Personally, I feel like this would be a great addition to a global issues-themed class, as our attitude is fundamental to how we respond to the world. I’m very interested in creating some happiness materials myself, and I’d like to offer it as a content elective in the future. I suspect that administrative responsibilities may keep me out of the classroom until next spring, though, so we’ll see.

In the meantime, I’m starting to collect happiness resources. For starters, there was a recent issue of Yes Magazine devoted to sustainable happiness. There are lots of articles, along with some visual aids.

There’s also a great list from Larry Ferlazzo that includes a bunch of infographics, along with articles like this one in The Atlantic on happiness and money.

If you know of any happiness materials, please feel free to share them in the comments. I’ll do likewise, as I find them.

Bigelow’s activity starts with a game created by the coal industry, asking students to mine cookies for chocolate chips. Students buy a cookie and a mining implement (paperclip, toothpick, etc.), then trace their cookie on a piece of paper. They have five minutes to mine it, the goal being to make as much profit (in terms of chips) as possible. They are fined for any bits of cookie that end up outside of the traced border, but as long as they fit their destroyed cookie inside the line, there are no penalties.

After completing the activity, Bigelow had his students look critically at the game, asking them what it was trying to teach, and what it was ignoring. Among other things, this is a wonderfully clear way to demonstrate the problems of a purely profit driven system, and the risks of externalizing environmental consequences.

I bet this activity would work well with a wide range of students. I love the idea of looking critically at an educational activity and considering the motivations behind it. This would fit well into a unit on the environment or energy consumption, but it would also fit into one on environmental justice. For example, it could be linked with an activity looking at who gets the largest benefits from coal mines, and who bears the brunt of the costs.

In addition, they have activities on human rights, animal protection, and culture. They even have a collection of quick activities that can be done in 5 to 15 minutes.

Finally, check out the Humane Connection blog, a place where the folks at the Institute share ideas and new teacher resources.

The show itself covers the original lesson, and also has several of the students rewatch it as adults. In my class today, I used only the original lesson, which goes for about 13 minutes starting 4 or so minutes in. The whole video is available on the Frontline website. I also used some of the discussion ideas from this site which has information on Jane Elliot’s continuing development of discrimination education ideas.

This was a perfect video for my current students, who are teachers in the midst of creating lesson plans dealing with democracy and diversity. In addition to being an engaging way to bring up issues of race, it is also a great example of an extremely creative lesson plan.

As a follow-up, I had students discuss the following questions in groups:

1. What do you think of the activity done in this video? What do you like / dislike about it?
2. What are some of the divides in your country / classroom? What are the different rules (written or unwritten) for people on each side of the divide?
3. How would you describe students who are “going to succeed” compared to those who are “stuck in place”?
4. How are teachers treated differently in your organization? (gender / sexual orientation / race / religion / other)
5. What are some activities you have done / could do with students to help them learn about discrimination?

Thanks Jane!

Facing the Future has a collection of activity-based, global issues lesson plans for students of all ages. In addition to the great stuff they offer for sale, they have a ton of materials available as free downloads. I especially like the lesson plans from Engaging Students Through Global Issues, and the Climate Change curricula. Finally, don’t miss their collection of graphs and other graphics. They cover a range of issues and could readily be used for discussion activities.

The International School Studies Association at the University of Denver has a large collection of links to lesson plans that deal with global issues. They break them down thematically (Cultural Studies, Environmental Studies, Economics, etc.) and by grade level.

My collection of links to global issues-themed video games might also work well with K-12 students.

Larry Ferlazzo’s blog has a ton of K-12 materials, and his “Best of” series includes ideas for teaching about social justice issues, environmental issues, Darfur, the recession, and many other issues.

For America-centric lesson plans, the Library of Congress and National Archives both have collections of lesson plans on race, war, gender and other topics. One great thing about these sites is the inclusion of primary sources — documents and images from history that can convey these issues more powerfully to students. The National Archives site also has a series of worksheets to use for analyzing documents, pictures, maps and so on.

Finally, I invite you to look at lesson plans from the Patel Center’s Global Schools Project. These lessons are not made specifically for ESL students, but they could certainly be adapted for them. I am currently working on a Patel Center program for teachers from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and my students will be adding their lesson plans to this resource.

Please feel free to share other good K-12 resources in the comments!

• Reading Circle Assignment Sheet
• Reading Circle Demo
• Miniature Earth / World Wealth Handout
• Miniature Earth Video
• Economics Reading

First, let me give a little background on this class. It is an elective for level 4 and 5 students, our top two levels. We meet twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday, for an hour and fifteen minutes each time. This class has never been taught before at the ELI, no materials exist for it, and we do not have a textbook.

This week, adaptation was the name of the game. I went into my Tuesday class with the bulk of my lesson plan based around using the Internet, only to find that the computer console in the room was mysteriously powerless. I began class on Tuesday by having students discuss their writing homework from last week in small groups. They told their groupmates what item they had chosen, why they had chosen it, and what issues it related to. I then collected their writing.

Next, I introduced the reading circle assignment. I’m a big fan of reading circles, and I think they work particularly well in advanced classes that look critically at meaningful content. Next, I had students read through the reading circle demo, and then quickly modeled the role of reading circle leader for them. I had planned to give them the reading for homework, and to do a more thorough demonstration on Thursday, but the loss of the Internet forced me to improvise. During the demo, we talked about various phrases that leaders could use to elicit language from quiet group members and to politely steer conversation away from more dominant members.

Overall, I think Tuesday’s class was OK. It was a bit too teacher-centered for my taste, but I think it went fine under the circumstances.

On Thursday, we did the activity that I had planned for Tuesday. I gave students the Miniature Earth Handout and had them make guesses for the top section, and discuss it in small groups. We then watched the video Miniature Earth, a neat, short video that contains a lot of demographic information on the world, and touches on issues such as wealth and education. Students seemed to enjoy the video very much. We watched it a second time, and I paused it periodically to discuss vocabulary and answer questions.

Next, I had students discuss the questions in the middle section of the handout. This discussion was very animated, and students really seemed to enjoy it. As they were discussing them, I wrote a simple table on the board. It listed the continents, and the percentage of the world’s population each contained. I got the data here. I then asked students to guess, in groups, what percentage of the world’s wealth each of these regions had. Again, I got the data here. After a few minutes, I had people share their guesses and wrote them on the board. Then I wrote the actual numbers. Students were surprised by some, and again seemed very interested.

Finally, I had them discuss the bottom set of questions on the handout. I put them in new groups for this. Again, the discussions were very active. This last part of our lesson plan was basically a pared down version of Poverty and World Wealth, an activity from the book Rethinking Globalization.

All in all, this was a great class. In an hour and 15 minutes, we did 3 active group discussions, covered meaningful content and focused a bit on vocabulary. I will definitely use this activity again in the future, undoubtedly tweaked in some form or another. One thing I would be interested in adding is a writing component.

In this podcast I talk about what I’ve been doing for the past several months. I talk a bit about my time at Dancing Rabbit, a community based around environmental sustainability with a website full of photos and articles. I also talk about two online jobs, as a tutor for TalkBean.com and as a rater for the iBt TOEFL exam.

I next talk about my new job as the Technology Coordinator for the English Language Institute at the University of South Florida. Check out the new website I’ve been working on.

Finally, I talk about a low-prep job interview discussion activity that I recently did. We began by brainstorming questions as a class, going over vocab and grammar as needed. I also taught some terms related to benefits, and also told students about certain topics (age, marital status) which were illegal to broach in America. I then had students do interviews in pairs, and wrapped up with a class discussion about “difficult” questions — What is your biggest weakness? Why did you leave your last job? etc.

The last thing I mention is a new planner made for teachers interested in social justice.

If you have any questions, or other low-prep activities that work well with all sorts of classes, please let me know.

Many of the materials fit US national standards and free registration is required to access the downloadable curricula.

via the World 727 email list

1. The Learner as Ethnographer
2. Cultural Values and Attitudes
3. Challenging Stereotypes
4. Critical Readings of Culture
5. The Media

I like the fact that the authors’ treat the students as researchers. I have had luck with that approach in my own teaching. Check out the activities, and let the authors know what you think.

via IATEFL GISIG