We have been working on this unit for about a week now. Before we made our final decision I had the classes evaluate the questions from the previous blog. For one class it went really well and we were able to draw constant parallels with the realities of a real democracy. For example, some students made the point that the process would have worked better if some people had participated in the decision-making process better. The committee was elected from one class and appointed from the other and these 10 students took a whole period to decide on the final topic. They had a bunch of justifications that the class had produced which they needed to consider and I gave them the following brief to follow:
Your job is to choose the topic that you think will serve the class’s interests and educational needs the best. You will need to discuss and debate the 4 choices and look carefully at the pieces of paper you have been given.
Your job IS NOT to convince the rest of the committee what YOU want. As representatives of the class your job is to serve.
You need to justify your response in a short statement and give it to me at the end so I can read it to both classes.
You have the right to ask somebody to leave if you think they are not participating in a way that is in the spirit of democratic decision-making.
They seemed pretty focussed but I was with the actual class rather than the committee for most of the time. It would have been good to have observed more closely how they came to the decision, which was Apocalypse Theories. I don’t know whether they actively discussed and deliberated the options or if they just used some kind of voting process. But at least we now have a topic which only took 4 periods to come up with.
I was all keen to do what James Beane suggests and let them loose on a series of activities such as the following:
•Prepare a report comparing theories and explaining which is the most likely and why
•Write a letter to a politician campaigning about the danger of Nuclear Weapons
•Survey people at WHS or create a FaceBook page finding out what peoples’ fears are – tabulate and graph data for the class blog
•Make a documentary using the Flip Cameras on the science and predictions behind global warming’s worst case scenarios
•Sculpt a monument to our global civilisation for aliens who discover earth after an apocalypse
•Find out what happened during the black-death how did people react? How did it impact society?
•Make a timeline of apocalypse theories, past and future.
•Prepare a presentation or podcast or documentary about the cold war, the Cuban Missile Crisis and how close we came to nuclear apocalypse in the 1960s
In the end I have chickened out – although I will get some students to do the FaceBook option. The Maths teacher could do some good stuff with the data that this might generate. I have categorised “Apocalypse Theories” into Human, Natural and Religious ones. I’ll definitely let them choose from some of these activities for an inquiry, but I want to first take about 6 periods or so choosing a case study from each category and be a bit more directed in my teaching. The risk with this topic is also that it induces a sense of despair and helplessness which is pretty counter-productive to citizenship education. So I have formulated 5 key questions that if we answer them well it shouldn’t fall into another example of debilitating “disaster studies”. They are:
• What apocalypse theories are there?
• What happens in them?
• What evidence are they based on?
• How likely are they?
• What can we do about them?
The first case study is Nuclear Holocaust and I want them to understand that a Nuclear Holocaust is a real and present danger but one that we can do something about. We will look at what might happen in a nuclear attack by looking at primary sources from Hiroshima and Chernobyl, who has Nuclear Weapons now and how many, what New Zealand’s historical position towards them is and what people are doing to stop the proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The next case study I might do a super volcano or meteorite strike, although I am hoping my Science teacher might be able to jump in here too. Perhaps even the Mathematics teacher if they were to look at predictions, probability or orbits. There is so much good literature on Apocalypse theories too for the English teacher. Nevil Shute’s “on the Beach” for one. My final case study will be a religious one; we might compare religious ones or do the Christian Rapture. Finally, this kind of teaching which involves students can go catastrophically wrong without a strong theoretical framework. Lots of the boys want to learn about Zombies – this simply isn’t going to be allowed. Students learning about Zombies is “constructivism” gone mad.
No comments:
Post a Comment