Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I would choose Goal 12- Sustainable ‘Responsible Consumption and Production’ as it impacts children at both a local and global level. I feel that it is particularly relevant as we live in an age of ‘fast fashion’ and where sites such as Shein and Temu are so prominent and used by so many people.
I feel that many children, and indeed adults, don’t even realise that so many of the products we consume today may be produced by child labor. Looking at the how, where and by whom of product production opens peoples eyes to this.
One way that children enjoy learning about the concept of reduce, reuse and recycles is through art and collaborative projects that focus on using junk materials to make something new. This year my class took part in the Repak Reimagine challenge which required them to work together to make seats out of old materials. All the pupils really enjoyed the project and learned a lot about how easy and fun it can be to repurpose items.
The responsible consumption of food and food waste is something that would be easy to explore in the primary classroom. Ensuring that each class has a compost bin and using food trackers would be a good way of exploring what foods are frequently wasted, why and how to turn food waste into compost.
I feel that it is important for children to know where our food comes from and if it is responsibly sourced. Growing food in pots or in a school gardenis a great way to help children understand where our food comes from and the work required to grow fruit and vegetables.
I also think it is important that we teach our pupils about food miles and the impact the importation of food has on our climate. A lesson I have done is to have each pupil, and staff member, bring in a package or label from one item of food that they frequently eat. The class identify where the food was produced and then ‘map’ the journey of each item from its place of origin to Ireland on a an interactive map, use the internet to find the distance each item travelled. We then used a food emissions calculator to look at how our choices of food contributed to climate change. The BBC climate change food calculator is easy to use and compares the carbon footprint of different foods to driving as well as looking at the water required to produce each item.
I would also work on interactive lessons to teach about fairtrade . Fairtrade.org.uk has a lot of really good resources including presentations and videos for teaching about the importance of fair trade and the life of farmers in other countries. Earth Cubs is a great website for teaching the global goals to preschool and primary school chilldren. It is very colourful and child-friendly with podcasts, songs, videos , colouring and art activities, quizzes and presentations to teach young children about the global goals. The presentations could be used as part of an assembly or in each class across the school if the school were to take a whole-school approach to development education.I also rotate the classroom jobs to ensure that boys and girls are all doing an equal share of the cleaning tasks. The first day of last year one of my third class boys asked me at the end of the day if I would like him to sweep up. Some of the boys started sniggering and one even said ‘the girls will do it’. He put them in their place by saying that in his house the boys had to help clean up because his mam was the only girl in house and she couldn’t do it all on her own. Coming from that boy it had far more impact than ir would have had coming from me!
From my experience gender stereotypes affect students from a very young age. As mentioned by many people here from a very young age they talk about the fact that girls wear pink and boys don’t. We have an annual Pink Run fundraiser every year and the first year I had boys complaining that boys and men don’t wear pink. I showed them a picture of Messi in his pink Inter Miami jersey. It turned out lots of them had that exact jersey but they didn’t count it as being pink because it was a football jersey! These gender stereotypes are also frequently seen in relation to sports. We have so many girls who love soccer and play for local clubs and yet very often many of them don’t play in the school yard. From speaking to these girls some of the reasons they have given are that the boys tell them that only boys are good at soccer, boys refusing to pass to them and boys going in for unfair tackles. I genuinely believe some of this comes from insecurity on the part of the some of the boys- the girls who excel at the game are often the ones who are targetted, perhaps because the boys have a fear of being ‘shown up by a girl’. We encourage both boys and girls to play together and frequently teach them about the importance of inclusion and fair play however, in many cases their views come from outside influences. We talk about giving equal support and media coverage to women’s sports, yet just yesterday the lack of support for women in sport could be seen in Croke Park when despite having the same two counties playing in a camogie and hurling double header, most of the spectators only turned up to support their hurling teams. We also see it in the way sports are marketed to children. Many of the sports loving pupils I had this year love to read the ‘Football Heroes’ series of books and I overheard two of the girls who were reading them saying they would love to find football books about female players so I decided to order some for our class library. To my dismay I discovered that out of over 100 books in the series I could only buy eight that were about female footballers (and the fact that only two out of the eight weren’t English players didn’t go down too well with my class either!)
We also see it in how both boys and girls view jobs and careers. I had a boy this year ask me when the male teachers in our school were going to leave to become principals. When I pushed him on what he meant he said ‘Men teachers end up becoming principals and women teachers always just stay as teachers’. When I thought about his experiences in school his current principal is male and his previous principal was male. He was actually taken aback when one of his classmates spoke up and said that it wasn’t true because her mam is a principal. We try to encourage pupils to look beyond traditional gender roles when we bring speakers in to the school. For example for a parent of a child in my class is a chemical engineer and so for Engineers Week she comes in along with a dad from the school to talk to the classes.
From a SSE point of view we should use development education to ensure that we are working on inclusion and equality as targeted areas for improvement in our school.
Hi Patrick,
I really agree with your point about how the overwhelming tide of information and global challenges and how we need to start by encouraging local actions is a way of regaining a sense of agency. I feel children have such ‘big ideas’ but like all of us become disheartened if they feel what they are doing is not enough. We need to encourage them to recognise that part of global citizenship is lots of people doing small local actions which add together to make an impact.
Eric Ehigie’s paper on ‘The Role of Global Citizens in Today’s World’ really articulates the importance of global citizenship in our world. It highlights the importance of orecognising and embracing our responsibilities as global citizens, as Ehigie stated ‘we are living in a global village that we all have a stake in’.
Development education moves beyond the simplistic view that I would have grown up with where supporting global development was about charity and it it pushes us to think critically and challenge our assumptions, stereotypes and biases. In this age of technology where misinformation is so prevalent it is vital that we as educators equip our pupils to navigate a world that is grappling with climate change, poverty, social injustice and war, and that we teach them how to think critically, question and verify the information they come across online and in the media.Over the last two years I have held the role of Green Schools Coordinator in my school as we worked on our Global Citizenship- Litter and Waste flag. This provided us with lots of opportunities to explore the different global goals in appropriate ways across each level of our school, from our preschool to our staff. Our Green Schools committee led the way by making presentations about global citizenship and the global goals to each class. Each class level then had a global goal which they worked on through their SESE, SPHE, RE and English lessons. We found that we were already doing a huge amount of work on global development, however we weren’t integrating it together and in many cases we weren’t using the terms global development or global citizenship at all in our teaching! This led each teacher to explore how to further include development education in their teaching, as well as encouraging teachers to develop a whole school approach to development education.
Having our Green Schools Committe work with our Student Council and our staff to lead our development learning in our school was a great way to incoproprate and set targets for student voice and inclusivity. We also had a Day of Action which was organised by the pupils and focused on activities, quizzes and projects based on development education. We used these and other means such as surveys and polls among students, staff and parents to evaluate how well our school wasfostering global awareness, critical thinking, and active citizenship. This all contributed to our SSE for the year.