9Th2

Today (5th March) we started on a Martin Luther King project in the Resource Centre. The project handout is here.

Make sure you read the second page for tips on how to do well. Having lots of facts is no good to me without explanation, analysis and evaluation!

I’ll put some of the best ones up here when they are finished. Remember: This is due on the 19th March, so that’s the homework for two weeks. Make it good!

Here are those tips on how to do well:

This is your opportunity to show me how much you know and how well you have understood it. Note that in RE understanding is often more important than the facts that you have found. Depending on the level you are aiming for you’ll need to:

Level 5: Explain. You’ll have found out lots of facts about MLK, but you need to explain why they are relevant to your project. For example, you may highlight the different water fountains for coloured people as evidence of what life was like for coloured people. What you need to do is explain why these water fountains affected coloured people. How did it make them feel? What did it say about the way white people saw them?

Level 6: Analyse. There are five questions to be thought about in your project. To do good analysis you need to highlight themes that occur throughout. Examples of themes might be:

• Justice/injustice
• Freedom/slavery
• Love/hatred
• Violence/non-violence

For example, the theme of injustice appears in all five questions. There was injustice in the way black people were treated, MLK had a strong sense of this injustice (perhaps from his father), Christianity teaches that God love justice and hates injustice, Martin may have picked up on the Christian idea about battling injustice, and one might admire his sense of battling injustice. This is only very brief, to do it properly you need to explain what you are saying (as in Level 5). For good analysis pick two or three themes and try to talk about them when thinking about each question.

Level 7: Evaluation. The main question in the project is about how MLK’s religious belief influenced him. To evaluate this you need to explain why you think his religious belief did or did not influence him. Some people say that his religious belief wasn’t that important, and his battle was more about making life better for himself, his family and his friends than a battle over religious ideas. Do you agree? If so, why? If not, why not? Using your level 6 analysis you can make an argument. For example, using the theme of freedom, you might find that while MLK thinks it very important, Christianity does not agree. If so, this might suggest that the religious side of the story is not so important for MLK.