My co-teacher and I, now thought we were finished with this unit. Our students informed us that we had thought wrong. They now had all this knowledge and desperately needed to share it with someone. They talked with their parents and their siblings but this wasn’t enough. Some of their families didn’t believe them and the students wanted us to do something about it.
Seeing how engaged and concerned the students were made us decide to continue our study. But what could we do? My co-teacher suggested we have an open house type presentation. Here students could show their work and educate others about the chocolate industry and the continued presence of slave and child labor in agriculture. We suggested this to the students and they loved the idea. They thought we should make a movie so that the whole school could learn what we had learned. As a class we outlined what we would talk about in the movie. We divided up the different sections and students decided what they would say. The students recorded themselves talking about their points using iMovie. We compiled all this together into a movie but in the end it was a bit confusing. Rather than scraping the whole idea, students decided to use the videos in a powerpoint this way we could include pictures and write out the important points people needed to remember. So as a class we did just that.
My co-teacher felt that though the movie/powerpoint was great, we still needed something more concrete and visual so that the Deaf students could fully grasp what we were talking about. She came up with the idea of having a skit where students would act out life on a Fair Trade cocoa farm and on a non-fair trade one. Students loved the opportunity to act and were very enthusiastic about this.
Now with our plan fully underway we invited classes and students’ families to come visit our room and learn about Fair Trade Chocolate. Our invitations were cleverly disguised as chocolate bars, which added a little extra something special. Teachers, parents, administrators and students came in to see our class’s video and skit. At the end we asked them to explain what they learned and had them search popular candy wrapper labels for Fair Trade logos. Our visitors praised the students for their hard work and asked them questions about where to find Fair Trade chocolate, as well as if certain brands were Fair Trade or not.
At the end everyone got to taste some Fair Trade chocolate and leave us some feedback. All of which was positive!
