Teaching Global Issues in the Classroom: Create a Campaign Video with Adobe Creative Cloud Express Video
Breaking Behaviour is a 5-lesson persuasive letter writing project. Using video as the final outcome, this project educates pupils about issues which concern them and how they can make a difference. Students start by identifying, researching and creating their own campaign for change. Over the 5 lessons, students use persuasive writing to convince their audience of why they need to change. By the end of the project, students will have written and filmed a campaign video.
Why discuss and teach global issues in the classroom?
There are so many repeated behaviours that take place in society without us giving a second thought to why we do them. Some are completely logical and others, given some thought, are pretty strange. Queuing and Halloween are two that spring to mind. However, there are some things that happen which actually have way more of a profound and negative effect on our world than we could ever imagine. Food waste in the UK is one of them. The term refers to food that somehow manages to end up in the bins at home or out the back of our favourite supermarkets and restaurants. In addition to food wasted, a great deal of food is ‘lost’ before it reaches the retail environment. Teaching global issues in the classroom is critical if we want students to understand the implications of such issues and the impact of their actions for change.
Discussing food waste and teaching other global issues in the classroom can help children understand how they can make a difference.
Taken from my book, Literacy Beyond the Classroom, Breaking Behaviour unpacks the statistics behind the amount of food waste in the UK and why this is the case. We look into the differences between food waste and food loss and how these differ around the globe, and consider what needs to be done to minimise these concerns.
All resources and full planning are free and available on Adobe EdEx:
Access complete Breaking Behaviour resources on EdEx
Watch a completed student example of Breaking Behaviour:
Interview with Hayley Connick
Interviewed for Breaking Behaviour is Hayley Connick, a start-up/scale-up veteran with a big passion for food and a deep concern for the future of our little planet. She was able to combine all three when she was asked to lead Too Good To Go in the UK – the world’s largest B2C marketplace for surplus food.
On tackling food waste, Hayley describes that, “While the damage caused by plastic is now better understood, many people don’t realise the harm that food waste causes the environment. Food waste is a major cause of CO2 and methane emissions. If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the US. In fact, wasting food contributes around eight per cent of total human-caused emissions. Given that 70 per cent of food waste in the UK happens at home, it is imperative to raise awareness and educate people on the environmental consequences of wasting food in order to motivate them to change their habits.”
Food wastage has major environmental consequences so raising awareness of this is key.
Here’s that resource link again:
Access complete Breaking Behaviour resources on EdEx
If you enjoyed Breaking Behaviour, check out Literacy Beyond the Classroom, which improves English progress at Key Stage 2 by 3.75 times the UK national average. This innovative approach links global challenges to the five key National Curriculum areas in English: reports, instructions, persuasive language, fiction and poetry, and presentation skills, presenting ready-to-use lesson plans, exercises and activities to help teachers bring this concept to life in the primary classroom.
All projects can be completed using Adobe Creative Cloud Express. By teaching English in this practical, purposeful and meaningful way, we can inspire the YouTube generation to learn the literacy skills they need to influence the world around them and have a positive impact as global citizens.
Dominic is the Education Evangelist EMEA for Adobe Education. Before joining Adobe, Dominic found his passion for combining literacy with digital skills as a primary teacher both in the UK and internationally. From there, he was part of the first cohort on Emerge Education and used that as a springboard to start an education social enterprise. In 2018, he won the EDUCATE award from the Institute Of Education for a 4 month research project into improving KS2 writing using digital skills at 3.75 times the national average rate of progress.