curriculum we use is a tool, something to mine for wisdom, refer to for integrative and group activities, a structure for your morning, AND it is no wiser than your own good instincts about what it means for a child to be religious. What you can give a child - matters.
In just about every teaching workshop or orientation I've led, I've told the following story. Years ago I walked into a Sunday morning religious education room. The leader was valiantly struggling through a lesson on the 'inherent worth and dignity of each individual' while two kids were escalating a war of words into physical violence and the rest of the group sat uncomfortably observing this interaction. The leader told me later, that she 'had' to get through the lesson. As gently as I could, I asked, "and in that room, with two children practicing violence on each other and the other children silenced. ..what do you think the lesson was?"
