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The Demo Effect Project Perhaps a good way to inspire others to help the world is simply to show them how to do it, writes Matthew Baganz
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to ‘help the world’, they didn’t know how to do it, or even where to look to find out how to do it. These considerations were the sparks that launched the Demo Effect project, which began as an international collaboration between students and teachers from thirteen schools in eight countries. With the idealistic vision of ‘an informed, invested everyone, realizing dreams’, educators across multiple time zones set out to accomplish two goals: connect students around the world, and capture on camera moments of them taking action, to be shared later with the collaborative team. At the end of the school year, clip highlights would be consolidated into one video that featured several schools and the different ways they demonstrated how they attempted to have a positive effect on their communities; hence the project title: Demo Effect. Molly Foote, teacher at Wade King Elementary School in Bellingham, Washington, USA, said about the project: ‘It is so important for students to see that the world is really a small place and that we are all more alike than different, regardless of where we live’. To increase international mindedness with exposure to Summer |
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It had been another one of those teaching moments. Students were brainstorming world issues to narrow down their action ideas for the IB Primary Years Programme exhibition, when one student suggested helping ‘all those starving people in Africa’. When asked which one of the 54 countries in Africa he meant to help, the student replied ‘Doesn’t matter, all of them’. ‘We can’t send a billion sandwiches over to feed everybody’, countered another student. ‘We can’t even send money because we’re kids and don’t have jobs’. When prompted to inquire into potential approaches kids could take to learn more about how they could help, the students remained silent. Finally someone said ‘YouTube it’, and the class laughed. Two things were happening here. The first was that although students considered themselves internationallyminded because they attended an international school, had learned about other cultures, and sat next to international classmates, they continued either to reinforce stereotypes by repeating cultural clichés or to maintain an aloof mentality of disassociation from cultures to which they had had no direct exposure. Additionally, although students may have wanted
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