RELIGIOUS LITERACY IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE: Children’s Museums as Playful Spaces to Engage Young Children and Adults

Children’s museums provide playful spaces for children and adults to engage together through familiar and novel content and platforms. This chapter explores processes to develop religious literacy within the informal educational context of the Boston Children’s Museum (BCM). To guide critical theory-practice connections, authors reflect on how, as collaborators in the Religious Literacy Initiative, we provided children and adults opportunities to: (1) unpack how beliefs and values develop as a facet of identity; (2) increase comfort learning about differing belief systems and uncover commonalities; and (3) celebrate religious, cultural, and familial traditions. The goal of the Religious Literacy Initiative is to support children, families, and caregivers, regardless of belief systems and practices and including those with no religious affiliation, to engage with issues related to religion and spirituality. We highlight how various community partnerships helped refine approaches to family learning, provided examples of religious literacy being implemented in the museum, and facilitated feedback to other public institutions around religious literacy programming. Acknowledging the challenges and opportunities of engaging in religious literacy efforts with young children and families, we consider the implications of religious literacy efforts in informal educational contexts and how multimodal strategies can promote religious literacy in other public spheres.