LP+Curriculum+Review+1

=Oxfam Education - Can You Beat the System?= http://www.oxfam.org.uk/~/media/Files/Education/Resources/Explore%20the%20food%20system/can_you_beat_the_system_short.ashx

Oxfam
 * What organization developed the curriculum module you are evaluating?**

Oxfam’s mission is to address and alleviate global poverty. They purport to do so by employing creative strategies to empower impoverished individuals to lift themselves out of poverty. This includes responding to crises such as natural disasters and campaigning to have the voices of impoverished individuals gain influence in national and global decision-making. Their underlying motive is to eradicate the underlying injustices that cause poverty.
 * What is the mission of the organization?**

Oxfam UK’s educational branch seeks to promote education for global citizenship by providing ideas and classroom resources. They define global citizenship as “enabling young people to develop the core competencies which allow them to actively engage with the world, and help to make it a more just and sustainable place.” Oxfam emphasizes a learn-think-act process, which entails promoting students to: []
 * What is the educational mission and philosophy of the organization?**
 * 1) Learn about an issue and explore its multiple viewpoints, focusing on causation and consequences
 * 2) Think critically about how to address the issue, enlisting diverse values and viewpoints
 * 3) Take action on the issue (both individually and collectively) as a global citizen

The primary aim of this learning module is to impart a sense of global food injustice. Additionally, it seeks to showcase environmental and social factors that can lead to food scarcity. Finally, it attempts to develop a sense empathy for the difficulties faced by small-scale farmers.
 * What does the curriculum module aim to teach? In other words: what are the learning outcomes supposed to be?**

I think that the game component of this activity is well designed for producing a sense of the injustice that some small-scale farmers face. Students are quickly exposed to and experience the unfairness of the game and can relate this unfairness to the struggles that farmers face. I also appreciate that it covers a range of issues that can either boost crop production (investment) or severely slow crop production (drought, land grabs, rise in food prices). Furthermore, it represents these issues as global issues.
 * Do you think the curriculum is appropriately designed to produce the intended learning outcomes?**

However, I believe that this curriculum fails to cultivate empathy by not providing enough narrative and discussion. The storyline behind the game is extremely decontextualized, leaving the history, geography, politics, culture, and laws of this less economically developed country to the student’s imagination. The student is unlikely to be able to place him or herself into this context because they have no background to grasp onto. The ‘Other’ with which the student is asked to engage in this curriculum is a metaphorical character, and the student’s sense of injustice derives from experiencing the circumstances of this metaphorical character rather than an actual individual (or even a fictional individual with context). I’m skeptical of this as a mode of developing empathy for others because the other is not enframed. Additionally, the discussion questions provided at the end of the activity focus more on the student’s personal feelings towards injustice rather than connecting it to the injustice felt by others.

While I believe that this curriculum does a good job of developing a sense of injustice, I think that it fails to showcase causation. I will address this further in the elements that could be layered into the curriculum.

With some tweaking, this curriculum could do a much better job of teaching the literacy goals for which the EcoEd Research Group advocates (all of which I will address in the following question). However this curriculum does do a good job of imparting: The following four literacy goals are touched upon in the curriculum but could be better addressed if the curriculum were to include the activity outlined below: If this curriculum module were to conclude with discussion on how climate change, land grabs, increasing food prices, and government investment were connected to global shifts, it would provide students with a better sense of how their own actions may play into food injustice. Additionally, it would possibly provide them with a sense of what they could do, individually and collectively, to refrain from contributing to food injustice. The concluding activity could start by listing all of the actors involved in each scenario. For each actor listed, the class should discuss its role in the scenario, as well as its capacity to make decisions in response to the scenario – the goal being to highlight how, in each scenario, individuals from very disparate contexts came together. It would be useful to place these individuals on a map in order to represent the intricacies of globalization in these issues.
 * Does this curriculum teach the kind of literacies the EcoEd Research Group advocates?**
 * //People understanding the history of disaster and decision-making failures, the vulnerability of some populations and regions, and varied approaches to risk management, reduction and communication.//
 * What could be layered into this curriculum so that it addresses more of the learning outcomes that the EcoEd Group advocates?**
 * What could be layered into this curriculum so that it addresses more of the learning outcomes that the EcoEd Group advocates?**
 * //People understanding that their own actions have an array of proximate and far off effects. In choosing when and what to drive, one has an affect on air quality for example. In choosing consumer products (made of vinyl, for instance), one becomes involved in an occupational health hazard.//
 * //People being able to conceptualize complex causation, without being paralyzed.//
 * //People having a complex understanding of government at various scales, from the local to transnational, made up of diverse agencies and types of experts, which really on diverse decision-making processes.//
 * //People understanding (through familiarity with historical and cross-cultural examples, for instance) potential for change, and alterative ways of doing things and organizing society.//

After this discussion, the teacher should ask students to narrow in on their personal role in each scenario. In what ways (if any) may they have personally contributed to climate change, rising food prices, land grabs, and investment? To provoke this thought, teachers should instruct students to think about all of the actors previously listed and to try to determine their own relationship with those actors. The idea of this thought activity is to incite students to think about how complex global networks might contribute to food injustice.