|
OSSTF District 11- Thames Valley
|
District 11 Office |
Education Matters Online
News
Volume 2, Issue 1: November 5, 2003
New OSSTF Curriculum Package Now Available |
The District 11 Human Rights / Status of Women Committee's October meeting was held to promote and distribute the new OSSTF curriculum package Common Threads: Globalization, Sweatshops and the Clothes We Wear. The OSSTF provincial office provided a copy of this package for each school, as well as copies for the four District 11 teachers who helped pilot this curriculum package last spring. From the Program Overview:
The Common Threads Teacher Resource is designed to meet a pressing need among Ontario’s secondary school teachers and the students they teach.
The new Ontario Curriculum has created unique challenges and opportunities for Ontario’s teachers. There are a number of new and potentially valuable courses that allow exploration of global issues, but textbooks and specific resources for many have not yet been produced. As a result, teachers often struggle to find suitable teaching materials for these new courses. Excellent resources may be available, but require significant time to modify into lesson plans, activities and assessments suitable to the new curriculum.
The Common Threads Teacher Resource addresses this need. The Common Threads resources are designed to be:
 |
“Ready to use” with no time-consuming modification or adaptation needed on the part of teachers; |
|
Designed using specific Ministry of Education curriculum expectations to allow for seamless integration within existing courses; |
|
Comprehensive and complete with all needed resources, materials, activities, handouts, and assessment rubrics provided; |
|
Multimedia in nature and engaging for students and teachers alike; |
|
Available in various formats to provide maximum flexibility. |
The Common Threads Project focuses on the sweatshop conditions in Guatemala’s 300 “maquilas” or garment factories, and the complex social, political, and economic factors surrounding the problem. The materials allow students to access first-person narratives from a number of stakeholders involved in the issue of the maquilas in Guatemala and so provides a case study approach. This approach allows students to explore a number of important global themes.
The package comes in a binder with a VHS video and a CD-ROM with additional resources. Each school has received one copy free from the provincial office. Additional copies of the complete package or just the binder or video or CD-ROM are available for purchase (OSSTF members get a special price) from the Provincial Office. Click here for ordering information.
