How can you help your students understand that worldview affects how a person answers questions?
A person’s worldview is connected to how s/he
answers questions. How can you help your
students understand this?
To help their students, teachers at Christian Academy have their students:
Take action. Today.
Here are responses of teachers at Christian Academy in Japan:
To help their students, teachers at Christian Academy have their students:
- Role play.
- Compare and contrast responses.
- Process responses to questions.
- Debate.
- Discuss.
- Learn about a variety of perspectives.
- Connect perspective and behavior.
Take action. Today.
Here are responses of teachers at Christian Academy in Japan:
- My students understand differing worldviews
when I have them role play and
represent the ideas of someone that does not have
the same view they do. When they role play, they
learn that actions come from thoughts and thoughts
are formed based on worldview. Giving students
examples of conflicting or differing worldviews
(i.e., literature, history, news, media) can help
them see that people will respond and act
differently depending on their worldview.
- Last week I decided I wanted to begin senior
English with the question, “What is the nature of
man?” Why will that question help them see
worldview, both their own, and others by
contrast? They read Chaucer and
Beowulf—decidedly differing views of the nature of
man. I think that asking this question of
themselves and of these two different pieces of
literature, and of the medieval mind, will help
students understand worldview. The medieval differs
strongly from the present, but even within the
span, early to late (Beowulf to Canterbury Tales),
there is a strong disparity between views.
Hopefully this will help the seniors see worldview
as the source of choices.
- Students need to be exposed to concrete
examples of various worldviews…. One good example
from the first grade curriculum is the study of
Korea and the Venn diagram of Korean
families and the student’s family. In “Our
School” unit in second grade, I need to do more
intentional teaching of Japanese school (or schools
in other countries) and have students look at the
differences. There are books in the library that
tell about schooling in other countries.
- By continuing to ask questions that
force them to back up to basic
beliefs. Eventually, they have to get to
worldview. And the final answer is not “Because God
made it that way!” Perhaps as I start the platonic
solids unit, I will ask students to answer the
question, “What’s beautiful?” How students answer
this question will hint at worldview assumptions. I
will then weave that question into future lessons
each day. We will then examine a Biblical view of
beauty and find support for it using specific Bible
texts.
- In math, I often look at the process
for answers to see how students figure
problems out; I scrutinize how students solve
problems. There is also is a similar process that I
use to help students to come up with their answers
to my key questions. Through this process, students
learn what their worldview is as it is being
formed. I break down their thinking to small chunks
(looking at social issues, and patterns around us)
to grasp the process of building their worldview.
- Have my students debate the
issue of how increasing technology affects the
lives of people, especially students. Since both
sides of an issue must be presented in a debate, I
hope to have enough time for students to switch
sides, even if they don’t agree with the argument.
Following the debate, I hope to have a discussion
about the values held by each perspective, leading
up to the idea that worldview is connected to how
people respond to issues.
- I would have to have questions, first of all,
questions that would elicit different responses
based on a person’s worldview. Then I would need to
create an opportunity to talk
about those answers. Or have them (the questions)
displayed in a way that students could see that
worldview affects the way one would answer them.
- After working with the course question “Who am
I?” in various ways for 3 quarters, students write
a paper answering that question, addressing who
they are spiritually, temperamentally, and
culturally. To address who they are spiritually, we
have discussed that people are made in the image of
God (Gen. 1:27), fallen, but loved and offered
redemption, fully known by God (Ps. 139), and
gifted and placed in the body to serve (Ro. 12),
where they are one in Christ (Gal. 3:28). Students
must articulate the Christian belief, but are
encouraged to state to what degree they embrace it.
To address who they are temperamentally, students
learn about Meyers-Briggs profiling, take an online
assessment, and read about and discuss their
outcome. To address who they are culturally,
students read the article “The Values Americans
Live By” by L. Robert Kohls and
discuss which values Japanese,
Koreans, the CAJ community, and they themselves
hold. After writing the first draft of the paper,
they discuss ways beliefs/personality,
personality/culture, and culture/beliefs interact.
- Students need to be asked the questions
and have an opportunity to answer. I think
it’s quite amazing how often teachers/coaches talk
and share what they think, but rarely do they stop
and ask the kids what they think. By giving them
this opportunity, students think for themselves.
Students also need an opportunity to see and hear
that others have different opinions and
perspectives. If they never see or hear that, it’s
quite easy for students to think everyone thinks
the same.
- I can help students to see the difference that their answer to my question makes in the way that they live their lives. This prevents them from thinking that this is all “abstract” and allows them to play out the significance of their thinking in concrete situations. I can do this by approaching a question in several steps: (1) What are the possible answers to the question? (2) What are possible strategies for choosing an answer? (3) What difference will the strategy and answer we pick make in our lives? A question with which I recently used these steps is: “How should we use the Old Testament law in our ethical thinking as Christians?”