Pride Month — What can students do in class?

I have a chance to teach English for Creativity course to Grade 10 students this academic year. I find it challenging as it is a new elective course for students which meant there was no syllabus, lesson plans, or materials. I have been interested in combining what is going on around the globe into lessons and English skills will be developed through the actual use and communication; however, I never had a chance to do so with the … fixed…, I must say, content for other courses. Therefore, this is a good opportunity to try it out.

Task

The first week of a semester started in June, so I asked students to work on the theme of Pride Month. The task was to inform people who had no idea what Pride Month was through posters. Students were divided into 5 groups and each came into terms with what topics they would work on. Finally, we got

1. very very brief history of Pride Month,
2. purposes of holding this celebration,
3. how Pride Month affects brands or any law alterations,
4. how to join or support, and
5. interesting events or parades.

After that, they got into group, studied the information related to their topic, summarized, paraphrased, and put it in the posters. Then they presented their posters to the class. Lastly, students published their work on Facebook Page of the school’s department.

Students’ Posters

Evaluation

The posters were graded using scoring rubric and peer evalation. The rubric covered 3 aspects: poster organization (having a balance of image and content), content (showing the sign of paraphrazing and giving credits), and structures (sentences are completed — not affecting the meanings). For a peer evaluation part, each student vote their peers’ posters whether the posters were ‘pass’ or ‘not pass’.

Reflections

Overall, students could design attractive posters that were beyond my expectation using their creativity. The content was also easy to comprehend; however, there were some parts that needed to be emphasized more in the next activities similar to this which are listed below.

• Word choice: Ask Ss to go over their content in the poster, if there is a word they do not know the meaning, it can be assumed that the audiences (their classmates) will not know it either.
• Sentence structures/grammar: Ask Ss to be more careful with the fragment or using of pucntuations as they can affect the understanding of the messages they are meant to convey.
• Visual aids: Ask Ss to include images, graphs, or any other kinds of visual media. They help a lot in terms of comprehension and grabbing others’ attention.
• Presentation: Provide students time to reflect their thought towards this social movement, even challenging their views on this must be a thought-provoking thing to do.

I did not plan to go into the debate as the task was to just inform others about Pride Month; however, I found a few students try to go beyond what they provided in the posters. They expressed their feelings towards the core of Pride Month celebration and mentioned people’s right to stand for what they are and just be themselves.