Humor i Religionsundervisning
The contents of the school subject religion in Sweden, has gone through a radical change during the past century. With an origin of only treating Christianity and being a major cultural and social actor, it has developed into more of a multicultural and philosophical subject. The fact that the subject no longer has cultural recognition makes it more abstract and harder for students to relate to. Additionally, religion is experienced as a rather dull subject in school. My essay is therefore written to provide teachers encouragement of interest for religious education, by using humor.
The well-known psychologist Jean Piaget claims play to be a prime state of learning. In addition, Paul E. McGhee, publisher of 11 books and 50 scientific articles on humor and internationally recognized for his research in the very field, claims that play, as the matter of fact, is humor. These two simple facts leave future teachers, an enormous pool of new and maybe more efficient ways to tutor generations of yet to come students. These also leave us a great field deficient of neither practical nor theoretical directives. Despite of this fact, teachers around the world use humor in their own way. They use creativeness and imagination to make subjects more appealing and intriguing for students. I took a certain interest in this peculiar field.
I wanted to find out if there is a certain correlation between: teachers who use humor, while educating religion to students between the ages of 13-18, and a positive effect on students comprehension and learning the essence of religion. In addition to investigate this correlation I choose to make 10 interviews, asking the respondents partly to: reveal memories of their past teachers in religion. And partly to: evaluate what qualities they consider important in a teacher. Five of the interviews were made by female respondents and five by male, all respondents were in the ages between 20-30 years. The sex quote gave me an opportunity to concern differences between sexes, regarding appreciation and evaluation of humor used by teachers while learning religion.
The outcome of my study shows that younger students value humor as an important quality. Contributing to the feeling of dullness towards religion as a subject in school, in lack of stimulation.