Another in the New Religious Movements series of PowerPoint Presentations, this uses the Sociological Detective format to investigate a “crime scene” to unearth various clues based on Eileen Barker’s observations about why NRM’s change over time.
The basic idea is that as each clue is unveiled it contributes towards an understanding of Movement change and once all the clues are revealed it should then be possible to link them to arrive at a general explanation for such changes.
While there’s nothing too sophisticated here, the Sociological Detective format plus the ability to reveal, focus on and discuss a single idea at a time might prove an interesting way to encourage students to reflect on and discuss changes in New Religious Movements.
If you need it, the Presentation contains a short video (about 90 seconds) of Barker talking
about the recent development of NRM’s. You can use this clip as a piece of background information to sensitise your students to some of the ideas identified in the main Presentation. The clip is linked from YouTube (so you will need an active Internet connection to play it) rather than embedded in the Presentation to keep the PowerPoint file down to a reasonable size (around 6mb as opposed to around 125…).
Although I haven’t included one here, if you have a favourite NRM case study (from the Moonies through Scientology to Heaven’s Gate…) it could be easily integrated into the Presentation to provide an empirical background to Barker’s observations.