Understanding Your Students' Religions: A Guide to Culturally Responsive Practices

This concise guide helps educators understand the diverse religious practices that shape students’ school and home lives. Using an encyclopedia-like structure, the authors provide short histories and other essential information on a wide variety of religions as well as atheist practices.

Each chapter covers origins, beliefs, practices, and common misunderstandings and stereotypes, as well as key holidays, religious dress, and dietary restrictions that can be accommodated in school. This book will help educators avoid stumbling over stereotypes so they can better engage students and their families and foster culturally responsive classrooms. Teachers of all grade levels will come away feeling more confident about identifying areas of cultural and religious practice where support for your students may be needed.

You will also have the tools to recognize the diversity of religious and cultural practices that students bring to the classroom, and to see that unfamiliar religious and cultural practices are assets to be cultivated and not signs of deficiency.

Liz Wilson has published on South Asian forms of sexual regulation, especially celibacy, South Asian modes of death and dying, and how Asian foodways and modes of religious dress have been adopted and altered in Western contexts. She has published a monograph on how gender figures in Buddhist literature about meditation, two edited volumes on Asian religious practices, and a coauthored textbook on religion, gender, and the body. Wilson teaches a course on religion and law that deals with case law on non-Christian religious expression in U.S. schools.

Michael Nichols specializes in Asian religions and religion in popular culture. He has published a monograph on Buddhist mythology and another monograph on the Marvel comic cinematic universe as seen through the lens of religious studies.

Peter W. Williams is an expert on American religions, with a particular focus on material culture and religious architecture. He has published a monograph on popular religion in America, another book on religion and architecture in America, and a reference work on America’s religions that has been a perennial source of information for many different audiences.