For reference to article see: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/nyregion/bloomberg-plans-a-ban-on-large-sugared-drinks.html?_r=1
My initial reaction to this article was probably similar to many. I decided whether I agreed or not with the premise of the ban and whether I thought it would be effective or not. Once introduced in the 504 classroom, the discussion of the article quickly moved from one about teaching to one about politics and civil liberties. Hands were flying and everyone seemed to have something to say about the article. That's when Professor Jeff asked us to break up into our groups and discuss what implications the article had for teaching.
The fact that everyone immediately engaged this article made the possibility of using it my own classroom even more exciting. Discussion of current events is usually a component of social studies (the subject I want to teach) classrooms. I remember during my own schooling how much I dreaded having to look up articles and put they in my journal for my seventh grade social studies class. I would basically do an internet search the night before we had to submit our current event of the week and put any article in my journal. When I think about current events now though, I am so excited about the possibility of incorporating them into my teaching. What made them so miserable for me as a student and so interesting for my teacher to assign??
I think our class discussion on the NYC article helped show me the difference. Assigning the students an arbitrary task of finding random articles and putting then in a journal without a discussion is meaningless. The current event loses all relevancy value because the students don't get to think about it and compare their opinions to those of their peers. If, however, all the students discuss a single event or article, as we did with the NYC ban, the capacity for thinking about current events grows significantly. If I can get students thinking about the news in the context of my classroom, the hope is that with time, they will be able to engage all the information they get from news-media in an intellectual way.
There are other implications for discussion of current events in schools. When I was first prompted with the question about how the article will inform my teaching, I thought about it from a purely subject-specific standpoint. In our small group discussions however, Pete brought up the point that this article could provide a very dynamic way of unifying student instruction across various disciplines. In the sciences students could discuss the differences between sodas, diet sodas, and juices. In social studies, students could discuss the legal implications of such a ban. In English, students could discuss how the article was written and what type of persuasive language was used. There are so many possibilities, and that's really the power of such an exercise.
My initial reaction to this article was probably similar to many. I decided whether I agreed or not with the premise of the ban and whether I thought it would be effective or not. Once introduced in the 504 classroom, the discussion of the article quickly moved from one about teaching to one about politics and civil liberties. Hands were flying and everyone seemed to have something to say about the article. That's when Professor Jeff asked us to break up into our groups and discuss what implications the article had for teaching.
The fact that everyone immediately engaged this article made the possibility of using it my own classroom even more exciting. Discussion of current events is usually a component of social studies (the subject I want to teach) classrooms. I remember during my own schooling how much I dreaded having to look up articles and put they in my journal for my seventh grade social studies class. I would basically do an internet search the night before we had to submit our current event of the week and put any article in my journal. When I think about current events now though, I am so excited about the possibility of incorporating them into my teaching. What made them so miserable for me as a student and so interesting for my teacher to assign??
I think our class discussion on the NYC article helped show me the difference. Assigning the students an arbitrary task of finding random articles and putting then in a journal without a discussion is meaningless. The current event loses all relevancy value because the students don't get to think about it and compare their opinions to those of their peers. If, however, all the students discuss a single event or article, as we did with the NYC ban, the capacity for thinking about current events grows significantly. If I can get students thinking about the news in the context of my classroom, the hope is that with time, they will be able to engage all the information they get from news-media in an intellectual way.
There are other implications for discussion of current events in schools. When I was first prompted with the question about how the article will inform my teaching, I thought about it from a purely subject-specific standpoint. In our small group discussions however, Pete brought up the point that this article could provide a very dynamic way of unifying student instruction across various disciplines. In the sciences students could discuss the differences between sodas, diet sodas, and juices. In social studies, students could discuss the legal implications of such a ban. In English, students could discuss how the article was written and what type of persuasive language was used. There are so many possibilities, and that's really the power of such an exercise.
Hi Rayhan! Well here goes my second attempt at trying to comment on this blog post! :) I will make sure that it has posted this time instead of pressing "publish" and hastily closing my computer.
ReplyDeleteAnyway so I really got a lot out of this post. I really connected with what you had to say about the English teaching strategies using the article--I even wrote something similar in my post! I think it would be just awesome to use the article in an English classroom, and use it to evaluate writing style, or look at journalism. In general, it would be such a different kind of text that would add variety. I know when I was in high school, sometimes I felt like the only thing we read in English was boring war novels. Incorporating different texts, and even texts that would inform students about current events would show them different writing styles and even invoke some really fascinating class discussions.
I totally related to your story about bringing in the articles in middle school and having to just pin them into a journal and then not doing anything with them. I feel the same way. When I was in middle school I had teachers who would ask us to "brainstorm" current events. We would just raise our hands, say one, and then just go around the room reeling off random current events. And that taught me NOTHING about what is going on in the world. If anything, I would hear something and want to know more about it, but we would never discuss anything. And I absolutely agree with you--I see no benefit in that. Current events like the soda ban are a great discussion starter for classrooms and are really valuable when they are used in that way. I just think of all of the ideas that came out of our class when Jeff and Kristin had us discuss it. It would be awesome to get secondary students doing this more, and like you said, thinking intellectually. I think articles are a great way to get that kind of exercise going, especially in a history class!
Rayhan,
ReplyDeleteI really like the idea of looking at the soda ban within multiple teaching disciplines. It makes the lesson multi-dimensional because the students are forced to look at it through the lens of science, history, social studies, english, etc.
So, a couple questions for you.
1. Would you co-teach this subject in the same classroom? Or would you convince all of the other teachers to teach the subject at the same time, but in their own classes?
2. As a social studies teacher, what is an idea for a lesson plan that could develop from this news story? Will you discuss? Write? Do an activity? I'm interested to see what kind of lesson plan you might implement.
Well in response to your questions,
Delete1. I didn't really think about that =D ... but I think in general, I could do either or. Co-teaching might be more practical than trying to convince everyone to teach the same thing. I might be able to convince one or two teachers to teach the ban with me, but it would probably be hard to convince everyone! It would be nice if the principal mandated it like in our class discussions ...
2. Well basically that's what we worked on in class. So I can give you the short version here and if you want a longer version, I could tell you more about it in real life =)
My group basically created a 3 day lesson and connected the ban to a section in the curriculum on prohibition. We devoted the first day to a lecture on prohibition and introduction of the soda ban. We would ask students to compare and contrast the two just quickly. The second day students would compare primary sources promoting or against both prohibition and the soda ban. We would ask students to look at the biases associated with these different sources. The last day would be a debate. The students would have been divided up the day before and given certain roles like "construction worker", "soda company board member", "uk resident" etc and argue for or against the ban from their respective roles. They would have to back their argument by using the constitution and bill or rights as well as 2 other sources.
That's it!