Giving classrooms a global perspective
October 2, 2008
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Elvira Cordileone
STAFF REPORTER
Note: This article has been edited to correct the title of Pierre Côté.
When Pierre Côté led a small team of volunteers to Bolivia to show Ontario high school students how the world's water supply is at risk, he took his family along with him.
Côté, associate general secretary of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation, and his wife, Jocelyne Auger, had done development work in the country years earlier. They hoped their children, François and Zacharie, then 16 and 10, would learn an important lesson from the trip.
In the summer of 2006, the group spent two weeks in the impoverished country gathering material for a teaching tool that includes a 24-minute video, available for use in classrooms across the province.
The video tells the story through Francois' eyes.
"Bolivia was the logical place for us to go because of the water wars (that erupted) when the former government attempted to privatize water," Côté says.
The Tapped Out: The World Water Crisis teaching tool provides hands-on lesson modules, print materials and rubrics and activity masters.
The materials are designed to help secondary-school teachers add a global dimension to their subjects.
In the video produced by Côté's team, François, then a student at Étienne Brulé High School in Toronto, walks along the contaminated rivers used for drinking water, visits a sewage facility with a stench so powerful it sickens, and watches impoverished villagers hoarding less-than-pristine water into barrels.
"The poverty is extreme. That really struck me," François recalls from his Leaside home. "Even after water was `unprivatized,' it's still a very scarce resource. In the city, a lot of people collect rain water and they use it for everything."
The main source of drinking water in the capital city of La Paz, for example, is so polluted it's a brilliant fluorescent green, says Pierre.
Bolivia is so poor, he says, it doesn't have the money for the kind of sewage systems and filtration plants that Canadians take for granted.
Though the subject matter makes the video compelling enough on its own, it was designed to complement the curriculum.
In a Grade 11 science class, for example, the Tapped Out lesson could be used to show how the water cycle relates to scarcity and resources, he says.
Or the section dealing with the water wars in Cochabamba, where the cost of water climbed up to 300 per cent after the World Bank forced Bolivia to privatize its water services, could be part of a Grade 12 ethics class, discussing whether the protesters were right to break the law.
"Here's a resource that's been created by teachers, vetted by their colleagues through field testing, then distributed free around the province," says Domenic Bellissimo, the federation's communications and political action executive assistant.
During the past seven years, volunteer teams of up to six federation members trekked overseas for two weeks during the summer to gather information, then spent up to a year designing a film and writing lesson plans to create these classroom resources.
Bellissimo says Tapped Out had a budget of $58,000. The Canadian International Development Agency contributed almost half of this.
Four copies went to every Ontario secondary school where the federation has members. The video and teaching packages are also available free online at commonthreads.ca.
Tapped Out is the third Common Threads project, and follows others on sweatshops in Guatemala and HIV/AIDS in South Africa.
"They're very easy to use because they're very teacher friendly," says Karen Wilson, a family studies teacher/librarian at Saltfleet High School in Stoney Creek.
The material fits into many subject areas, from civics to science to ethics and health.
Wilson used the sweatshop tool in her fashion class. She used portions of the AIDS package in nutrition classes to show how the poverty cycle affects the basic needs of victims of the disease.
"Having the DVD gives visual context as well," Wilson adds.
This summer, a team travelled to Brazil to work on the next Common Threads theme: food security and supply.
As for François, he hopes the work his team produced will lead students to pay more attention to the way they use water.
"I'm not going to say (the trip) changed me drastically because I don't try to cut down as much as I can. But I'm definitely more aware of how much water I use.
"Now, I just use what I need. I'm not going to waste water."
Toronto Star