Discussion 2

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Session 5 Inclusion Strategies

So far we’ve looked at why is educationally sound to teach about the Bible and Christianity in a public school environment. We’ve seen that it’s culturally accurate, it’s academically expected, it’s legally supported and it’s morally imperative.

But the real question is, “How do I make it work in my classroom?” That’s what we are going to be looking at in this session.

We think in two broad categories for how to include this in your classroom. One is to:

1. Give proper attention to religion in the curriculum and in school. We’re going to spend some time unpacking that and what that looks like. That certainly can be recognized in your subject matter and in the culture of your school.

2. The second thing is creating a welcoming environment for a religious expression in your classroom.

Now Session 6 is where we talk about students’ religious liberties. That can really lend itself more to this second point. So let’s take a little closer look to this first point: giving proper attention to religion in the curriculum and at school -- recognizing that it is part of life, it’s part of our history, it’s part of our culture, and it’s part of the student’s life, as well.

Now, in giving proper attention to religion in curriculum and in school, there are two things to keep in mind:

One is that it needs to be instructional, not devotional. If you recall, in our spectrum of views on the separation of church and state, different people interpret instruction differently. For instance, there are those with the “Separationist Perspective” say that any instruction is bordering on devotional – that your motive is really to have students accept a particular faith. That’s not necessarily true.

On the other hand, you do have those teachers that look at any instruction as an opportunity to have students accept the faith. So you need to really check yourself and see “Are you instructing for academic reasons?” While it can be robust, it can be interesting, and it can be creative, it cannot be devotional in nature.

The second thing is to “explain by attribution.” This becomes a lot easier for you to talk about religious topics, religious events, religious people, and stories from the Bible. You need to explain it by attribution. And we’ll take a look at some examples of how to do that. But let’s take a look at how one state has addressed this issue of how something can be instructional and not devotional.

The California Board of Education came up with a wonderful statement explaining the difference between teaching about religion and instruction in religion. This explains the difference between devotional and instructional. They say:

[Read Slide]

There’s a lot in that, and we are going to unpack that a little more.

It goes on to say that:

[Read the slide]

So, let’s take a look at how that divides up.

__________________ Footnote: A Handbook on the Rights and Responsibilities of School Personnel and Students in the Areas of Providing Moral, Civic, and Ethical Education, Teaching Religion, Promoting Responsible Attitudes and Behaviors, and Preventing and Responding to Hate Violence; California Department of Education, Sacramento, CA (1995); p. 19

If we were to look at what are the things in that statement that have to do with teaching about religion versus those things indicative of instruction in religion or seeking devotion, we see to teach about religion is:

A study of, the appreciation of, information on, and talking about the influence of. Those are objective. On the other hand, instruction in religion is…

Seeking acceptance or seeking commitment.

So you have to ask yourself, when I’m talking about the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity, “Am I wanting to have the students accept it as their own faith, or am I wanting to have them be committed to this as a religious truth, or am I simply wanting them to understand it, have an appreciation for its impact, talk about its influence, those sorts of things.

This becomes a wonderful guideline for helping you examine how you’re approaching a topic.

Now let’s take a look at how that would apply to certain topics.

Everything inside the box is appropriate, and everything outside the box that I will be listing here is not appropriate - - it is not instructional, but is devotional. And I find that when we understand the parameters, we can fully engage -- robustly, creatively, interestingly, -- in teaching about something of a religious nature. It is when we don’t know where the barriers are that we tend to pull back and not teach as robustly as we could because we are afraid of crossing the line—because we don’t know where those lines are.

So, if we are going to be teaching about, for instance, with the holidays, we can teach what Christmas is. We can explain it factually. This is what this holiday is all about.

Or, when studying something in history, you can say “This is what happened” – explaining an historical event whether it is in recent history or ancient history. You are simply explaining this is what happened.

“This person was motivated by.” If you are studying Martin Luther King, Jr., and you wanted to look at his religious motivation for his civil rights actions, that is perfectly acceptable. That is perfectly within bounds to look at his motivation.

Christianity gave to America. Again, if you wanted to look at how the Founding

Fathers were influenced by biblical views of the world and the rights of man and liberty and so forth, you are attributing it to the Founding Fathers and what they say they were using as a source.

Or you say what the Golden Rule is. If you are wanting to look at things that are common vernacular, common phrases and talk about the Golden Rule—well this is the Golden Rule. That is a fact.

Things that are outside the bounds -- that are not acceptable -- are things like:

“You should believe.” “This is the way.” “Christianity is better than other religions”— and showing favoritism in that way.

Some are facts. Some are opinions.

Now we obviously are going to be getting into areas that are faith statements -- statements of belief. And the best way to handle those — the safest way to handle those -- is to explain by attribution. What do I mean by that?

Well, for instance, if you are talking about an item of faith, then you simply say “Christians believe”. For instance, if you are studying Easter and why Easter is important. You can say “Christians believe that Christ rose from the dead,” or “The Bible records that...” If you are explaining something that the Bible says then that is a factual statement. The Bible does record this, or it’s factual that Christians do believe this. Or, if you are looking at a particular story, you could accurately say “In the story, God said...”

There is a difference between saying “God said” versus “In the story, God said.” You are attributing it to the story. Maybe the acid test would be this: “Could a non- Christian say it?” You see it is not a faith statement. It is a factual statement. So, that is what I mean by explaining by attribution. You are attributing it to the source.

Okay, let’s look at a very practical way that you can teach something about America’s Judeo-Christian heritage using the Pledge of Allegiance. This is an everyday activity in schools—even at a high school level if you are a homeroom teacher. That is where the students are saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Over the last decade or so, there has been a question as to whether we should say “one nation under God”. Is that an appropriate sort of expression or is it somehow violating the separation of church and state.

Let’s take a look at that a little bit so you can teach your students the proper understanding of the Pledge of Allegiance. You might discover that your students have never been taught what the Pledge of Allegiance actually means. Have you ever taken them through an exercise of what each phrase of the Pledge of Allegiance actually means?

Now let’s take a few minutes and actually go through the exercise of teaching each phrase of the Pledge of Allegiance. I would be willing to bet that your students have not gone through this exercise. I was a world history teacher at the high school level and wanted the students to say the Pledge. They were not saying the Pledge of Allegiance on a regular basis. And the response was: “Aw, Mr. B, we haven’t said the Pledge of Allegiance since third grade. That is something kids do.” So, they did not have an appreciation for it, and they did not understand what it meant.

So I said, “Let’s set aside what I had planned for the first part of class and let’s just put on the board what each phrase of the Pledge actually means. And we had a discussion about it.

So why don’t we do that right now.

I pledge allegiance—what does that mean? Well, a pledge is a promise, and allegiance means to be faithful, to be loyal. So we are pledging loyalty or faithfulness to something. So I pledge allegiance to the flag. Why a flag? And so we discussed what flags represented, how countries developed flags, and what they mean. They are a symbol of something. To the flag of the United States of America. I’d ask them “What’s the United States of America? “ There would be this silence like it was a trick question. Not, it is not a trick question, it’s our country. It is the United States in America.

And to the republic for which it stands. What’s a republic? You know, oftentimes when I ask teachers this question, there’s stunned silence. “Well I thought we were a democracy.” We are a democratic republic. A pure democracy means the citizens vote on everything that the country has to deal with. In America, we vote on representatives who then go represent us, so we are a democratic republic. “To the republic for which it stands.” It is our representative form of government.

I always find it interesting when we have protestors who are burning a flag as if that’s a way to reflect their feelings toward a particular presidential administration or a policy of government. What they are actually doing is trampling on and burning the very symbol of our representative system of government which, of course, I am sure they would cherish if they stopped and thought about it.

And then we get to the next phrase: one nation under God. Hmmmm. What do we say about that? What does that mean? Why do we even have that in the Pledge? And some people argue that it wasn’t in the original Pledge of Allegiance in the late 1800s when it was developed. It was added in the 1950s. My response is it just took them 50 years to get it right. This is a really important part of the Pledge of Allegiance. But many people don’t think through why it is so important.

Is it a prayer? No, actually it is a description of the republic which we are in. Let me explain what that means.

The second half of the Pledge of Allegiance is a description of the republic that the flag stands for. One of the first descriptions of that republic is that we are a nation under God. What does that actually mean? I believe it is an important point that goes back to what Thomas Jefferson articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

Let’s take a look at what he wrote. He wrote:

[Read the slide]

You see, what the founders understood was that it was God who gave us our liberties, not the king, not a queen, not the president, not Congress. Our country was established only to secure those God-given rights, and that was the justification, by the way, for the revolution—that the king had usurped those God-given rights. And so saying that we are a nation under God is a recognition – and a nod -- to what the Founding Fathers understood as fundamental to our liberties.

Now, if we jump forward almost 100 years in the 1800s, Abraham Lincoln in his famous Gettysburg Address, that’s engraved in the Lincoln Memorial, said this:

[Read the slide]

So he recognized that our nation was dedicated to the concept that all men are created equal.

Lincoln concluded…

[Read the slide]

So again, there is that central concept -- that fundamental foundational concept -- that we are created with certain inalienable rights and that these come from God— not from a king, not from a president, not from anyone other than God Himself.

If we jump forward another one hundred years into the 1900s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reflects this same thinking in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. He said:

[Read the slide]

As we look at American history, whether it’s the 1700s, we see Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and his reference to “all men created equal and endowed by their Creator”. In other words, endowed by God with our liberties.

That’s repeated in the 1800s with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and in the 1900s with Dr. King and his “I Have a Dream” speech.

So, every century in American history reflects this fundamental -- this foundational -- principle that our liberties come from God. When we say it in the Pledge of Allegiance, we are recognizing this historical, fundamental principle of American liberty.

In 2015, the American Humanist Association sued the Matawan–Aberdeen Regional School District claiming that the phrase “under God” was prejudiced against an atheist student.

Plaintiffs asserted that their child's humanist beliefs do not allow him to participate fully in the pledge and that the child felt excluded from the other children when the pledge is recited. They also argued that by including the term “under God” in the pledge, New Jersey is defining patriotism in terms of God-belief and is ignoring the non-theistic beliefs of atheists.

The Superior Court of New Jersey ruled in favor of keeping “under God” in the Pledge. It wrote a very strong defense for the words “under God” being in the Pledge. Here’s just one paragraph:

[Read the slide]

You can download a PDF of that quote as well as some of the other very inspiring excerpts from the statement the Court wrote in its decision. In fact, the Court’s statement would make for a very good handout and classroom discussion for your students.

And, if you want to read the entire decision, you’ll find a link below.

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/nj-superior-court/1700792.html

Continuing on in our description of this republic in which we live, we are a nation under God and we are indivisible. Now what does that mean? That means that we are going to stay together even when we disagree. Originally written in the late 1800s after, of course, we had gone through the Civil War, and we wanted to pledge ourselves to staying together even when we disagree. And I think that is an important point to remember in our political debates.

With liberty and justice for all. Now the push back I got from students was “Hey, we don’t have liberty and justice for all. If you’ve got more money, if you are well positioned, you are going to have more justice.” Well, let’s first look at what liberty and justice mean. Of course, liberty means freedom and justice means being fair— being right in our judgments of others. And yes we don’t have liberty and justice for all. There isn’t justice being meted out in the courts and so forth. There are injustices. But that’s what we are pledging ourselves to—we are describing a country where our desire is liberty and justice for all. And we pledge ourselves to it every day.

And so if you explain to your students each phrase of the Pledge, it becomes much more meaningful for them to engage in.

Now as a teaching aide to help you with this, Gateways to Better Education has created a colorful poster. It’s 11” x 22” and fits on a bulletin board or door. It’s a great reminder of the Pledge of Allegiance and its meaning. And you can obtain copies of that at gtbe.org/store. And when it comes to that one nation under God, it says:

[read that portion of slide]

And I like to emphasize that it’s to secure these rights, not grant these rights.

It’s a good poster. I recommend you get one for your classroom.

I want you to take 60 seconds and just jot down on a piece of paper on your notepad when you’ll teach your students the meaning of each phrase of the Pledge of Allegiance.

I think every teacher needs to do this. So even if you are in a high school situation and you are not a history teacher or a civics teacher, you can still include this if you are a homeroom teacher and normally start your day with the Pledge of Allegiance. So actually calculate when you are going to do this. I’ll start the timer for 60 seconds.

Let’s go across the curriculum and begin to look at some inclusion strategies. You may not teach a particular subject that we cover, but it may give you some good ideas that you can use in the subjects that you teach. We’ll look at Language Arts, Science, Mathematics, Economics, and Health.

First let’s look at language arts.

It is very common for teachers to put a quote of the day, an inspiring quote, a thought-provoking quote on the white board or the bulletin board. And you could certainly include quotes from Jesus, Moses, or Solomon in your quotes of the day. Now if they were quoted every day, then that would start to be too heavy-handed. But certainly, they are part of our culture; they are part of our heritage. They are part of our vernacular; so using famous quotes from them is perfectly appropriate.

Another idea is to make books available that mention biblical characters, values, allusions, metaphor, and symbolism. This is part of western civilization and our literary heritage. You could have books available or even if you are reading books and those topics come up, you can obviously drill down on those and help them understand the connections.

You could have a Bible in your classroom library -- not as a devotional tool, but as a reference—as something that students may be interested in reading in order to enhance something they are learning in the classroom.

And you could include the Bible in your Accelerated Reader Program. Many schools have an Accelerated Reader Program. If you are not familiar with that, it is a program by which you can get computer comprehension tests that link up to books that

students can check out in the library. So they can read a book in the library, go to the computer, and take a comprehension test. A lot of schools give them rewards for the score they get on their comprehension tests.

The Accelerated Reader Program—the company that developed it—has now included the Bible as one of its modules. And so we have actually had cases where local community members purchased the module for the school. Then they help stock the library with Bibles so that students can incorporate the Bible in their Accelerated Reader Program.

You can find out more about the Accelerated Reader Program and its inclusion of the Bible as one of the books that it has comprehension tests for by going to www.arbookfind.com.

When you go to their website, there is a quick search, and you can type in the word “Bible”, and it will take you to the list of books of the Bible they have comprehension tests for.

So here you see they have each of the books of the Bible, and they have the module for the reading comprehension test that goes with that.

They also include books based on the Bible. They’ve got children’s books: Everyday Life in Bible Lands, Kings and Queens of the Bible, and Miracles of the Bible so students can not only read the Bible itself, but books about the Bible.

When you deal with creation stories. Maybe you are reading a story that references Native American creation stories, you can talk about, by way of contrast, other examples of creation stories. You can actually have students read the biblical account in Genesis. Now I recommend, by the way, that if you do that, go through a website that has a Bible online. I would take the section that you want to have the students read, cut and paste it in a Word document rather than merely photocopying the Bible and handing that out to students. I think it is going to have a more academic feel to it, and I think that is the point you want.

You can also reference Bible stories for cultural literacy. You can talk about David and Goliath oftentimes as a metaphor for small against large or the odds being against someone. Abraham, Adam and Eve obviously and the story of the fall and the temptation. Jonah, Daniel, Esther, Ruth, Job, famous sayings of Jesus--these are part of our culture, part of our literary heritage, and so to have students be familiar with these stories and even find places where they are referenced in literature so they understand the connections would be, of course, a part of their education.

If we look at the area of science, where are some inclusion strategies? Well one thing I think is important for students to understand is the limited scope of science. Science is about seeking naturalist explanations for our world.

You might illustrate it with a box. Science tries to describe things in the box. And if it would lead to questions outside the box, science isn’t really equipped to answer that. It has to explain everything by looking at what is only in the box. Consequently, it can only explain things in naturalist terms. If evidence starts to lead us to something outside the box, science cannot go there. Science has to come up with an explanation for how it could have happened in the box.

So I think if students understand the limits of science, they’ll not only appreciate the scientific quest more, but they’ll also not feel as though science is against, or has to be against, their faith.

Besides explaining that science is seeking naturalist explanations for natural phenomenon, another thing you can do in science is point out evidence of intelligent design in things other than investigations of origins.

There is a big controversy going on between evolution, intelligent design, and creationism. And yet, I think we can help students understand that science itself uses the idea of evidence to point out intelligent design.

We do this in things other than just looking at the origins of the universe.

For example, if we look at cloud formations, this would be a good illustration of the difference between random chance and intelligent design. By the way you look at clouds in the elementary grade—even if you are at the lower grades, you can talk about this.

If I look over here I see that kind of looks like a fish. But that happened by random chance. That was just the way the wind happened to hit it and the way you look at it, it kind of reminds you of something.

But if I look at this over here and say “Wait a second. That happened by skywriting.” That wasn’t random chance. The sign of intelligent design is when you see a pattern that communicates a message.

Another example would be Mount Rushmore. What a beautiful example of the affects of millions of years and erosion over time. No, actually if you looked at these rocks over here, you could say that those shapes come from corrosion and time.

But if you look at these shapes over here, you say “Wait a minute. That happened by intelligent design.” That is, this is a pattern indicating a message—in this case an artistic pattern communicating a message.

If you look at archeology, we don’t know how these rocks got here necessarily or why they are there. But we know that it didn’t happen by chance. We know that happened by design.

As an archaeologist, I go into a cave, and I see scratchings on a wall. How can I tell whether they are random animal scratchings or if they are hieroglyphics? Well, I can tell if there is a pattern that communicates a message.

This doesn’t mean that you then launch into “Therefore, God created the heavens and the earth!” You’re simply helping students see that, even in science, we look for evidence of intelligent design.

The third thing that you could do in a science class is teach about the controversy. There is debate about how evidence is looked at and how it’s interpreted. And you can talk about the controversy of that interpretation.

In the elementary grades, students learn the value of money, and they learn to count money. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters ….

But while you are teaching them that, you can also have them look at what is stamped on the coins. In his book Still the Best Hope, Dennis Prager refers to what he calls the “American Trinity”—the three things stamped on our coins. “In God We Trust”, “Liberty”, and “E. Pluribus Unum” (out of many, one). These three things are fundamental to American values. So you can teach these to students as you are teaching them how to count money.

Another way you can use mathematics is to look at how math is used to benefit others (charity, digging wells, micro investments, inventions, Habitat for Humanity). Here you are measuring length, width, area. If you are digging wells, you are looking at volume, depth, pressure, speed. And so in your illustrations for how math is used, you can point out math is used in charity work.

An algebra teacher once pointed out to me how she uses the square root of negative one, which is equal to an imaginary number. She uses that to illustrate the differences between something that is invisible versus something that is imaginary. Oftentimes in our world, we think if you cannot sense it with your five senses, it must not exist. Sometimes then people are affected in their faith issues where they say “Well, I can’t see God; therefore, He is just imaginary.” She uses this little lesson on the square root of negative one to talk about the difference between something that is invisible versus something that is imaginary.

I’m not going to go into detail on this, but you can download her lesson on how she talks about this as an introduction to her lesson on the square root of negative one.

One more area in mathematics that you can use to teach a way of looking at the world is through teaching standard deviations. Standard deviations are a standard, and you have deviations from that standard.

As you are introducing this to students, one of the things you can do is help them see that we use this in how we make judgments about things.

The issue of tolerance comes into play. Tolerance we often think of socially in terms of acceptance. The more things you accept, the more tolerant you are. But there’s another definition in the dictionary, and it’s more of a quality control standard. That is, “the allowable variation from a standard.”

So if you are making or manufacturing something, you can have certain tolerances for error or for changes. But beyond that it is intolerable. That’s the same way we conduct ourselves socially. You might say “Our standard would be that in a classroom we have good interaction and participation by the students.” The allowable deviation from that standard is that you don’t have to say anything. But what is beyond the tolerable deviation, what is intolerable, is you can’t fall asleep in my class.

If you look at life, there are a lot of areas of our life, where we have a standard and then we have allowable deviations from that standard and, beyond that, it is justifiably intolerable.

We are going to examine this more in the other sessions on character education. I wanted to introduce this idea here because you can actually use math to help students understand something about the way they socially interact with one another and those around them and their values.

If we look in an area like Economics…well, religious thought had a lot to say about the economic world.

The very purpose of work—why do we work? What joy do we get out of work?

Or what about being just in our labor practices and how we treat our workers and co- workers. These are social interactions and religion has had a lot to say about that.

Attitudes towards money—the Bible has had a lot to say about how we are to treat money, how we are not to allow money to treat us, and so religion has had a lot to say about our attitudes towards money.

What about materialism? What about charity?

These are the way people really live their lives. So often, we just treat Economics as “profit and loss,” “supply and demand,” and “macro economics.” But, when you drill down into how do you actually live in an economic world, that’s where our religious values oftentimes come out. And you can acknowledge this in a classroom and talk about it.

In a health class we might cover topics like dating, marriage, mental health, and decision-making skills. Religion has had a lot to say about these topics. While you are not a religious teacher, you can certainly acknowledge to students that many of their family backgrounds come from perspectives of a religious nature that deal with these topics. They should be looking at those topics remembering their religious upbringing, their family’s religious faith.

For instance, in the area of decision-making skills, are we helping them to think of their decisions by also looking at it through the magnifying glass of their faith. Simply acknowledging it—you are not telling the student they should be Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu--you are simply acknowledging that many of them in the real world make decisions that are based upon acknowledging their faith.

Too often, when we teach decision-making skills in a public school, we teach them to:

• gather information • identify options • predict consequences • and take action based upon the consequence that they most desire.

The problem is, we forget a very important element in students’ lives.

It’s important that we acknowledge that many of them look at the options and make choices based on their family’s religious faith.

Again, you are not advocating one faith over another. You are simply acknowledging the reality that this is an important part of their life, and they shouldn’t exclude it from their decision-making process.

In summary, and it’s important to remember:

[Read the slide]

Now I’d like you to take five minutes and reflect on what we have talked about in this session. Think about your subject matter. Think about how you can find appropriate intersections between your subject matter and America’s Judeo-Christian religious heritage. I’ll start the clock.

You have completed Session 5. Now move on to Session 6.