Putting ideas into action

I thought I'd post gain a teaching idea which I talked about recently so you can see how it panned out in the class (see here for full lesson plan).


Imagine a situation:

You're the head of a refugee camp somewhere in a poor, developing country. The annual crops have failed once again and thousand of people arrive at the camp seeking food and medical help. The problem is that you have supplies enough for, at most 5000 refugees, however another 15,000 have come. As the days pass the death rates, especially amongst the very young and the very old rise dramatically. Despite repeated calls to the international community the aid promised by western governments fails to appear.

At this point a local drugs baron/warlord appears on the scene and makes a proposal; in return for supplying food and medical supplies for the camp you must agree to let him use the place as a cover for his cocaine/heroin/etc production facilities.

Do you agree?

In the future I'll ask all the students to respond to the situations like this on the class blog, either in written form or a video clip posted via YouTube. This way students get to choose a form which most suits them.

The most interesting thing about doing this exercise was how much effort the students in Chris's group made so as to make their announcement as convincing as possible. Also Chris worked especially hard on ensuring that his performance was as good as possible. Now I'm sure that knowing that all this was going on the net, and hence would be seen by others was a major factor

Chris's answer