Welcome to our Div. 4 blog,

The beginning of our year has been an incredible adventure. Div. 4 students are incredibly motivated, environmentally and socially conscious, and keen to make a positive difference in the world. During our class reading of the Breadwinner, students have shown their ability for deep thinking and questioning. Students continue to display these qualities in our small group literature circle discussions. Students are reading books that deal with issues of inequity and struggle across the globe. As we have these discussions, students are developing and expressing a much deeper awareness and empathy for the circumstance of others. Many students have expressed a deeper sense of gratitude and appreciation for the rights and freedoms that they are afforded here in Canada. As we delve deeper into our study, we are starting to question the responsibilities that we have as global citizens given our great level of privilege.

Yesterday in Social Studies, we did an activity that split the world into three sections (Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and High-Income). Students had to complete a task but were given different resources and legible/illegible instructions based on their region. Each round, students in different regions were given penalties that impeded their ability to perform their task. For example, in the Sub-Saharan region, a flood caused all of the water sources, wells, and latrines to overflow causing an outbreak of cholera. As such, two members of the group were unable to help perform the task for that round. At the end of the four rounds, students in the high-income region had easily completed their task. Meanwhile, despite students’ resourcefulness and excellent cooperation in the African and Asian groups, they were not able to successfully complete their tasks due to illegible instructions and penalty after penalty. This led to an incredibly rich discussion about what the activity reveals about the way the world works and what it teaches us about the different region’s education systems. Students shared amazing reflections. One student from the Sub-Saharan region explained that despite his group’s inability to perform their task, their lack of resources and illegible instructions forced them to forge a closer bond as they became much more reliant on one another. Through this struggle, he expressed that his group became very resourceful and worked together very cooperatively. This student shared that because the high-income region had everything they needed to complete the task, they remained much more individualistic during the task and weren’t forced to cooperate on the same level as his group. Many students talked about how every region would profit from a more equitable division of resources and didn’t understand why the higher income region did not want to share their wealth and access to resources with other regions. Students were struck by how many barriers there are to receiving an education in many parts of the world. Our activity led to students’ examination and questioning of the current economic and political structures that are in place in our world. Students in Div.4 are developing powerful critical thinking skills; I am inspired and privileged to guide them in their journey towards becoming excellent global citizens.

Ms. Arden