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Katy Siepert, Candidate Credentialed Religious Educator January 11, 2018

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Katy Siepert, Candidate Credentialed Religious Educator January 11, 2018 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS HUMAN AND FAITH DEVELOPMENT Pg. 4 RIGHT RELATIONS AND PROFESSIONAL ETHICS Pg. 14 SIX SOURCES OF UU INSPIRATION Pg. 21 SEXUAL HEALTH Pg. 35 SYSTEMS AND CONFLICT Pg. 40 UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST FOUNDATIONS Pg. 49 ADMINISTRATION AND VOLUNTEER MANAGEMENT Pg. 60 FAMILY MINISTRY/MULTIGENERATIONAL COMMUNITY Pg. 74 WORSHIP Pg. 81 3 HUMAN AND FAITH DEVELOPMENT SUMMARY The learning and development of personhood, spiritual depth, and an ethical core are all part of human and faith development. Our role as religious educators is to nurture each child’s deep questioning, seeking, and exploration. It is through engaging in these practices ourselves that we are best equipped to help a child in their own search for truth and meaning. Our passion and curiosity offer a model for the children in our care. Our open-ended questions allow them to think deeply about the world. Our loving boundaries allow them to know the limits of their power within a given context and help them to feel safe enough to learn and grow. In human and faith development, we might look to Piaget to describe stages of human mental development, Erikson to describe stages of emotional development, Fowler for an understanding of the stages of faith development, and for me, one thinker who has brought these stages into beautiful synergy with one another and who describes them in a way that does not imply mastery, but instead movement, is Bill Plotkin, who outlines in his book Nature and the Human Soul the cyclical and revelatory nature of human and faith development. I’ll discuss more about Plotkin’s influence on my own thinking in the SpiritJam section below. Here, I want to make sure that I touch on some of the other theories of education and development that come into play in my work. Gardner’s learning styles describes how children interact with the world on a variety of levels, and may have natural competencies in some areas more than in others. This is why offering lessons with a variety of modalities is vitally important to ensure that we are reaching and teaching children in ways that work for them. Bloom’s taxonomy encourages us to engage children in deep and creative ways, moving our questions from the realm of the mundane, i.e. which religious figure is said to have sat under a Bodhi tree for 40 days and 40 nights, to the realm of critical thinking, i.e. given the four noble truths of Buddhism, what might it look like for a UU to live a good life according to Buddhist thought? In this way, the knowledge outcomes are evaluative, creative, and child-driven. Lastly, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs reminds us that in a classroom setting, children need to be nourished, rested, encouraged and heard before they can feel safe enough to really integrate new ideas. If our role as a religious institution is to encourage esteem for self and others, and eventual self-actualization as a spiritual pursuit, it makes sense to pay attention to the foundational needs that can give rise to these more differentiated components of personal and spiritual growth. What all of this means for me in the classroom is to create a safe space in which children can learn and grow, lesson plans that engage children’s many senses, and offer them guidance toward asking the big questions and looking for answers within our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition. 4 FORMATION Structured Learning: • Undergraduate program at University of Oregon: I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies and a minor in Biology, with a strong emphasis on environmental, racial, feminist theory, philosophy and ethics. • Graduate program at Pacific University: I graduated with my Master’s Degree in early childhood education and teaching from Pacific University. This degree program was a teaching intensive program and included several classes on human development. • 2015 - Curriculum Renaissance Module • 2015 - SpiritJam orientation and training with Katie Covey • 2017 - Participation in SpiritJam webinar as guest speaker / co-trainer with Katie Covey Notable Reading: My knowledge about faith development comes from working within a church context, and reading such critical thinkers and innovators as Carol Gilligan, James Luther Adams, and Sophia Lyons Fahs, as well as reading the following texts: • Nature and the Human Soul, by Bill Plotkin • Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, by Marcus J. Borg • How to be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration, by David Richo • Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer • Wisdom Sits in Places, by Keith H. Basso • Surprised by Joy, by C. S. Lewis Life Experiences: • Raised a son, Sage, as a teenage single mother from the time he was a newborn until the age of 13. Have since partnered and married, and am now helping to raise two more boys. • 10 years in Alanon (as of May 2018), working with a sponsor and trusted others. • Development of my own deep reservoirs of faith after personal grief and losses. • November 2016 – Five day long silent retreat and insight meditation training with Pacific Insight Meditation Center. • July 2016 - Eliot Institute workshop with UUSC’s Associate Director for the Justice-Building Program, Pamela Sparr. • Additional Eliot programming includes: 2014 - “The Unseen World” with Jeremy Taylor, and 2017 - "The Storyteller's Compass: Metaphysical Orienteering and Narrative Wayfinding" with David Novak. 5 APPLICATION AND INTEGRATION SpiritJam: In Bill Plotkin’s work, he brings the development of faith back full circle, in a literal wheel of personal, emotional, and faith development that offers a picture of faith development as a whole group exercise, in which every stage of human development provides a much-needed role for the health and well-being of the whole community. Faith development is no longer a hierarchical structure but a much sounder shape –a circle, a cycle, a wheel. Each individual is honored for their location within the natural progression of things, and each “wedge” of the pie provides support and counter-balance to every other part. It is in the spirit of this model for human and faith development that I chose to bring SpiritJam to my congregation. As a vision for what faith community can look like, SpiritJam most closely corresponds to Plotkin’s work. The SpiritJam model, designed originally by Katie Covey, and expanded to fit the congregational needs of UUCE, imagines a whole-community church involvement and engagement, where the age lines don’t divide, but invite a fluid movement of interest, energy, and learning. At our recent relay race day – a day in which we explored with children and adults the distinctions between competition and cooperation – a blind adult member of our congregation won 2 points for her team (“The Yellow Dragons”). As she explained to me afterward, she had never won points for a team before in her life; she had never been allowed to before. In focusing our attention on developing relationships and ties across age and developmental lines, we allow for a more fluid movement of connection and joy. The children on her team learned more about what it means to be blind and to live and function with altered abilities. J-M learned what it meant to be part of a team, something she had never been allowed to do in her own childhood. The following slides are taken from my presentation to the board at UUCE when I decided to try this new model of religious education. These are part, not all, of the slide show I presented to them in the hopes of inspiring them as I had been inspired by Katie Covey’s presentation at a PNWD LREDA chapter annual meeting. Her ideas are the jumping off point for our current RE program at the UU Church in Eugene: 6 As a result of this just in time ministry model, we’ve been able to present some creative and thought-provoking material, including a recent covenanting process that asked the children to draw parallels between Unitarian Universalist principles and the core beliefs of the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing this exercise, we discovered that BLM explicitly lifts up the role of family and the village in their work, whereas UUism lifts up a much more individual and I-centered style of engaging with the world. The children in our class opted to adopt more of the Black Lives Matter concept of family and all ages engagement when drafting their own covenant, because this is more in line with how SpiritJam operates when it is at its best. 7 At the request of a young boy in our program, we added creative expression to the matrix that we use to brainstorm our jam sessions. Children and adults feel empowered to lead jam sessions that speak to them in personal ways. A recent jam suggestion was from a young girl who wanted a crafting day. She explained in a brainstorming session that her jam session would involve lots of crafting supplies, and varieties of music that participants could respond to by creating something that was inspired by how the music made them feel. 8 Nature Playground: When we moved to our current location, we gave up a good deal of wooded land in exchange for being centrally located and thus better able to attract a wider variety of congregants. After a year with only bark chips on the playground, the RE Committee and I began researching various play structures and quickly determined that we could install a state of the art playground, but it would cost a large amount of money – and one thing our congregation was dis-inclined to do after committing themselves to a several million dollar loan for the purchase of our new church site was to invest more money! But necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and our predicament lead to a wonderful idea: creating a nature playground! One of Gardner’s modes of learning is through the natural world.
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