ED. Journal - Otherness

Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought.
The class was disposed by Buddha, sculpture, paintings and decorations.
We were asked to choose an object or rather let an object choose me.
Then we were asked to do an exercise in empathy and answer the questions list below:
What is it about this object that drew you to it? List seven adjectives that describe this object. If you were able to enter into a conversation with this object, what three questions would you ask? Now, imagine that you are the object and you are looking at yourself through its eyes. What three questions would you ask yourself? Reflect on this experience. How is it related to multiculturalism? How could you adapt this experience to an elementary or secondary classroom?

I chose the Buddha bronze, since it caught my attention at the beginning. It’s only the head part of a Buddha, sounds scary, but not at all when you really see it.

Ok, that’s all what I got from this Buddha: old, broken, peaceful, calm and scary.

I was thinking about other religions and the conflicts among religions. The other day I got a concept of “Community of Gods” and the proof is in the Genesis 1 in the Bible: “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." So, if Gods is a plural + if you trust the Bible, God should be a community. I knew little about Buddhism and I was told that all other religions are evil. In this otherness case, I am facing some so called evil statue and try to communicate with him. (I felt I could start a cult or something crazy...)

Totally awkward.

Anyways, what we were doing was to understand otherness, so for some reason I started commiserating this Buddha statue. So generally, I asked what his name is and where he is from, w hat he is doing in this world. Of course, there wouldn’t be any answers from the statue.

But how good is Christians? Jesus is absolutely perfect, the Bible is awesome, but the Christians are notorious. Probably that’s why we call all other religions are evil: because the follower can’t follow the God’s good will 100%. Or because the followers of Christ have some selfish purpose to achieve while defacing other belief system.

My 3 questions are:
Who are you? Why you are here? Where are you going to?
The buddah bronze of course is not going to answer me, but when I was really asking this buddah bronze, I successfully avoided judging the buddah as I could have done as usual for the other religion.
So instead of saying: oh, that's a buddah, the God of nothingless and compassion and they believe they are from nowhere and going to nowhere, I keep the questions open to him and leave it as a question without pre-judgement...
GREAT!!!

Then, the other exercise bothered me the whole day : “exercise in empathy”.
I will look at myself through the buddah's eyes and ask myself the questions.
So: '
"How mature do you think you are?"
"Wanna be my friend?"

It's way too weird...
I just learned that maturity means the willingness of changing the mental map and chaning the way of old thinking. Sometimes, it's accepting otherness and sometimes it's sacrifice.
En...how mature I am?
... It's hard but I wanna be more mature. ...
En...be his friend?
That's strange...to keep normal...I decide to give up thinking this.


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For classroom, it's role play:
like role play for African American, role play for Hawaiian, role play for poeple from mushall islands, role play as a minority, role play for all kinds...

=)

It's an easy way to understand the otherness...