Understanding Your Students' Religions by Wilson, Liz; Nichols, Michael; Williams, Peter W.;

Short description:

This guide helps educators understand the diverse religious practices that shape students’ school and home lives. Using an encyclopedia-like structure, the authors provide short histories and other essential information on a variety of religions as well as atheist practices. You will find that these practices as assets to be cultivated.

Long description:

This concise guide helps educators understand the diverse religious practices that shape students’ school and home lives. Using an encyclopedia-like structure, the authors provide short histories and other essential information on a wide variety of religions as well as atheist practices.

Each chapter covers origins, beliefs, practices, and common misunderstandings and stereotypes, as well as key holidays, religious dress, and dietary restrictions that can be accommodated in school. This book will help educators avoid stumbling over stereotypes so they can better engage students and their families and foster culturally responsive classrooms. Teachers of all grade levels will come away feeling more confident about identifying areas of cultural and religious practice where support for your students may be needed.

You will also have the tools to recognize the diversity of religious and cultural practices that students bring to the classroom, and to see that unfamiliar religious and cultural practices are assets to be cultivated and not signs of deficiency.

Table of Contents:

1. Why Care About Religion? Principles of Religious Literacy  2. African Diaspora Religions  3. Atheist, Agnostic, Humanist, and Anti-religious Groups  4. Baha'I  5. Buddhism  6. Chinese Religions: Falun Gong  7. Chinese Religions: Traditional Chinese Religions  8. Christianity: Overview  9. Christianity: Amish, Mennonite, and other Anabaptist-descended Churches  10. Christianity: Anglican and Episcopal  11. Christianity: Baptist  12. Christianity: Black Churches  13. Christianity: Christian Science  14. Christianity: Jehovah's Witness  15. Christianity: Latter-day Saints  16. Christianity: Lutheran  17. Christianity: Methodist, Moravian, Wesleyan, and Holiness Churches  18. Christianity: Orthodox  19. Christianity: Pentecostal and Holiness  20. Christianity: Presbyterian and Other Reformed Churches  21. Christianity: Quaker (Friends)  22. Christianity: Restorationist (Churches of Christ, Disciples of Christ)  23. Christianity: Roman and Eastern Catholic  24. Christianity: Seventh-Day Adventist  25. Christianity: Unitarian Universalist  26. Hinduism: Overview  27. Hinduism: Shaiva  28. Hinduism: Shakta  29. Hinduism: Vaishnava  30. Islam: Overview  31. Islam: Nation of Islam  32. Islam: Shia  33. Islam: Sunni  34. Jainism  35. Judaism: Overview  36. Judaism: Conservative  37. Judaism: Orthodox  38. Judaism: Reform  39. Neo-Paganism  40. North American Indigenous Religions  41. Scientology  42. Sikhism  43. Zoroastrianism