This set of lessons and accompanying activities was designed to enhance student knowledge of and engagement with the themes of global poverty and sustainable development as part of a high school freshman Global Studies course.
Through concrete multimedia case studies, students learn essential content information about different experiences of global poverty (e.g. slums, sweatshops, cycle of poverty, global health, migration) and the perspective of people who work in the garment industry in Bangladesh, live in the slums and favelas of Mumbai and Rio, face malaria in Western Africa, or flee poverty in Cameroon.
Students, furthermore, explore different tools (e.g. fair trade, micro-lending, reducing food waste, SDGs) available for overcoming poverty. They learn how groups of women in India, despite significant obstacles, are changing their towns through entrepreneurship and how technology is facilitating the process of change in Dharavi. Students also explore the refugee experience of fleeing poverty and hardship and integrating into new communities.
As part of the unit, students perform role plays (e.g. taking on the perspective of favela dwellers; developing the backstory of refugees and making an asylum case before a refugee tribunal), participate in collaborative problem solving and civic-oriented activities (e.g. communicating essential information about the spread of Ebola visually to illiterate communities), and partake in experiential learning in the classroom setting (e.g. the refugee journey website activity). Students also engage in reflective writing and ethical discussion (e.g. what's our personal responsibility for the plight of garment industry workers?), develop research outputs (e.g. corporate (ir)responsibility profiles in the garment industry), and explore commonalities and differences of people from different income groups (e.g. My Most Loved Item - Gapminder Income Cards activity). The unit, most importantly, steers students towards empathy and recognition of the fact that there isn't a single story of poverty. The lesson set can be found here. The lesson plan explainer + Gapminder income cards for the unit opener are here.
Table of Contents
My Most Loved Item - Gapminder Income Cards
A previous section of the course on environmental issues and climate change was shared here and a section on stereotypes and prejudices can be found here.
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