GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

guys assume, it just is not. Unit 2 deals with media literacy, as I mentioned. It

also touches on trade unionism which then goes into unit 3 which amplifies

student voice and amplifies the idea that actually you are the voices for change

and it is quite often from the ground up that change happens. It rarely ever

starts from the top. It is about getting those young people to actually engage

and give them the tools necessary to start to make that change happen. Within

it they get slide shows, they get notes, they get graphic animations. We do a

lot with graphic cartoons. The guy that did the voiceover for the graphic

cartoons is a person called Aaron Roach Bridgeman who works with SBTV.

We try and engage young people in the best way possible using mediums that

they use themselves.

This is a quick snapshot of a lesson 2 plan that the teachers get. They have

key vocabulary in all of them, because one thing that we have got to also

remember is that it is not just young people that do not have political literacy, is

it also a lot of teachers. The Government in the last three years has only

trained 57 citizenship teachers. There are over 3,000 schools and they have

only trained 57 citizenship teachers. So quite often we are starting from ground

zero not just with the students, but also with the teachers themselves. This is a

quick snapshot of one of our graphic animations which pretty much

encapsulates everything that the teachers cover in the lesson plans. The kids

then log in to their version of the e-portal and then do the activities with the

graphic animations as almost like a double up on what they have learned in

class. The teachers get a clear snapshot of where the kids are at, making sure

that they keep track of all the students that go through the programme. There

are pre and post course questionnaires just to show the engagement and the

level of increase in regard to their political literacy.

One of the most exciting elements of our e-platform is that we also introduce

school student unions within the schools themselves, because it is this idea of

giving young people that feeling of having a voice, because quite often in

schools you are taught several things, but one of the main things is to suck in

information, regurgitate it in an exam and you will do all right. That is not free

thinking, that is not critical thinking and we need to introduce that in schools

141