Change the World? We Are!
~ from Lana Friesen, Grade 5 Humanities Teacher at Calgary Science School
Wow - for the past week and a half there has been so much energy and passion bubbling to the surface in class from my grade 5's. The lessons about extreme poverty have sparked an interest in how other people live, where there is hope and how we, who have so much, can help. It has been a wake up call about why we should know about poverty and why we should care.
Erin Wilkins from CAUSE Canada launched the week with an excellent introduction to the 8 Millennium Development Goals and helped to bring the significance of building a school in an Kenyan village to life with posters of the goals on the board which she connected with arrows as she got the kids talking about how lives would be changed because of this school.
We are becoming Global Citizens. Students who didn't know what poverty was or where it existed have watched documentaries about real people in Cambodia, India, and several African countries. After watching the first doc from Poipet, Cambodia, one of the girls in my class shared that she'd traveled there last year with her family and offered to bring in her own photos and stories from her experiences there. This very far away place became very real. Her dad is coming in this week to share more of their around the world trip that opened their eyes to the differences in how people live.
We were fortunate to meet and question the documentary filmmaker, Rick Castiligone, who taught us the word SUUBI (the word for "hope" that he learned in an African village). His films showed some of the desperate situations that poverty creates and introduced us to people who are working to change that and bring hope. This is what we all need to know - that so many people live this way and that we can do something to improve their lives. The students had so many questions, powerful questions. He commented that the 10 year olds in the class asked questions that he was used to hearing in the college classes he teaches.
We had Deng, a Lost Boy of Sudan, in to tell us part of his incredible story of survival and the hope that he lives by. For many of the boys in the class, the idea of having an AK47 might have sounded kind of cool a week ago, but that changed rapidly when Deng shared the reality of why he had to carry a weapon for 2 years as a child soldier. Survival was not just some video game. His biggest message to the kids revolved around thanking their parents for everything in their lives, being grateful to live in Canada, to learn as much as they can in school, and to realize just how much we all have here.
Today, during 'If the World Were a Village Day', students got a first hand experience about life in the Global Village when they randomly picked slips of coloured paper that would determine if they were in the top 20% (green), the middle 60% (blue) or the bottom 20% (red) of the world’s population related to income. It was fascinating to watch the morning unfold as they were told that there groups were to create a poster about the theme "Life's Not Fair" after the conditions were attached.
The green group got 86 of the poster making supplies and could work anywhere in the room, blue had 13 supplies and were restricted to 3 tables (no chairs) and the red group had 1 old pencil and had to stay on the bamboo mat on the floor. The way the world typically reacts played out in class as if it had been scripted -– the red group huddled in the corner and struggled, frustrated that they wanted to do more "but didn'’t have the means to do it"– they also got really creative. One boy in the group said “Our poster is invisible.” How fitting. They surmised that the people in poor countries must feel invisible as well. The biggest word on their poster was "HELP"
The blue group had a lot of resourceful people who took charge and put in an impressive effort. However, quite a few people didn’t contribute and just hung out on the sidelines. There were 2 messages on their poster that stood out -– one complaining that they didn't have as much as the “other group" (ie green) and one being thankful for what they did have.
The first thing the green group did was cheer, gloat about what they had, and then run around to the other groups flaunting their materials. They made the biggest mess in the room with garbage and materials strewn about. Their poster was filled with glossy magazine pictures depicting luxury and excess in the "rich” column, with a few token photos of impoverished people in the "poor” column.
In the end, they claimed they weren’t allowed to share materials, despite the fact that that was not the case. They used only 51% of their materials, while the other 2 groups had used 100%.
Part way through the activity, one blue boy came up to me and exclaimed, "The red group are the extreme poverty group, I'’m in the average group and the green group is the really rich group. I get it!” He came up to me two more times throughout the day saying "I get it!".
When we debriefed they figured out why those numbers were chosen - this is how the real world works, they weren'’t randomly chosen. We all fit into the green group. What are we going to do about our actions?
They suggested that we do this again, when the groups could share and have the new poster theme be "Life Could be More Fair if We..."
Interesting results!
Throughout all of this, students are asking to learn more about child labour & smuggling, sweatshops, HIV/AIDS, debt cancellation, why kids don’t go to school, and what WE can do to make a difference.
This feels like an incredibly important and powerful issue to be learning about together. We can make a difference.
We are making a difference, as evidenced by this comment yesterday when a student explained why she had just made a donation to ChristmasFuture: “Before last week, I didn't even know what poverty was and just thought that everyone lived like I did.” - Sarah. 10 years old.
posted by Jay@ChristmasFuture @ 12:07 AM
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