Well, I attempted to do some Participatory Learning Activities with some of the kids in the neighborhood. There were supposed to be six, but only three showed up and one of them was six. So, needless to say, I wasn’t able to get much accomplished.
We chowed down on some pepperoni and some sausage pizza and then tried to get some stuff done. I managed to get some really great stuff, surprisingly. I may try to do this again, but if possible I want to have more participants and more in a certain age range. I am not so sure I will be able to do that though, but perhaps.
The Victims:
I asked them to draw a map of their street and the things that were important to them.
I was going to try to make a pie chart of what kind of foods they ate. We started naming pizza, chicken, french fries, carry out. It devolved into a list of things “we do”, but the original idea was to have them tell me how much of what they ate… oh well.
The last thing I wanted them to do is called pairwise ranking. I had them list problems and “bad things” that go on in the neighborhood. Then I made a chart and had them each rank them from 1 to 6. Unfortunately I did it backwards, so the problem with the lowest total was defined as the biggest problem. The biggest thing that came out of this was their knowledge of such things at such a young age.
I’m not sure the six year old knows what raping is, but that is what they defined as the biggest problem in the neighborhood. So, crime is obvious to them and part of their lives at ages 6, 10, and 11. I thought I would share this with you.
We had a lot of fun once I was able to keep them calm enough to get stuff done. They all taught me their secret handshake and said “peace out.” I hope to be able to do this with focus groups of neighborhood residents.
major/minor key 