What is a worldview? And what is your worldview?

Well, to answer the first question, a worldview is how a certain group of people sees the world. To answer the second question, every person’s worldview is unique, but yours may be affected by your religion, ethnicity, home country, and many other factors. To give an example, here’s a video that describes mine.

My worldview is affected by the perspective of Canada and America, which makes it pretty unique. A perspective is a point of view shared by a large group of people. Religions often have a perspective, and this is what this unit was about. The main question of this unit was ‘How is religious worldview represented in the real world?’ Turns out it’s represented in many ways, which can change the way whole continents view the world.

To learn about each of the world’s major religions’ perspective and worldview, we studied them, and eventually broke off into groups to learn more about one specific religion. Of course, we all had some questions we needed solved.

To answer these questions, we visited the places of worship of all of those religions. This took three field trips and a lot of food for energy. On the first trip, we visited the Masjid Ar-Rahman mosque and the North Shore Jewish Community Centre.

 

The religion that I was studying was Sikhism, with Anika, Ben, and Aedan. We visited a Sikh temple, a gudwara, on the second field trip. But before that, we visited a Hindu temple and a Buddhist temple.

 

 

 

 

The Hindu temple was right next door to another Buddhist temple that we didn’t visit, but got plenty of pictures of, especially of its grand entrance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When we arrived at the gudwara, we had lunch that volunteers served us, called langar. Langar is the practice of feeding every one who enters the gudwara.

We also the visited St. Pius, the Catholic Church down the road.

 

The main values of Sikhism are helping others before yourself, earning an honest living, and giving a percentage of those livings to the less fortunate. These values are the things that affect the rest of the world, even if they are not Sikh.

Sikhism was founded and continued by the eleven gurus, who compiled many books teaching the ways of peace and selflessness. The most revered of these texts is the eleventh and final guru, the Guru Granth Sahib. However, each of the gurus gave something to the religion, and that is what we based our infographic off of.

Infographics were the next part of our unit, and we learned about the different styles, such as lists or timelines. There were some examples, and we found our own too.

Our first infographic was quite messy. There was way too much text, and several of the gurus’ bubbles were crowded too close together, and some of the icons didn’t make much sense. The ‘Hymns’ icon was a different style than the rest, and the marriage icon was on the wrong guru. The circle around the symbol looked too much like blood, and the colour scheme didn’t fit the overall colour scheme of Sikhism. It took several drafts, but by the end, we changed the colours, the title, and the icons, and shortened the text so it wasn’t as crowded. The outlines helped each text box stand out, and with the text shortened, the whole thing flowed better.

Different religion’s worldviews are speculated about and talked about a lot, even if the word ‘worldview’ isn’t used. Since worldview affects how you talk and act, it will affect the people around you as well.

I think learning how worldviews develop can change your own worldview, and I would advise you to look at your own and think about it. It’s actually really interesting!