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Tropicality
is an enquiry designed to enable pupils to get a deeper
feeling for tropical African countries, and to celebrate
and enjoy the diversity of the world.
This page
looks at how children learn and how children develop
a sense of place.
Interpreting
pictures
Much of
the tropicality exercise is concerned with interpreting
pictures. Young people often need support from teachers
to interpret pictures. They may misunderstand what they
are looking at, ignore the unfamiliar, or home in on
less relevant details. Help our pupils to get started
by asking them to think what would it be like to be
in the picture, or imagine how they would describe it
to someone with no sight.
But extracting
a real sense of place from a photo, or from any sources,
depends on two important questions:
- What
does it tell you?
- What
doesn’t it tell you?
In designing
lessons to really explore a sense of place, the latter
question is crucial.
What
is a sense of place?
A sense
of place is about feeling what it is like to be there:
the ambience of a place. It could be interpreted as:
- the
sights, sounds, smells and textures you would experience;
- an
impression of the landscape, the weather and the peoples’
way of life and the way they behave.
- the
natural and human elements that make that place unique.
Selecting
a variety of different resources is vital to giving
a sense of place.
Use
of resources
Easily
available sources are often an inadequate tool for getting
over a sense of place, but we can compensate for this
inadequacy. Each type of resource offers something different:
- Video
– glimpses into the landscape and lives of people
- Photographs
– time to dwell on images of landscape and lifestyles
of people
- Audio
– opinions and feelings of the people
- Texts
– descriptive passages to develop vocabulary
or eyewitness accounts from people who live there.
The greater
the range of sources we show pupils, the more informed
their sense of place becomes. Ask pupils to compare
the sights, sounds, smells and overall ambience suggested
by the different resources. What can this tell us about
who might have created the source? Who might it have
been made for? And why? Sometimes, the teacher can annotate
the resources with personal experiences.
Even though
Africa is the continent with the lowest access to modern
technology and the Internet in particular, it is possible
to supplement published sources with more direct contact
with people in other places. We can now access a greater
variety of eyewitness statements, sounds, news and pictures
via the worldwide Web and email.
Sources
of information tell you as much about the people who
made the source as they do about the place in the source.
Exercises
The following
exercise can be used with any picture:
Perceptions
of place
Ask your
pupils to look at a picture and write down a list of
adjectives (6 –12) they would associate with this
place.
Now categorize
them, giving a "+" to those adjectives that
are positive in the pupil's view e.g. clean; a "-"
to those adjectives that are negative in the pupil's
view, e.g. dirty; and a "=" to those adjectives
which are neither positive nor negative e.g. muddy
- Note
– when unsure just categorize them as =
Now add
up the number of +, – and =. How do you perceive
the place in the picture? Is it predominantly negative,
predominantly positive or do you have a balanced view?
Offer
your own list and encourage children to look at each
other's list. How do they differ? And what are the factors
that influence interpretation?
Some sample
factors that can influence perception:
- experiences
of that place
- experiences
of people you respect
- how
the media represent that place
- attitudes
of your family and peer group to people who are
different and to places abroad
In conclusion,
pupils are never too old to develop a sense of place
and they should progress from simple sensory awareness
of places through to deeper understanding of perceptions
of places.
Here are
some more exercises and ideas for exploring perceptions
of place:
Adjectives
Take five
images of a place, ask the pupils to select adjectives
from an envelope and link them with the picture. Use
the categories =, - and + to see how they see that place.
Where
is this place?
At the
beginning of a topic, give the pupils a collection of
images which all come from the same country. Don’t
tell them where they come from. Pupils seem to increase
their observational powers looking in every corner of
the picture for evidence when they don’t know where
that place is.
The debriefing
should include questions like:
- Which
photographs surprised you?
- Which
gave you the most evidence?
The
‘wherever’ experience
Pupils
are led into a darkened room and create a walk through
experience where they encounter the sights, sounds,
smells and touches of a country.
If you
visit a country that you know you will be studying,
then take a set of slides, record the ambient sounds
and conversations, collect everyday objects that represent
the country.
Use this
to stimulate the pupils into enquiry questions that
they subsequently will be taught about or can investigate
independently.
Whose
place is it?
Put each
pupil into one of three groups representing an organisation
from the country you are about to study, for example
- the
tourist authority wishing to increase visitors from
abroad
- an
aid agency wishing to raise funds
- a development
corporation wishing to an export product
Get each
group to design a brochure and an oral presentation
around this set of images, describing the place to people
abroad. After the presentations discuss with the pupils
what they have learned about the way that places are
represented.
Curriculum
hooks
Geography
– the study of a ‘less economically developing
country’
Literacy
– developing descriptive vocabulary of distant
places
Global
citizenship – getting children to feel positively
about people in other places, and understand how to
make others feel positive about people in other places.
Tropicality
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