Section outline

  • Nau mai, Haere mai; welcome to Global Studies 2020. This year you are transitioning from the junior school version of social studies into the high school curriculum of social scholarship. 

    Kia ora...

    Success Criteria: I can/have...

    • understand the purpose and importance of concepts in social scholarship
    • recognise how a person's identity and how it shapes their perspective is unavoidable when analysing politics and society

    Activities:

    1. see google classroom

    The buzz:

    My aim for this year is to provide you all with the skills and understandings you need to be capable of applying your own perspective, and value system, to any social topic and/or content effectively, and independently - I will not be “teaching you topics”. 

    I aim to teach you how to have your own thoughts about topics, and how to present those thoughts in a persuasive and effective manner. The problem is, if I teach you all about a select ‘topic’ per se, however i present that part of society or history cannot avoid being tainted by my ideological perspective, and ethical values. 

    This is the hardest part about social studies/global studies to accept; that there is never any certainty of truth when it concerns society, people cannot be calculated using a neat pythagorean theorem. The way we each individually see our society cannot ever claim to be absolutely right about what it is or should be, but equally we never have to accept that we’re wrong without good reasons either, what we each value and prioritise in life is shaped by the perspective we hold. 

    It is getting our heads around this idea that we will tackle first. Then, we can move onto to our study of Colonialism and Imperialism wherein we will begin by looking at the local significance of these ideas, especially in relation to the Treaty; and move toward a global view by comparing the NZ case to other experiences of colonised societies and peoples.