The English classroom is not only a place for learning languages, but it’s also the space where students can reflect on their own lives, habits and sustainable living.
The following project was conducted by Ms. Vương Thị Mai Lan in the Bắc Ninh province and her students, based on a project included in their textbook, Tiếng Anh 7 Global Success. The project invites students to work in groups to lead a campaign on making their school a healthier place. Each group needs to identify a "bad habit" that they may have observed on the premises of their school. Once they have decided, students need to create a poster that raises peers’ awareness of that habit and to make suggestions for tackling that habit by replacing it with healthy and sustainable habits.
This project is great because it gives students the opportunity to practice the vocabulary learned in that unit. At the same time, the project turns students’ attention to their own environment and daily practices. In each group, Ms. Vương Thị Mai Lan encouraged students to use drawing as the key arts-based practice to design individual posters and then present as a group the habits identified in the format of a “Posters Exhibition”. At the end of the poster presentations, the students get to vote their preferred poster. Students’ work reflected their attention to eating healthy foods and eating regularly (e.g., having a healthy breakfast at home before coming to school) and taking care of the school premises (e.g., avoiding throwing trash around the school).
This project could indeed be scaled up by turning it into a school-wide project where students in other classes join this effort of making positive choices and engaging in healthy habits. The posters presented in the English classroom could join a line-up of posters around the school on healthy eating and sustainable care for the school and could, indeed, become a semester-long campaign.
As for variations of this project, if the technology is available, student groups could be given cameras and students could take photographs of actual instances where they observed non-productive or damaging habits to the school environment. This would require an initial conversation with the students about the importance of taking photographs while protecting the privacy of their peers (i.e., not photographing students and showing their faces on camera), and the use of photography would require new artistic skills (e.g., the use of zoom and perspective to focus on objects or scenes that capture those habits).
Alternatively, students could lead a campaign focused on “healthy and sustainable habits” by representing their own positive actions. By setting themselves as models of actions that lead to positive outcomes, this would be a campaign of self-empowerment and self-appreciation, and would make students reflect on what they are actually doing well already, sharing with each other new ideas of how they can serve others, themselves and their own communities. The campaign could also focus beyond the school environment as students would have many more examples to provide (e.g., caring for an elder or a younger sibling, helping parents with work around the house, creating a mini-house or shelter for animals/birds, etc.).
We should note that language choice in this project is important. While focussing on "good" or "bad" habits may be a good starting point, we find the focus on the language of "healthy" and "sustainable" actions and habits more productive. Instead of using evaluative words such as "good"/"bad", using terms such as "healthy" and "sustainable" draws students' attention to the consequences and impact of their actions. Framed with these terms, the project raises children's awareness of their responsibilities towards others and their environment. If you have other terms that you would like to use and find them helpful for a similar project, please share them with us!