AIDS Awareness

Categories: Development and Health
I'm not going to blog about all of my lessons for tomorrow, as in several classes I find myself in the middle of a piece of work which we have already started. Just thought I would share something that a colleague had used with a class previously (and knowing it is here, I'll now be able to do next time round). The class were given the AIDS topic to coincide with World AIDS Day-something that with a little more forward planning, I should have done too. They were asked to create a character - name, gender, sexuality, age, job etc to build up the profile of a typical HIV positive person. They were given no other direction and the choice was completely up to them. The teacher then asked them to tell the class about their character. In every single case, the character was gay. From this starting point, the teacher was then able to challenge stereotypes and deconstruct the myths of AIDS/HIV. I really liked this idea, and I'm sure it's one that is floating about on the internet somewhere as a starter activity. I might get my s4 to do some kind of AIDS awareness debate/radio show/display on the back of our discussions from Thursday, which in a less powerful way, hopefully brought out some of the same points. I'll put more of the s2 movies on later, really busy up till Wednesday...