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January 20, 2008

Around the world’s religions Suburban sixth-graders get a whirlwind tour of faiths

The sixth-grade students of St. Mary School in Riverside pad quietly up the stairs, through a hallway and into a temple building at the Chicago Greater Hindu Temple in Lemont. They gather in a room with shrines to various deities set into the walls, and watch quietly while a priest with a towel around his waist bathes one of the statues of the deities.

The guide explains who the various deities are, and that they have more than one name. The way they are worshipped also varies by geographical region, he explains, because the practice of Hinduism grew up over more than 6,000 years in local communities that did not always have much contact with one another.

“Hinduism is not an organized religion,” he said. “It is just a way of life in India.” After leaving the room with the shrines, the students pad in their stocking feet to the cafeteria, where they unpack lunches that do not include any animal products, out of respect to their vegetarian hosts.

Along the way, teacher Susan Lachowicz reminds them how what they saw and heard relates to what they have learned about Hinduism: It’s the oldest of the major world religions, its sacred books are the Vedas and followers worship many gods. They believe in karma and reincarnation, but their recipe for a moral life is not that different from a Christian’s.

The students are on a field trip for their social studies class where they are studying world religions.

Shoeless again

After lunch, the students retrieve shoes and coats and board the bus to go to the Burhani Park Mosque in Hinsdale.

Once there, they again take off their shoes and hang up their coats, and walk into a carpeted gathering space. After a few moments looking at a display about the Shi’ite sect’s spiritual leader, they settle down to listen to Rashida Dahodowala, a mosque member who shares her experience and quizzes them on their knowledge of Islam.

“What’s that in the photograph?” she asks, pointing to a picture of Mecca during the Hajj. “It’s the Kabaa.”

The stone marks the place where Adam is supposed to have come when he had to leave paradise, she explains.

After discussing Islamic worship practices, the students are allowed to enter the prayer room on the first floor, where the men and boys pray. Then they go upstairs, to the galleries for women and girls and small children of both sexes. Dahodawala explains that when there is a speaker giving a religious discourse—the talks can go on for more than two hours—she spies on her young sons from the gallery.

“The rules say they [men] can’t look at us,” she explained. “Not that we can’t look at them.”

After once again putting on shoes and coats, the students get back on the bus for a quick trip to the Buddha Dharma Center Buddhist temple next door, where they are invited to sit quietly in meditation.

After a few moments of silence, P. Boonshoo Sruburinm, a monk visiting from a nearby temple begins to speak about Siddhartha and his “middle way” between indulgence and asceticism. Enlightment, he explains, is the highest value for Buddhists.

Sruburinm later says he enjoys speaking to groups from other faiths, especially young people, as a way to promote religious understanding.

“The truth itself belongs to nobody,” he said. “It belongs to everybody.”

Responding to tragedy

In September 2001, Lachowicz could see that her students were scared. She watched the students react to the Sept. 11 attacks with a mixture of fear and of ignorance. The students knew that the attacks were carried out by Muslims, but they didn’t know what Mus- lims believed, or if Islam would sanction such violence.

Lachowicz decided that the best thing to do would be to teach the students, not only about Islam but about all the major world religions.

That was the beginning of St. Mary’s sixth-grade unit on world religions, taught as part of the broader social studies worldcultures curriculum.

“When I started, there was no curriculum written for this,” said Lachowicz during the field trip to the Chicago Greater Hindu Temple in Lemont. “Now there is, but when we started, we had to develop it all.”

The unit, which lasts almost a month, includes approximately a week of study each about Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism, generally in comparison to Christianity.

Students get a chance to visit the houses of worship of the other religions — a Hindu temple, a Buddhist temple and a mosque—during one whirlwind field trip and compare them to the Catholic church in which they worship. They complete dioramas of a Catholic church and one other house of worship, do a written report and make a display board about what they’ve learned.

The academic rigor provides good preparation for seventh- and eighth-grade science projects, when students’ work will be evaluated by judges who don’t know them.

Family ties

While the Catholic faith is always presented as the true faith, students need to know what other people believe, Lachowicz said.

For class member Angelique Bedolla, the project opened a window on the beliefs of her own extended family. She has an aunt who is Jewish, so when Angelique started researching Judaism for her project, she had a first-hand source. She and her family even were invited to celebrate the last night of Hannukah with their extended family.

“It was really neat,” said Angelique, as she used a glue stick to attach religious symbols and pictures to her poster on a December morning. “It’s a different religion, but there’s a lot that’s the same.”

The boards and dioramas will be on display at the school’s Catholic Schools Week curriculum fair.