Fairtrade Facebooking. A tired and late entry for #pedagoofriday

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When you teach rotations in the lower year groups, its sometimes hard to surprise students (their pals have told them what you cover and how they'll do it). It's even harder maintaining teacher motivation if, for example, you have 3 second year classes and are teaching the same lesson for the 6th time. This was a dilemma when we swapped rotations at Christmas and I found myself teaching fairtrade again in quick succession on Friday past. Instead of following a lesson looking at its impact on individuals through character case studies, I asked the class to create their own characters. We were able to start this via a rather excellent show and tell from a couple of the girls in the class which started to give us an idea of the location of fairtrade producers, the likely demographic, what they might be producing and how they benefit. We mapped some of this in the centre of the class and I then distributed mock Facebook profiles found on Tony Cassidy's ever useful http://www.radicalgeography.co.uk . I listed the criteria on the board (see the image above) and, in twenty minutes, the class created some really nice summaries of typical fairtrade producers and its positive impact. I've shared some examples, which I meant to include in #pedagoofriday but a Burns Supper and general fatigue at the weekend put paid to that. If I had ict access, it would have been nice to make these look more professional or use Russel Tarr's Fakebook as originally intended but, in the time we had, I thought this was a nice productive use of it.

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