Skip to main content

What does "culture" mean?

Our Central idea is

Understanding the beliefs and values of different cultures may promote global -mindedness.

The words "beliefs" and "values" are not really that easy to define. A quick glance at different definitions of these words does not give you a simple answer.

What strategy could best address this dilemma? How can the grade 6s begin to appreciate their beliefs and values?

So we started with the word "culture"  And their responses were, as I anticipated, pretty basic - Family, Flags, Food and Festivals.



I allowed them to place their post-its wherever they pleased.

Later, after everyone got a chance to express themselves, I moved most of them up to the tip of the iceberg, explaining that they were the outward expressions of culture.



...and asked them to think of other less obvious words related to culture.

And so we dove deeper ...






It was great to see them coming up with words such as "respect", "lifestyle' and 'animals!"

I picked on the word "animals" and the next day, posted pictures of animals around the room:
The holy cow, the whale in the aquarium, the guide dog, roasted turkey...The intention was to give students a chance to tap into their beliefs and values when they thought of animals and how we use or abuse them.

After a great discussion one evening with our Librarian Ms. Lea, we wondered how the students would react to the following statement:




Not only could we address the cultural beliefs and values of different groups of people behind this statement, we could also think about how we felt about it and we could introduce the language of debate: 

I respectfully agree or disagree...however, I would like to add...

Ms Lea pointed out that students could get the opportunity to change their minds about an idea; in other words, understand that beliefs and values can change!

On the way towards this understanding, our class faced a rather big hurdle.
We surfaced for a bit...



The quality of their responses towards the pictures did not reflect deep thinking. How could the students realize this without the teacher bringing it to their notice?








Harumi took on the lead role here and helped the class sort the students' responses into HOT and LOT questions (clink on link for more information on this).






This activity was a great way to see how we thought about things.

We have just begun the year, and I hope with more probing activities, we can help encourage the students to think more deeply about issues and hopefully become great global citizens of this world.








Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.

Popular posts from this blog

Generalization-Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 3)

This post is the third of our blog post series on how to design lessons for conceptual understanding. Part 1 here Part 2 here Strategy 3 : Generalizations You may have come across Lynn Erickson's diagram on the structure of knowledge. In my IB workshop's I always like to present the avocado model alongside this diagram when I am talking about facts. The intention of inquiry-based teaching and conceptually-driven understanding (or Concept-based inquiry- whatever terminology suits your fancy)  is to enable students to make generalizations. In other words, can they transfer their learning to a new context because they have understood what they learnt.  In order to make generalizations, we need to first plan lessons that help students acquire facts/topics that are interesting  and worth knowing. Bringing in local and global issues that are relevant to the topic help students as they begin to compare the topics and see emerging patterns. Remember, facts and concepts have a syn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Concepts-In-Use: Designing your lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 6)

  Concepts-In Use www.ibo.org In this post, one more strategy takes center stage when it comes to designing lessons that aid conceptual understanding in our students: Concept-In-Use. This strategy should be used once several concepts have been covered in class.  A great way to know whether your students are internalizing the concepts is to ask them to explain the connections between two concepts. For example:  In Math Ask them to convert a fraction to a percentage.  Or a percentage to a decimal.  Can they clearly explain the connection?  Can they use drawings to support their explanation? Can they articulate the difference between a prism and a pyramid.  How are they same?  How are they different? How can you represent data visually?  Bar graphs, pictographs, line charts are all concepts. As a designer of conceptual lessons, a teacher needs to be keenly aware of the connections between concepts.  For instance, is the Grade 3 teacher awar...
Post a Comment
Read more

Classification -Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 1)

In this series, we will discuss how we can design lessons for conceptual understanding. Having recently completed an upskilling course with IB, I felt we may all benefit from looking at some of these strategies and how they might look like in our PYP classrooms. Strategy 1: Classification    Source: Ibo.org In this post, I will be focusing on the research-backed strategy, "classification".  Chadwick (2009) highlights that classification helps develop conceptual understanding by allowing students to organize information, recognize patterns, and understand relationships among concepts.  Here are some examples across several disciplines on how I have used tools to classify. Math Class 1) In my math class (Grade 3) instead of having students simply rote learn the names of the shapes and their properties, have them sort the shapes  based on the number of sides, angles and symmetry. Even better, use the Concept Attainment Strategy (I keep returning to this strategy be...
Post a Comment
Read more