As I approach the end of my learning journey at OISE, I am experimenting with the pedagogy that I have been exposed to over the past three and a half years. Looping, taught in Joe Flessa's class social policy class caught my attention. I wondered if this indeed could be applied to elementary school students to help build connections and deeper learning. In the development of the social justice curriculum, I have included two loopers each week. The grade six students are excited and nervous about this role. Loopers connect what has been taught in the previous week to their journal entry. On Friday, we connected their looping ideas, questions, and wonderings on a connection board. I was amazed and surprised as to where their thinking is going. We have read two newspaper articles so far. One was on the relationship that occurred between rescuers and a humpback whale and the other was about junk collectors that pick through city garbage and recycling to earn an income. At the end of the discussion, one student explained that although we, as humans can help animals by recycling and taking care of the amount of garbage we produce, that animals have greater lessons to teach us about our emotions. The student supported this though with reference to the San Francisco Chronicle . She shared that the humpback whale helped the humans. I have pulled the quote that inspired this thought,
"When I was cutting the line going through the mouth, its eye was there winking at me, watching me," Moskito said. "It was an epic moment of my life." When the whale realized it was free, it began swimming around in circles, according to the rescuers. Moskito said it swam to each diver, nuzzled him and then swam to the next one. The social justice group has me wondering about the impact that nature can have on humans; all this in the face of technology, bombardment of social media and images that, at times prevent us from looking up and appreciating nature.
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