8th Grade Religious Conflict Research Project

In Class Religious Conflict Research Project

“Religions don’t cause wars. People cause wars.”
Agree or Disagree?
Prove it!

With your neighbors, where you are sitting, either in pairs or groups of three, you will research a current or recent world conflict that has religious elements to it. Then you will create a poster presentation that will instruct the rest of the class about the issue you researched. We are going to investigate the quote above. Is global conflict really based on religion? Here is what the poster should contain:

A. Go to this website to look at a list of current world conflicts that involve religion somehow. You can decide as a group which one you are most interested in researching:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/curr_war.htm

B. Make it visually appealing. You will all have to read each other’s posters, so make sure yours looks interesting, has easy to read information, helps people learn.
C. Your poster will have to answer these questions:
1. What are the religions that are clashing?
2. Why are they clashing?/What are they clashing over?
3. When did this start?
4. What is the background of this conflict? Did this group clash before? What were the previous tensions and issues that they were bringing to this issue?
5. What do the texts/main ideas of these religions say about war, peace, etc?
6. What other factors are involved in this conflict? (Besides religion, if any)
7. In a paragraph, discuss whether this example you researched agrees or disagrees with the quotation above.

After a week of research and poster making, you will individually produce a 5-paragraph essay that reviews the answer to this question, using THREE examples. 1 will be your group example, and the other two examples you will learn about when you read your classmate’s posters.

You can use the back of this sheet to write down the notes that you will eventually transfer to the poster. I will also paste these directions to my blog in case you lose this.