Högskolan i Skövde

Study: Degree project in teacher education, Advanced level, 15 hp

University of Skövde

Title: Religious belief in everyday life – a study of the effects of a teaching

model focusing on religious belief in everyday life

Number of pages:42

Author: Johanna Claesson

Tutor: Kennert Orlenius

Date: Jan 2009

Keywords: Religious study, students´ understanding, students´ commitment,

Buddhism

This paper presents the execution and the result of a project examining how a tutorial model (called the model of everyday religious practice) focusing on how Buddhism is expressed in the daily life of Buddhists believers, affects students understanding of and commitment in religious studies. In the project, Thai students have partaken by producing sex posters and a picture-show with the help of their own photographs and short texts. However, the picture-show was mainly produced by the author of this paper. These posters and the picture-show were brought to Sweden to figure as teaching material during a lesson in religious studies for students in year eight in a Swedish school. The Swedish students participated in focus-discussions about religion as well as religious studies before and after this lesson in order to make it possible to analyse the lesson´s affects, regarding understanding and commitment, on the students. In the result of this paper, this tutorial model appears, on one hand, to encourage students to commitment in religious studies by adding an emotive dimension to the lesson which helps the students to an authentic experience. On the other hand, it is not unequivocal whether the students did gain understanding or not for religious studies. The lesson enabled the students to see that they are likely to experience some usefulness of religious studies in their lives outside school and thereby the students gained some understanding for the subject. However, it is not clear whether this understanding is complete or not. It is likely that the teacher in planning the lessons also need to take two other tutorial models, presented in this paper, in consideration. Finally, this paper ends with a discussion about which impact the result of this study might have on how religious studies are thought in Swedish schools.