Period 5 - Charlotte Oostwal

[CALIS]

Thank you for participating in TIRP service-learning outreach!

Your reports are the basis for academic credit. Whether or not you are seeking a credit option, reports are required as a record of your teaching complex issues in local schools.

1. For each report, select Post Reply. (Do not select New Topic)
2. Copy/paste from your Word file and save a copy until after the semester is over.
3. Before pasting, confirm that you have met the minimum of at least 500 words.
4. Each report must be submitted within 3 days after each session.

Remember:
a. The webboard is public. Do not refer to students by name; instead call them Student A, B or C. If you include names, commentary or observations, you will need to revise your post.
b. Guiding questions for reports are provided in section F of the Requirements & Guidelines.
c. If you include too much focus on the step-by-step process of the lesson rather than content, you may be asked to revise your report.

A CALIS staff member will review your report each week and post a message below of the scoring for your performance evaluation.
We welcome any questions or concerns you have about scoring.
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Session 1
On time: 0/3
Substantive: 6/6
Student specifics: 6/6
Total: 12/15

Nice work, Fleur! I am glad you had such a successful first session. However, you didn't include any specific comments from individual students. If you would like to revise your report to include at least 3 specific student comments, you can earn back those points! -CT on 3/6

Session 2
On time: 0/3
Substantive: 6/6
Student specifics: 6/6
Total: 12/15

Great report, Fleur! Your team did a great job encouraging students to solidify their responses with the theoretical frameworks. Keep it up! -CT on 3/6

Session 3
On time: 3/3
Substantive: 6/6
Student specifics: 6/6
Total: 15/15

Nice job, Fleur! I like how your team kept working to capture the students' focus even after a bumpy start. -CT on 3/21

Session 4
On time: 0/3
Substantive: 6/6
Student specifics: 6/6
Total: 12/15

Great last report! I like how your team reviewed and incorporated what you learned from previous sessions to run things more smoothly. Thanks for being a great TIRPer! -CT on 3/21

[Fleur Oostwal]

Session 1:
I had anticipated our first visit to Inglewood to go far less smoothly than it actually went, due to what I knew about the school and due to us being the first group to teach there. Additionally, I had been in contact with Mr Gordon over email, who warned that his class had large variations with high energy levels and sheltered students, which potentially posed a challenge for teaching. However, session 1 ended up going better than predicted, as our introductory lesson was one that the students could easily conceptualize and get involved with. We had a good response rate to our questions, although the same people tended to respond, and we focused too little on making sure the quieter students in the class were involved.
Our first lesson was an introduction to the three main schools of thought within our topic, ethics (and human rights, as an extension of ethical principles). We used hypothetical scenarios of people on a train track and the concept of sacrifice to teach the class how you would come to a conclusion through different ethical narratives, which was effective in engaging the class with the topic but not as much with the perspectives. We found that much of the responses were directly thinking about the train scenarios: Student A insisted that they should find a way to stop the train, which overshadowed the conceptual meaning of the exercise, and many students agreed. Many of the students could not step back to see how other perspectives would view the scenario. Therefore, we had to spend a while going over the three narratives, but they were very eager to engage in the conversation about whether a human life has different values subjective to the person in question, and when student contributed it encouraged others to do so as well. Student B claimed that every human life was equally valuable, and brought in the question of religion and doing what was right. Student C agreed and claimed that no one should play the 'hand of god', so to speak, as it was no one's choice to determine who else could die. As fruitful as this conversation was however, it made it difficult to hold their interest once we addressed larger humanitarian issues where sacrificial choices are inevitable, which they struggled to empathize with and process. It seemed as though any deviation from the train scenarios and the discussion of human life as equal seemed too far fetched for them to consider, which made it difficult to go in depth with the philosophy of ethics.
Overall, the class was much more engaged with the material than anticipated, I think due to the use of the train scenarios and the ability for them to see ethics in such a narrowed down situation. However, as aforementioned, our need to narrow ethics down to just these situations meant that the perspectives were not grasped as much, and will likely need to be reiterated in the future. We noticed that the things they focused on were very different from those typical university students would highlight: the wealth of the individuals and the role of equality of every person stood out as sensitive points. Additionally, the balance of who talked in the class was somewhat skewed – we paid a lot of attention to the high energy group of males, which made it difficult for quieter students, and sadly girls too, to speak up.

[Fleur Oostwal]

Session 2:
Our second lesson plan at Inglewood focused on a short clip of an ethical dilemma presented by the Joker in one of the Batman movies. Before we started the lesson plan, however, we did a quick ice breaker to engage all students in the class from the start, not just the louder members like last time. We asked for names and dream jobs, and it was great to hear the diversity of the students’ goals. In the clip we then played, the students saw the Joker pit two boats full of people against each other, one full of civilians and the other full of convicts. The dilemma in question was that the Joker gave each boat a device to detonate the other, and if neither did, both would blow up. After watching the clip, many of the students exclaimed about the unfairness of any human life being lost. Student A spoke up and said that should there have to be a choice, that the convicts should be killed, as they had already done wrong, whereas the others were innocent. Another student added onto this by saying that there were policemen and guards on the prisoner boat who were equally as innocent as the civilians, and we used this to highlight the consequence based ethics, of what would give the best outcome. Additionally, a student said they would leave both boats to be blown up, so that there would be no unfair choice of one boat killing the other – all the responses were detailed and we made sure to ask for the ethical reasoning behind their decisions. Once we moved onto the three perspectives again however, there were some students mixing up the definitions of consequence versus virtue based ethics: we found that we had to explain the two a bit differently in order for the students to conceptualize them properly. The three perspectives were still something that we needed to work on in our next two classes: even though we tried to explain examples for the three, they weren’t coming across as well as we hoped and we will approach those differently the next time around. The later part of the class was spent on a difficult worksheet assignment that asked for the students to come up with a question and phrase it three different ways in order to show the answers from different perspectives. Although working in groups had previously facilitated discussion, it now led to the students being distracted, because the task was complicated and uninteresting to them. As Mr. Gordon had warned us, these type of moments caused the higher energy students to lose focus quickly and it was difficult to hold the class’ attention. Previously, the group work instead of just volunteering answers had really worked well and we had gotten answers from groups we usually would have seen not doing much. For this assignment however it just increased distraction, and it showed us what worked with the class and what didn’t, strategy wise. Afterwards, we discussed the lesson with Mr. Gordon, who suggested that we go more with what the students found engaging than what was strictly the assignment plan, because of the nature of the class dynamic.

[Fleur Oostwal]

Session 3:
For our third TIRP session at Inglewood, we used the NPR Blood, Bones and Organs: The Gruesome “Red Market” lesson. We chose this topic because we had picked up on what subjects we thought were most engaging for the students in our class, and considered the Red Market to be one with ample opportunity for conversation. However, the way we approached the activity meant the student were initially very disengaged. We wanted to improve engagement from all students, going off of our commentary from the last classes, and thus tried to go around the room to read through the interview. It turned out that doing this made the concentration levels worse: some students did not want to read, others kept headphones in and overall it caused distraction from the topic. Additionally, we had a substitute teacher, which meant that control over the class was already lacking, and our activity structure didn’t help; we ended up summarizing the article quickly after interrupting a lot to explain concepts that they were not picking up on. We opened discussion concerning what the ethical dilemmas with the Red Market were: here, Student A said that she didn’t see the unethical angle for selling an organ in exchange for money, as it is your own organ. They saw it as a transaction, which we then used to explain how it was an unfair transaction due to the role of the middle man – the broker – and the exploitation of the poor. Now students became more interested. The interest in the concept of inequality and rich versus poor has been a trend we have seen throughout our classes. Student B brought up a great comparison of the Red Market with sweatshop workers, where the middle man prevents the poor getting the amount they deserve, simply because the system allows them to. Furthermore, when we brought up the IR concept of the four worlds, interest was sparked in trying to analyze different worlds and their problems. Student C pointed to the cultural world and noted how what seems unethical in America may not be unethical in other cultures. Also, the economic world concerning exploitation and unfair transaction was also a successful talking point. We talked a lot about the difference in the context in which an organ is donated – whether that is through signing up to be an organ donor when you die, or being coerced into thinking that selling your organ is the best and only option for you to make some income. The result is the same, donating an organ, but the reasoning behind it is completely contrasting and this definitely sparked interest in the students, and we had some good comments about potential policy changes and political options for improving the current organ donation scandals. Students were in agreement by the end of the class that the Red Market’s structure was ethically wrong, but also had differing opinions on whether organ selling should be allowed if there were a more regulated and fair system that was more of an honest transaction.

[Fleur Oostwal]

We started our final session with an icebreaker, because we had noticed that doing so engaged the students more than just rushing into material without catching their attention first. Many students were enthusiastic about the icebreaker, although it was difficult to get some more sheltered students to speak up. We then returned back to IR and started by reviewing the concepts we had covered so far, including the three ethical principles and the four worlds. Compared to previous sessions, students had far more memory of the three principles, and Student A talked about consequence based ethics and the idea of achieving the greater good, or the ‘best option possible’ which was a great improvement. For the four worlds, Student B brought up the concept of justice which allowed us to link corruption, police, law and status together to show how the four worlds of IR are all intertwined, a concept previously unfamiliar to the students. Again, there was more will to input answers and there seemed to be a better response to the topic. Our review of the ethical principles and four worlds meant that we could go into our lesson plan, the hypothetical Villager’s Dilemma scenario, far more easily. The plan included an imagined situation of hostages in a civil war, where the student had to make a decision whether to accept a military commander’s deal to kill one person to save the other nine. Due to the unsuccessful results of asking the students to read in turn last time, which caused inattention and more difficulty in controlling the class, we read out the prompt ourselves. Many students were not aware of what ‘guerilla’ warfare was, so we did have to simplify it in summary after, somewhat. The students all took well to the prompt and were excited to answer, so we split them into groups so that we could go around and talk, hear ideas and keep them engaged and interactive. We good a good response from going to talk with the groups individually: at first students were hesitant to talk to us, but I noticed more timid students speaking up in the smaller groups after some introduction, which was great to see. When the groups all shared their ideas, as we went around the room, there was a noticeable shift in the preferred perspective. Most of the groups went with consequence-based ethics and chose to shoot one person to save nine, rather than go for the maybe more unrealistic virtues-based ethics that had been prominent in the train cart scenario and the Batman moral dilemma we had covered so far. This may have been because this scenario was more realistic in a sense, with the threat of policing and military, than the previous ones. Student C suggested to sacrifice yourself, and Student D said to kill the commander instead. Here, we brought up the six more detailed ethical principles that included ethical egoism as well, and students were eager to comment on the idea of running away in order to preserve self-interest, but found it difficult to grasp that this would actually be very likely should you find yourself in such a situation. However, overall there was a much better grasp of ethical principles and more willingness to look from other perspectives. We noticed an increase in information retention and thereby the ability to use the perspectives as a thinking tool.