Systems
- Suggested duration: 15 mins
- Technique used: Group ice breaker (From ‘Linkingthinking’ by Sterling: WWF Scotland)
- Materials required: Marker pens, flipchart paper
- Aim of activity: To look for any links between members of the group and to show these links on a flipchart. This would help the group get to know each other better, but also illustrate that, as individuals, we are more interconnected than we perhaps first realised.
- Underpinning components: UC1.2a; UC1.2b; UC1.3a
- Connection with other competences: Transdisciplinarity
Short description
Group is divided into subgroups of around 4-6 and given a sheet of flipchart paper and pens. They are asked to look for anything that members of the group might have in common or are connected by and to show this somehow on the paper.
Afterwards, groups can comment to the rest of the group as to what they found.
At the end, the group leader should draw the activity to a close by highlighting the fact that we are interconnected in many different ways – often without realising and therefore part of a complex system.
This should lead to input on systems thinking, boundaries around systems and feedback within systems
Students work in groups to research and analyse, using data, different area’s around the world/in their country/region with different wealth/ poverty levels.
Discuss, using multi-perspective background (e.g. social, political, economic, cultural and ecological) as input, possible causes of these differences.
Analyse connections between these perspectives.
Write up the report and use it as a starting point for discussions with local authorities, social workers and cultural leaders about the situation in the school’s neighbourhood: do they recognize the team output and in what way are they working on improvement, against the background of the targets and indicators of SDG1?
Seek contact with a school in a different social area and work on an exchange of ideas and people; and seek how these schools can support each other.
Background reading Piketty, Le Capital au XXIe siècle, Paris 2013 and Atkinson, Inequality, London 2015