Beneath the neatly ironed shirt and expensive slacks, I'm still a bit crunchy. Though I shy away from any and all things political with adults, I do have a bit of a tendency to get a bit preachy in front of a room of impressionable YLs. That's not to say that I stand behind my little bully pulpit of a desk assigning them reading passages by Naomi Klein and telling them that it's acceptable to spell woman with a "y." Rather, I like to combine project work and CLIL with socially conscious themes.
year I went to Mali and when I came back from vacation my YLs were filled with questions. "Why would you go to a Third World country for vacation?" "Were you scared?" "Do they have food?" The idea that someone would choose to go to a poor country was totally foreign to them. So we spent a couple weeks looking at poverty. We started with this very thought provoking video from National Geographic.
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Very interesting video and very interesting post. The politics issue is a tricky one and even if we avoid it we are addressing it by condoning the status quo. I wonder what sort of course books you use. Do they present life in the US or the UK or do they try to be more global and in that case which global scene do they present?
ReplyDeleteIn that particular course we were using New Opportunities as our coursebook. The book is divided into chapters that are then subdivided into modules and there's one chapter that's all about development, the environment and conflict.
ReplyDeleteIn general though, the book takes a decidedly international approach.