In this post, Dr Steven Sutcliffe and Dr Kirsty Murray from the School of Divinity explain how they have been drawing on visual resources to engage students with assessment in two Level 8 courses in the School of Divinity. This post is part of the Mar-May Learning & Teaching Enhancement theme: Assessment and feedback revisited↗️.
In the first half of this blog post, Steven describes how he incorporates the image-based assessment activity, ‘Take a Picture of Religion’ in the course, Religion in Modern Britain. In the second half, Kirsty explains how she uses the assessment task, ‘Image of week’, in the course Popular Religion, Women and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe.
Picturing Religion (by Dr Steven Sutcliffe)
Sadly (for me), I can’t claim credit as the originator of this picture-taking task. I was inspired to incorporate it in course assessment by my good colleagues at The Open University, Drs Stefanie Sinclair and John Maiden, as described in a paper entitled ‘Take a picture of religion: Engaging students in the multisensory study of lived religion’. With their permission, I slightly adapted the task by broadening its remit.
Students were asked to take a digital image (with smartphone or camera) of any object, scene, group, place or building which, in their view, meaningfully illustrated some aspect of ‘religion’ in modern Britain. I wanted to encourage reflection on the parameters of the ‘r’ word by stimulating creativity in finding appropriate content. The image was to be accompanied by a short caption (150 words) explaining their choice of subject with reference to course content. In other words, the image needed to be empirically based: not anything goes!
As a prompt, I created a few simple examples using my own snaps of the kind of thing I was looking for. As an ethics control, I also stipulated that students who included people in their image should be sensitive with respect to inadvertently capturing faces or other identifiable characteristics, and that if they did seek to photograph particular individuals, they should receive permission first. The following is student’s commentary on the below photo of Edinburgh’s Islamic Central Mosque:
“This is a picture of Edinburgh’s central Mosque in the back of a panel addressing the public. On it, one can read: “Did you know Muslims believe in Jesus”. It is one in the line of panels attached to the fence near the Mosque. They all seem to address a non-Muslim public, addressing themes of acceptance. This one, in particular, is very interesting to me in the context of Britain, where Christians remain the majority religious group and especially in recent times of internal tension in debates about Muslims. The panel aims to create a link between Muslims and Christians, perhaps addressing the narrative of the Muslim ‘Other’ present in Britain. Contrary to some of the panels found in front of Churches, this one does not aim to convert or call in the masses. This panel seems to defend the place of Islam in a ‘multicultural space’ that favors other faiths (151 words)”.
The next commentary is from a student who took the feature photo of a fireman’s funeral outside Edinburgh’s St Giles Cathedral:
“The photo shows a gathering outside St Giles Cathedral in central Edinburgh for the funeral of a fireman. The emotional energy at the scene is immense and attracted a large and diverse gathering of people, likely from a range of religious backgrounds or with no specific religious affiliation. In an increasingly secular Britain, this kind of gathering illustrates how religion (and the established church) continues to be a point of reference for significant life events: ceremony forming a platform for the evocation and presentation of collective emotion. The fireman’s colleagues, uniformed and in formation, and the flag at half-mast show a community gathering in support and solidarity, and further merging of secular and sacred. The ceremony becomes not only the religious marking of a soul’s passing but also an honouring of the place the human held in the community and a space to mark that community’s continuity and solidarity (149 words)”.
The task proved a great success, not only in the volume of on-time submissions – almost 90%, the highest I have ever seen for an assignment – but in the quality of work, which included many highly creative images and thoughtful commentaries. Inevitably, a few students took an easier route by emulating my examples with the result that we had a few too many basic images of St Giles Cathedral and the Islamic Central Mosque. But the majority of responses was very creative, using images from outwith Edinburgh city centre and, in some cases, Edinburgh itself, and playing imaginatively with the task of representing ‘religion’. In course feedback, one student commented: ‘The photo task was very intriguing, and helped extend my creativity’ and another said, in a similar vein, that they ‘really liked’ the ‘photo task – I feel this was really creative.’
I will be running the course again in S1, 2024-2025, and look forward to a fresh crop of thoughtful images and neat analysis. Encouraging confidence in being creative ‘beyond the text’ seems to be a key factor underpinning this task, with links to play and imagination, which may be a relatively neglected pedagogical factor in the Study of Religion/s (or anything else).
Image of the Week (by Dr Kirsty Murray)
I have been using ‘Image of the Week’ in my course Popular Religion, Women and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe for over 20 years. It began just as discussion boards on VLEs were becoming usable, and as galleries, museum and archives were beginning to digitise and share their treasures. The opportunity to draw on the wealth of images from the late medieval and early modern period was too good to ignore.
In the current version, students are directed to find an image each week that they feel encapsulates the themes from the lectures and nominate it as the “Image of the Week.” Mid-week, they post a short comment online for their tutor and group to see. Discussion of those images forms part of the tutorial at the end of the week when the groups debate how the images work as historical evidence. Posts are also marked with feedback and the best seven posts of the semester count towards the final grade.
Towards the beginning of the course the students are directed to images brought together on LEARN or to single collections online, allowing them access to plenty of reliable background information. As the course progresses the hints on where to seek visual evidence are wider and give more opportunities for evaluation and independent research.
There are several aspects of the task that seem to work well:
- The task gives a regular rhythm to the week and is a thread that links the lectures to personal research and to the tutorials. Students are encouraged to reflect on each weekly theme, which makes for a good level of preparation for tutorials. I also enjoy dipping in to see the images that are chosen and weaving them into the lectures for the following week.
- The posts allow the tutors to understand where the interests of their group lie and to pick up on any misapprehensions or gaps in knowledge.
- In the tutorial discussions, there is an opportunity to build confidence and skills in debating. The feedback, plus the visibility of the posts of other students, offers opportunities to improve their historical writing skills and evaluations of the visual sources. Marks often climb over the semester.
The aspect that I most love as a teacher though, is the passion of students who find things that are new or unusual. I like the questions about what exactly an image might be or why it could be important. The excellent Popular Religion tutors curate a Padlet board showing the winning images from each of their groups every week, which turns into a wonderful record of the semester. Feedback suggests that making their own discoveries through Image of the Week can be a highlight for students too!
References
Sinclair, S., and Maiden, J. (2020). Take a picture of religion: Engaging students in the multisensory study of lived religion. JBASR (Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions), 22 pp. 122–137.
Kirsty Murray
Dr Kirsty Murray is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Lecturer in the History of Christianity, at the School of Divinity.
Steven Sutcliffe
Dr Steven Sutcliffe is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion, at the School of Divinity.
