I returned from Cambodia 10 days ago and am revelling in the bubbles of excitement as I reflect on my experience of working in an orphanage and teaching English at a high school in Cambodia. The optimism, graciousness and genuine hospitality of the people has convinced me I will return to this beautiful country and its people.
A day after my return I was in front of my Year 10 classes sharing with them my experiences. I chose to use the photographs I had taken on the trip as my primary learning tools. Students love photographs. They are visual and engaging so make great learning tools. Apart from being an excellent way to capture the spirit of an event or idea learning aboout how to interpret photographs can be challenging. So my aim was for my students to not only use the photos to teach about Social Justice but also to challenge my students to think more deeply about the issues the photos presented in story format. I wanted the girls to understand how and why people experience injustices, how and why they take action to address injustice as well as develop empathy for people whose experiences differ from their own.
Some essential questions in the use of photographs as teaching tools are:
How do photographs convey meaning? How do viewers contribute to constructing meaning?
How are photographs similiar to and different from other kinds of communication?
What role can photographs play in revealing injustice? What roledo they play in encouraging people to take action against injustice?
How do photographs show activism and activists?
How can the subject of a photograph help reveal the photographer’s point of view on a topic?
How can the specific details in a photograph combine to tell a story?
The results?
The girls were fully engaged, asked heaps of questions and were very curious about so many aspects of my experience that every lesson went overtime. My students had walked along side me throughout the preparation for the trip, the journey itself and my experiences of teaching English in a third world country. I showed them photos of me presenting the resources my girls had made to the children at the orphanage. Many of the picture books the girls made had activities in them and I spent time with some girls and boys aged 8-11 completing the activities.
This was particularly significant for one student who had exhibited signs of “compassion weariness” at the beginning of the Social Justice unit. She, and a few of her peers, had expressed a negative view of humanity and the future of our world. They believed the constant bombardment of information reporting tragic events had paralysed their responses to growing world poverty. This presented the challenge of how I was going to expand their cultural perspectives yet acknowledge their right to a point of view. As it turned out these girls were very inquisitive about my goals in journeying to Cambodia and offered to make some picture books for me to take to the orphanage. I returned to their classroom after my trip armed with photos of the children in the orphanage holding the resources my students had made for them. I then explained to my students how I had used their handmade resources in teaching English at the orphanage. This had a profound effect on the girls-they were able to see results, progress, social action. The “hopelessness” morphed into HOPE and the expression of a belief that individuals can make a difference.
This reminded me of a Khmer saying I had come across whilst in Cambodia:
TORK TORK PENH BAMPONG (Drop by drop fills the bamboo container)
which means “Do things step by step, small acts accumulate “.
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