A Place For My Stuff

Here is a quick report on using Leanne’s international trade scavenger hunt and a related exercise:

I awarded five points to any student who found an item from all five regions and five points for each unique item; all other rules were the same. In a class of thirteen students, nine posted photos to the online discussion. Points earned ranged from zero to twenty-five, for a course with a grading scale of 1,500 points. One student said he was unable to upload his photos; my response was “not my problem.”

As Leanne experienced, my class found very few items from sub-Saharan Africa. Two students took photos of clothing made in Mauritius, which really isn’t part of Africa, but I counted it as such anyway. When I asked what the scavenger hunt revealed about trade flows, they were for the most part clueless, and it took a lot of prodding on my part to get them to see the possible implications of the scavenger hunt’s results.

I found this a bit disappointing because the class had engaged in a similar exercise the week before, in which teams of students tried to identify the country of origin for every item they had with them in the classroom. After about ten minutes of students searching for labels, I compiled a digest of what they had discovered by writing on the board categories of items — such as “clothing” — and the countries from which the items originated. The purpose of the exercise, which I communicated to students after some discussion, was to demonstrate that everyone in the room was a participant in globalization, whether they were conscious of it or not.