Creativity and Religious Education

• How to start a lesson?
• How to make pupils think about different matters without pushing them in a certain direction?
• How to involve pupils in a subject without giving too much input beforehand?

What I tried to do in the workshop was involving the participants immediately in the subjects using creative methods.

Sometimes I use the following method to start my lessons with pupils in the following way:

Everybody gets as many “post- it” as there are participants in the lesson. Now I tell them to have a look at everybody in the group and to find one positive characteristic of every single person. Write it on a post- it and go to the person and post it on his/her body. So in the end everybody has a certain number of positive characteristics from each of the other participants.

Why?

Pupils are more willing to participate in discussions,… , now and to express their opinions because they have the feeling that they are accepted by the group.

Then I like to use role plays for involving them. For example: “Which prejudice do you have?” is my question and I use the following role play. I go out of my classroom and every student comes to me – one after the other- and get an information about a new classmate (he has committed some crime, he is a refugee, he has some psychical problems, he moved house,…). To everybody I say that he/she should not talk about the information to the others because we want to give the new classmate a chance. Then I come into the classroom and I am the new classmate. I try to get into contact with all of them, to make friends with them. It turns out to be very difficult.

Then we have a discussion:

• Why?
• What was your first impression of your new classmate?
• Did you ask the person who gave the information to you: “who are you?
• Why do you know so much about our new classmate? …”
• So why did you know that the information was ok? ...

With one of the games I tried to sharpen the awareness of the students concerning: reception of information.

The last example was a game about: National Socialism. (questions about it,…)