Background
I recently attended the Central States Conference for language teachers. I highly recommend it if you have the opportunity!
Hands down the best workshop I attended over the 3 day period was titled “Teaching with Social Justice”. Thank you to the presenters Karen Goering (@kbhawki) and Lindsey Camacho (@lindseyscamacho) for sharing their brilliant ideas! I couldn’t wait to incorporate both concepts into my Spanish classroom as soon as possible!
I was looking for a good transition from a unit on travel into something involving social justice. My seventh graders had just finished writing about an ideal vacation, so I created a lesson where I asked them to plan that trip. They were asked to use Mexico’s Kayak.com for some authentic reading in Spanish. Throughout the research, I was amazed by the great questions students asked. They truly had never thought about any of this before, and were so eager to learn more. Here are some of their reflections:
Offering perspective
After we debriefed their research, and discovered that many students needed more than $1,000 a day per person for their trips, I showed them the movie “Living on One Dollar.” The movie is available through Amazon Prime Video, but I purchased it for $9.99 through LivingonOneDollar.com to support the cause. The documentary looks at income inequality and the role opportunity and privilege play in our daily lives.
I didn’t provide any introduction or transition from the project to the movie. I just told students I wanted them to watch, and I would ask them to answer some questions for homework afterward. They were completely captivated the entire time!
The last screen of the movie shows the organizations website for donations. At least three of my students whipped open their Chromebooks to go to the website.
I told everyone to take a stretch break and find someone they wanted to talk with. I asked them to share their reactions with that person. Nobody took a stretch break. They all immediately began talking, and made the connection between their ideal vacation project and the message of the movie. It was unbelievable!
It was so obvious that my students understood the message that I scrapped the homework questions!
Creating Empathy
The next day in class, we talked about an idea the film makers explained:
They couldn’t really understand the feeling of poverty until they experienced it themselves.
The social justice workshop presenters had told me about a simulation to accompany this movie. I bought it here and translated it into Spanish for my students.
The simulation
The simulation is designed to create empathy for students. Students start by uncovering their family. They roll the dice to see if they are married, how many children they have, how much money they will start with, and if they have enough money to send their children to school. They continue rolling the dice to see how much money they earn each day, and then choose situation cards to see what curveballs life throws them. Students had an absolute blast with this and asked all sorts of interesting questions.
“What does it mean if I have negative money but my child was in school? Do I have to take her out?”
“What will happen if I can’t pay my loan back by the end of the game, and what happens to people in real life who can’t pay their loans?”
We talked about really interesting and important topics that normally do not come up in a beginning Spanish class.
Yes, my kids were speaking in Spanglish and using more English than ideal, but they were learning so much and so completely engaged, so I really didn’t care. It was a clear reminder that I don’t just teach Spanish; I teach kids.
Taking action
The third phase of this lesson was inspired by Kara Jacobs’s blog about using Kiva with Spanish I students. I showed this video explaining what Kiva does and then gave my students about 20 minutes to just explore the Kiva website.
I used Kara’s template from her blog article and asked students to choose a loan they wanted to fund and create a page describing the person. We read each other’s loan summaries and then voted on two that we wanted to support. I told students that there was no obligation to participate, but if they wanted and were able to, they could each bring in $1.
The next day, a group of girls excitedly ran into my room exclaiming that they were planning a bake sale to raise money for our loan! They planned it all themselves, got permission from the office, and raised over $100! They were so proud of themselves!
When we went to make the donation to our selected recipient, we saw that he (and all the rest of our choices) had already been funded. The kids were so overjoyed that they didn’t even care that their money was going to someone else. One student claimed
“Who cares! At least we know he can pay for his surgery now AND we get to help someone else go to school!”
I could not have been happier with how this project turned out and it makes me want to rewrite all my lessons to include some element of social justice!
