Week 17 – Professional

During our university classes this week we dealt with some very interesting topics.  They were the topics of diversity and distribution.

In our classroom of diversity module we were following on from the previous week where we had looked at the topic of diversity and began to watch the movie “Freedom Writers”.  This movie is about a newly qualified teacher who enters a class of teenagers that are completely segregated due to diversity because of gang violence.  The teacher tries a variety of different techniques to try and get her class to become “a family” but then realises that the only way she encourage her class to get along is to show them that even though they may have many differences they are similar in more ways than they think.  Our class was based around the discussion of how we thought the teacher was doing and if we were in her shoes would we tackle the situation in a different way.  It was through this discussion that I began to think about the different ways I could teach about diversity through a PDMU lesson.  The Northern Ireland Curriculum (2007, p. 40) states that children at foundation stage should “be enabled to explore similarities and differences between groups of people” and that children at Key Stage 2 (p.97) should explore “valuing and celebrating difference and diversity”.   This movie highlighted to me the importance of educating children about the different types of people and about informing children that diversity does exist in the world.  Through this lesson I also got to see how an appropriate movie can be so effective when it directly relates to the topic that you are teaching.  Previously we had only watched 15 minutes of the movie but then during the weekend we had sat watched the rest of the movie because the lecturer had helped us develop a keen interest on the subject of diversity.

 

Freedom Writers 

 

             Marcus: No, that don't fly Ma.

             Erin Gruwell: First of all I'm not anybody's

             mother.

             Andre: No, that's not what it means.

             Eva: It's a sign of respect... for you

 (a scene in the movie which shows that the teenagers are now beginning to respect not only each other but also the teacher) 

               

Wealth distribution in America 

In our Global citizen class we looked at the topic of distribution.  We began the lesson by looking at the Millennium Development Goals and we had an in depth discussion about if we thought that these goals were achievable or not.  This then lead into having a conversation about the distribution of wealth in a variety of different countries.  We watched a very interesting clip about Wealth Inequality in America and found out http://padlet.com/wall/h83r54bo9o ) This class was very interesting and as a group we began a discussion about if we could teach this to an upper Key Stage 2 class.  We then looked at the Northern Ireland Curriculum (2007, p.88) and saw that it stated that children at key stage 2 should be enabled to explore “features of, and variations in places, including physical, human, climatic and vegetation”.   We thought that we could teach this type of lesson to a primary seven class but that we would have to be sure of what we wanted our learning goals to be. 

that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of the global assets in the year 2000.  We were then divided into three groups in which we had to prepare a presentation about either  combating poverty, child mortality or food shortage/ rising prices using a website called Padlet which allowed us to create a wall of information to show the rest of the class (our presentation available at

All in all we had an interesting week of class this week and it really made us think about different ways and ideas of teaching lessons when we get back home to Ireland.