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Students’ research into themes related to religion and childhood is currently on display at Stauffer Library.

Students from the 200-level course “Religion and Childhood” have created more than 30 posters that are part of a display addressing a diverse range of topics including: the residential schools; children and nature; rites of passage from various religious traditions; Harry Potter; religion, childhood and popular culture; child spirituality and Indigenous Traditional Values.

The display started on Monday and will continue through to Friday, Nov. 20, which is National Child Day, celebrated in Canada in recognition of the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of the Child and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The day was also declared Universal Children’s Day by the UN in 1954.

The role of many of the world’s great religions in child protection and advocacy has been a major theme in the class, says instructor Valerie Michaelson, a post-doctoral fellow cross-appointed to the School of Religion and the Faculty of Health Sciences. Sometimes religions get it badly wrong (as evidenced by some of the posters), but for millennia, before there were any human rights conventions related to children, members of many religious traditions advocated for children around the world, Dr. Michaelson says. That makes this display a good complement to the values reflected in National Child Day.

“One of the things we’ve tried to do in this course is to look at how religions have advocated and not advocated for children and what the potential is,” she says. “Along with all the bad stories, it has been very hopeful to see sometimes where really wonderful things happen.”

Dr. Michaelson adds that a key element to the course has been trying to: “get at the child’s voice and what the child’s experience is of religion. So we’ve looked at a lot of qualitative studies that look at children’s experience.”

The students are looking for the child’s perspective, from wearing a hijab, to taking part in communion or the experience of a Hassidic Jew growing up in New York, she says.

One group – Jessica Schissler, Chanel Irwin, Kayla Mullin and Rhian Catton – looked into introducing an integrative education system across Canada that includes Indigenous values, world views, traditions and spirituality.

One of the common factors that emerged from the studies they looked at was that teachers felt they could not effectively teach this topic to their students based on the fact that they themselves didn’t receive any extensive Indigenous education.  

“That kind of solidified our research because we thought that the only way that the problem was going to be solved, the only way that the effects of basically ignorance are going to be mitigated, is if we start this type of education at an early age,” says Ms. Schissler. “For me that was the most striking thing that I took from it, that we have to start the trend somewhere or else it’s never going to happen.”