Teaching UN Millennium Development Goals in Spanish Class

I recently showed The Mission to my seniors. I recommend watching it - it is available for rent on iTunes. It was my students' last week of classes. They were kind of done with reviewing for the exam so I wrote out a few short synopses in Spanish of different movies I have access to (I'm in the Philippines so no Netflix) and I assigned them to read the descriptions and write a persuasive letter to me telling why they wanted to watch one of the movies over the others. My hunch is that the words "Robert De Niro" caught their eye and they zeroed in on The Mission. For a second I felt bad allowing them to watch an English language film in Spanish class, but I quickly reassured myself that it is an amazing movie with a strong social justice message for soon-to-be college freshman. (Note: And in my own  personal practicing-Catholic opinion, it's especially poignant and heart-breaking when viewed in light of the Catholic Church's current/repeated struggles over self-preservation versus the need to protect its most innocent members.) 

The Mission reminded me of my own personal mission as a teacher that I haven't had time to think much less act upon since taking my current job at an exclusive private prep school: to instill in my students the ethic that with great power and privilege comes great responsibility, and a compassion for those less fortunate than themselves which motivates them toward action.

That brings me to this project. My goal is to write in this blog an outline of ideas and resources for integrating lessons on the U.N. Millennium Development Goals into Spanish units for beginning and intermediate levels. I hope to do this in a way that facilitates authentic use of the target language as well as enhanced student engagement in poverty issues.

The foreign language classroom is an optimal place for educating young people about global poverty, social justice, and specifically the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. Learning a foreign language is opening a window to the people, language and culture that are different from our own. While I currently teach very privileged children, even when my students were of a much lower socioeconomic level they never came close to experiencing the level of poverty that the MDG's are aimed at addressing. It is our job to make sure that they are taught about it.

As far as structure, I think that I will devote two posts to each MDG/development issue. The first will be explicitly related to teaching the MDG as such and the second will have additional resources that are related to that development/social issue. For example, the first post will address MDG #2: Achieve universal primary school enrollment and the second post will address other aspects of education in a social justice/poverty context. 


Each post is not by any means meant to be a finished product. Rather I hope that it can serve as a jumping off point. Reading the posts to come may spark an idea about poverty and social justice education in the foreign language classroom. Or maybe you have an experience with some activity or resource that you'd like to share. I invite you to please leave a comment with ideas, questions, concerns, experiences.

So, what do you think? Do you think that this is the place to teach students about global poverty? Does this emphasis create a misconception among our students that Spanish is a "third-world language=poor" language? I will say one thing, I do regret painting a one-sided view by telling my seventh graders a few years ago that "I'll have to look up the word for 'toilet' because I don't know it... I didn't have a toilet when I lived in Peru." I was merely stating a fact, but I think that the statement could have been contextualized a bit more for better understanding.