For a recent second-grade project, I and the other teachers on my grade level asked students to research different important people from around the world, write a monologue from the perspective of the person, and join a “wax museum” exhibit: visitors from other classes came by, pressed a button on the student’s desk, and the student (dressed as their figure) would come alive and tell about themselves.
We excluded the United States and Canada from the project on the basis that students would learn plenty about American and Canadian figures through other sources (and also because our school’s theme is Global Scholars). Each of the four classes took on a different area of the world: one class was Europe, one was Asia, one was Central/South America and the Caribbean, and one was Africa.
We limited ourselves to people that were fairly benign (Gandhi qualifies, Eva Peron does not) and to people whose influence was not primarily a military influence (teaching war to second-graders can be fraught). Artists were fine, as long as their work is something we can expose second-graders to.
Europe was really easy to come up with figures. Asia took a bit of work.
Africa and the Americas were really damned hard.
So, my question to you: if you were to come up with a list of 4-6 figures from each of these regions that met our criteria, who would you choose? Bonus points if you can come up with a list without doing a lot of research first.
Kofi Annan
Desmond Tutu
Nelson Mandela
Richard Leakey
Paulo Freire
Isabelle Allende
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Jorge Borges
I didn’t include athletes, though I could round out both lists with some upstanding footballers. I also didn’t include ancient leaders, though I guess they might be fair game (e.g., Mansa Munsa, Ramesses II, etc.)
What’s so wrong with teaching about war? Kids love war-faking GI Joe stuff and all that. Enrapture them with the exploits of Shaka Zulu. But I second Borges though. And Anwar Sadat, Cecil Rhodes (for his institution of Rhodes Scholarships), and Cheops are goode options/ Maybe Moses if he counts as being African (as he was born in Egypt)
Some feedback. Don’t read this until you’ve tried yourself:
Our African people were Nelson Mandela, Biko, Kofi Annan, and Wangari Maathai (the last leads an organization of women devoted to planting trees, more or less). We dropped Tutu because we didn’t want to have two more-or-less identical South African figures (yeah, I know they’re not remotely identical, I hope you get what I’m saying), and then added Biko in when we realized how, er, complex it would be to teach second-graders about Cleopatra or any other ancient Egyptian. Oh, right, we also did an African drummer, I forget his name.
Our Americas people were Mary Jane Seacole (a nurse along the lines of Florence Nightingale), Pele the King of Futbol, Edwidge Danticat (probably a weak choice, but the only children’s author we could think of), and Frida Kahlo. We considered and rejected authors of books for adults, believing these would not be engaging figures for children.
QSH, I’m not going to explain my reasons for not doing military figures here; if you want to start another thread go for it, but the parameters in the OP are the ones I’m interested in. We spent a long time talking about whether to include military figures in this unit and decided against it for what I consider to be sound developmental and pedagogical reasons.
If folks would be willing, a very short description of each of your suggestions would be interesting.
For comparison, our people from Europe were:
Albert Einstein
Marie Curie
Roald Dahl
Jane Goodall (I thought she should have been for Africa, but we ultimately decided to include her in Europe–Leakey, I think, would’ve been the same)
From Asia we had:
Gandhi
Mother Theresa
Shigeru Miyamoto (inventor of Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers, etc.) Queen Rania, an interesting human rights activist.
Emphasis on social justice people, with some artsy and scientific types thrown in, in other words. It’s really really hard to find any scientists from Africa and South America who have studied something second graders can possibly understand, although Leakey and Goodall would possibly qualify.
kenyatta a terrorist? he studied under a a scottish-run school, studied in england and other european countries for 15 years, was a politician for a moderate party composed mainly of intellectuals. he was accused of being a member of the mau-mau group and unjustly imprisoned for 7 years. he was released after it was proven he had no ties with the group. three years later he became prime minister.
Wait, you are having an 8-year-old be a Steve Biko wax figure that comes to life and tells you his life story?
I hope you gloss over the end.
I don’t want to fight the hypothetical, but it seems like learning about Simon Bolivar would be considerably less traumatic than learning about Apartheid and all the people killed and tortured by it.
Cuban Carlos Finlay’s story might be of interest to an 8 year old. He identified mosquitos as the vector for yellow fever and probably helped save thousands if not millions of lives by doing so.