21: Temple-Mosque-Kovil-Church

October 06, 2019

A conversation on Religious Tolerance

Today’s lesson was derived from an old thought, a larger project designed around the conversation of religious tolerance. Can art help foster this? We focused our lesson on four main religious building types in Sri Lanka, hoping to seek commonalities in the act of praying rather than through differences in belief. 

How do we Pray?

We started the lesson by presenting a poster designed by Irushi Tennekoon for the Daily Mirror— it was great timing indeed! Irushi and I had discussed documenting this lesson plan but never got around to it— but here was a precursor to it. 

Illustrated by Irushi Tennekoon

Class groups for Temple, Kovil, Mosque, Church 

We then proceeded to hand out folded pieces of paper that divided the students into four groups - one for each prevalent religious structure in Sri Lanka: Temple (Bhuddism) , Masjid (Islam), Kovil (Hinduism), Church (Christianity/ Catholicism ) we felt thath through learning about the shared act of prayer and spaces for prayer, we’d be able to begin advocating for religious tolerance.  

Work in Progress

Some students complained: ‘Miss! I’m a Christian but I got the Kovil! I don’t know anything about it’ I urged them to learn more about it from Hindus in their group. It was heartwarming to see how excited some students were to tell others more about how they pray in their masjid/ kovil/ church or temple. After a few sketches, they began to build. 

They didn’t have time to finish it over the single class, so it would have to be completed some other time. For a project like this, more time gives them a chance to observe these structures in person, and see it in a perspective they hadn’t before. 

Here’s the end result at our 2020 Art Exhibition!