Survey the views of your 16-19s
‘More spiritual than religious, less atheistic than you may have thought.’
That’s the conclusion we came to in the light of research we undertook in 2005. We also discovered that a simple questionnaire can become a powerful tool to draw out comments such as the one below and to lead into deeper discussion.
‘To me being an agnostic means I am unsure about what I believe when it comes to religion. But I believe in something out there.’ ‘I do not really believe in god, but refuse to believe that once you die, that is that and its over.’
Our findings indicate that many student groups are more spiritual than they will readily acknowledge. Our research tool takes seriously the beliefs and values of individual students and the group as a whole and offers a wonderful opportunity for reflecting back this ‘spiritual snapshot’. You can test and challenge the students assumptions by inviting them to guess the percentage who are ‘atheist’, those who thought they were ‘spiritual but not religious’ and those who believe in ‘one true God’. Allow their curiosity to generate motivation for learning.
We’re interested in collecting a new student sample and if you would like to participate and send us your data we’ll be pleased to process your results and return a report to you electronically, from which it is straight forward to create a power point presentation to feedback to your student group.
You can download the survey from our publications section or alternatively, purchase ‘Spiritual Engagement’ and you will receive this on CD-Rom along with a wealth of other resources. You’ll also find details of our research findings there as well.
We’re interested in gathering a wide sample from 6th forms, Colleges and FE Students who are 16-19. We request that a whole cohort / year of students complete the questionnaire at the same time. However, if you are prepared to process your own data we are happy for you to use the questionnaire in a different way.
For further details of the D2E Research Project email us on mail@dare2engage.org
1. ‘Seventeen year-olds: more spiritual than religious, less atheistic than you may have thought’ Lat Blaylock and Peter Williams published in Resource 28:1 Autumn 2005 See also ‘Exploring the beliefs of 16-19-year olds, Part 2: Respect, spirituality, human rights, life after death.’ Resource 29:1 Autumn 2006
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