Category: Uncategorized
Detective work: how can Guildhall uniforms be more ethical?
Another fantastic piece of student work from last week’s ‘Fashion ethics after the Rana Plaza collapse’.
Press release: students stage unique ethical fashion show
Here’s the final press release from our Fashion Ethics after the Rana Plaza project last week. There’s much more on the blog, and more to come.
‘We’re going to get inspired by Eeva’
ftt review of 2013: part 1
At the end of each year, we reflect on our work and see what’s catching on.
Highlights
2013 was the year when, for example, our website:
- had its 149,500th page view (from 38,000 visitors in 166 countries/territories: according to Google Analytics);
- was peer reviewed for the first time;
- was recognised as an open access academic publication;
- was made more accessible and useful for school geographers through newly created and collected classroom materials (big thanks to Alan Parkinson);
- was used in class by NQTs involved in our new #followtheteachers project, who blogged about what they did right here!;
- provided the Ethical Trade Trumps card game that has been adapted and test-driven for Fashion Revolution Day on April 23rd 2014 (watch out for more); and
- was researched and introduced to the Finnish school system by a Masters students at the University of Helsinki (read Eeva Kemppainen’s thesis here).
Our 2nd #followtheteachers blog post
Over the course of the 2013-4 academic year, we’re following seven school teachers and they use and adapt followthething.com in their classrooms in England. Our second post is by Natalie Batten. She reflects on how she encouraged her students to use our site last year to help compare and contrast multinational corporations. This year, she will be using one of our new game-based teaching resources to encourage her students to better appreciate corporations’ diverse policies regarding workers’ rights and monitoring.
I covered a similar topic to the one discussed in Oprah’s #followtheteachers blog post – that of globalisation and multinational companies. This scheme, however, was implemented for AS Level Geography students (studying the OCR exam syllabus). This highlights the versatility of followthethings.com site as a resource for a variety of student ages, even when covering the same topic area. For example, while Oprah used the site to introduce globalisation at Year 7, I used it at A level to consolidate pupils’ prior learning and provide them with examples and case studies for their exams.
Click the seat!
The pupils were not familiar with the site, so time was incorporated into the scheme of work for them to explore it. They really liked the layout and navigation of the site and its recognisable format – like other online stores such as Amazon – which made the site personal to them and their interests.
Click to play!
The different forms of data presentation on the site (eg. film reviews, travel journals, newspaper articles and Lego re-creations) provided opportunities for differentiation with more able pupils challenging themselves through interpretation of more abstract research sources. In particular, some used the Ford Car Seat page – based on a 2006 film called ‘Made in Dagenham’ – to explore social and historical geographical topics such as feminism and women’s rights. This was important as it allowed pupils to ‘find the geography’ and make synoptic links to other geographical topics during their MNC research task.
An extension to a task like this could be to incorporate followthethings.com’s new teaching resource – Ethical Trade Trump Cards as a way to compare and contrast global MNCs on categories such as worker’s rights, policies and monitoring in an exciting and familiar game for pupils.
Both they and myself as a trainee teacher took a lot of positives away from this activity and I will certainly be using followthethings.com in my future teaching for this and other topics.
Preview: our Easter header
This is it! On site soon.
Four eggs are clickable, try the links below:
What chocolate bunnies think of Easter | Where Easter chicks are made
A surprise in every egg | Some eggs are better than others
The chicks photo is reproduced under Creative Commons license from here.
Our MoCC Thinkering Day film is out!
Regular readers will know that, with our friends at Blind Ditch, we are working on a new project called the Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC). We hosted a Trade Justice Thinkering Day at the University of Exeter in January this year. Filmmaker Benjamin Borley was there to document the day. This is his film, posted last week on REACT’s website.
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If you want to know more about MoCC and its Thinkering Day, see our previous post outlining the day, the cards that fed discussions (on smartphones / tablet computers, plastic packaging, bananas, medicine pills & cotton clothing), and our Storify compilation of live tweets from the day.
If you want to find out what’s happening next, follow the project on Twitter @MoCCofficial.
Thanks to everyone who came along and made this such a rich and productive day; to REACT for its funding, and to the University of Exeter for its support.
Ten top tips…
There’s a ‘follow it yourself’ page on our website here.
What it doesn’t have are tips for those thinking of making new followthethings work.
This is our recently released ‘top 10’:
Now being researched for followthethings.com
Most of the pages for our website are produced by undergraduates.
These are the examples set this week to groups of students taking Ian’s ‘Geographies of material culture’ module at the University of Exeter.
They should appear on site in 2013.
Grocery
- The dark side of chocolate (documentary film released in 2010, watch online here).
- Experiences of forced labour in the UK food industry (research report published in 2012, download here).
- The Salt March (a march in India in 1930. Start with this ”Salt March” & “Ghandi” search result).
Fashion
- The Song of the Shirt (poem, first published in 1843, read it here).
- Playfair 2012 (Union/NGO Olympic sweatshop campaign, start with the website here).
- Sim Sweatshop (online game, first published in 2006, play it here).
Health & Beauty
- Girl Model (TV documentary film first shown in June 2012, watch here).
- Ahava Stolen Beauty (boycotting campaign starting in 2009, website here).
Gifts
- Kanye West’s ‘Diamonds are from Sierra Leone’ (song/music video released in 2005, watch it here).
Auto
- The Oil Road (non-fiction book published in 2012, publisher website here).
Money
- Inside Job (documentary film released in 2011, trailer here).
Energy (new Dept?)
- ‘Down the mine’ (an essay by George Orwell, first published in 1937, read it here).
Shipping (new Dept?)
- The Forgotten Space (documentary film released in 2010, trailer here).
the back office 