HANDS UP FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS! These young boys are speaking up!

HANDS UP FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS! These boys are speaking up!

This was incredibly heart-warming.

Having discussed and shared activities in my Leadership Within workshop, it was time for an Open Space activity. The idea was to allow these Yr 6 Heidelberg Primary students to lead their own discussion groups through topics of their own choosing, and then to create actionable and solution- focussed steps.

Students stepped forward to lead groups on topics such as 'Ending poverty,' 'Raising student voices', 'Equality,' 'World Peace,' 'Reducing bullying,' and 'Animal Rights'.

Then one young boy stood up. 'I want to lead a group on Women's Rights.'

'Excellent', says I, beaming at him.

When we had all the topics sorted - 11 in all, the rest of the year level got to choose which group they would go to.

Six boys joined the Women's Rights group. It became an all boys group, and I wish you could have all been privy to the mature, rational and inspiring conversation that ensued.

Congratulations to the teachers and parents of these boys for raising such consciously aware individuals.

Cheery blessings,

Marg

Margaret Hepworth is the founder of The Gandhi Experiment. Margaret facilitates Global Citizenship and Leadership Within workshops across Melbourne schools and internationally.

COLLABORATIVE DEBATING THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

Students workshop the topic prior to the Collaborative Debate

Last Friday, I was very excited to be back at Preshil, running a Collaborative Debate with all their Yr 10s. Having studied ethical questions around the Fourth Industrial Revolution - digital revolution - social credit, advanced surveillance technology, facial recognition and more, the topic of our Collaborative Debate was ‘That we need more surveillance strategies.’ Oh yes, it was challenging!

I was impressed at how quickly these Yr 10s learnt to shift to this new framework of collaborative conversation, not trying to point score or denigrate, but to open the topic up to further examination. 

In Collaborative Debating we learn that we may need to pose new questions - create a question chain that will then take us closer to the answers we are seeking. One such question raised by one of the Preshil Yr 10s in relation to new surveillance strategies was ‘What are the outcomes we would be seeking?’ It helped to clarify the purpose and intent of our debate. 

And as much as we were talking about 'screens' here we were fully engaged in face-to-face conversations, in deep learning. Love it!