Looking for effective middle-school level world religions textbooks.

January 14, 2013 8:06 AM

I am a first-year religion teacher at a middle school. I am currently teaching christianity, and am planning on teaching Judaism and Islam to my sixth grade class. I have been looking for a textbook or curriculum I could use to help guide me. Does anybody know of one? I have seen college textbooks, but generally they are too complicated to even pull readings from.
posted by Lee Shore to Education (7 answers total)

From your phrasing, I guess you are in the USA. You might try looking for textbooks from the UK, where comparative religion is a mandatory part of the National Curriculum—I have heard that it's often not taught in the USA (please forgive me if I'm wrong). You will want to search for "Key Stage 3 religious education textbooks"; Key Stage 3 covers 11-14 years old. For example, here is a course from Hodder Education with a book on each of seven major religions, for teachers and students.

I wanted to recommend the books my high school used, but I can't find them at all on the internet. Now I feel old!
posted by daisyk at 8:42 AM on January 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

These may be of use to you:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/reledchil.htm
http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/children/index.shtml

In my (admittedly limited) experience, the Unitarian Universalists do a good overview on world faiths/cultures in children's education, so there may be textbooks or worksheets you could borrow or adapt.
posted by fiercecupcake at 8:52 AM on January 14, 2013

I have also found the religious tolerance website useful for this sort of thing. They are very clear about their own personal beliefs and seem to be thoughtful in terms of comparative religious understanding. Their website is written in fairly simple style and you can look at a section like Islam and look at the references that they use and see if some of them might be helpful.
posted by jessamyn at 9:21 AM on January 14, 2013

I took religions of the world in Catholic high school, and our textbook was from a Catholic publisher. It was absolutely fair and unbiased. You might check parochial school publishers to see if they have anything for middle schoolers.
posted by Biblio at 10:23 AM on January 14, 2013

This article describes a countywide world religions course offered in Virginia, though it doesn't specify a textbook or textbooks used.

This course appears to use this textbook.
posted by Sidhedevil at 10:36 AM on January 14, 2013

So, this isn't a textbook, but one book we used in a comparative religion class I took in college was Diana Eck's A New Religious America. Eck runs the Pluralism Project at Harvard and is a really great writer and researcher. The book sort of melds together basics of the different major religions in America (which is representative, as is one point of the book, of the world's religions), while giving these sort of real-life exposes about religious communities in the country.

It's definitely a book focused on religious tolerance especially in America. But it is a good read and extremely informative.
posted by Lutoslawski at 2:11 PM on January 14, 2013

My old employer did tons of subjects, including religion, for kids that age! Also talk to librarians, special interest topics tend to end up in the library rather than just bought for a class. There are other publishers who do similar series.
posted by emjaybee at 6:03 PM on January 14, 2013