1. Dear collegues,
This article has been written by an experienced English teacher, prof. Barbara Ghedi, who
courageously decided to propose POLITICS and the use of Web 2 technologies in one of her classes
in May 2010 and wrote her impressions about the use of the new way of teaching.
Mirella Cusinato
STUDENTS’ RESPONSE TO THE “POLITICS” PROJECT
When first proposed in class last May, the Politics project got quite a cold response, as the students’
very first impression was they would have to do extra school work of no special interest for them.
Their response started getting warmer when they were asked to brainstorm the topics and issues to
focus on in developing the project, as they realized the contents would be their own choice and the
related work their own “creation”.
The brainstorming led to quite an impressive list of issues, which were the closest to their personal
interests and attention; from which they agreed the first one they would concentrate on would be a
hot issue here in Italy, i.e. “immigration”.
At the end of the school year last June, they were invited to start collecting information on
immigration through the Internet, in whatever form they preferred (videos, texts, graphs, photos,
documents, newspaper articles, etc), during their summer holidays.
Some of the best motivated students collected and produced quite a quantity of material, that the
whole class is now proceeding to analyse, process and organize in “modules” and shorter “units”
with related activities; for example:
Module one: Migration inside Europe
- Unit 1: Freedom of movement
- Unit 2: the Schengen Treaty…….
Module two: Immigration to Europe…………………
The enthusiasm of the first group of students on starting the project has now quite “caught” most of
the others, and currently the whole class is participating heartily. They’re working on it both at
home and in the school laboratory; and the spreading feeling among them is that the time they’re
devoting to this project is time they’re actually devoting to themselves and their personal interests.
More like a hobby than work.
Nichelino, 10th October 2010 Barbara Ghedi
( English Teacher)