A Visual Cycle

Understanding the cycle

So, the students had an understanding of what a cycle was now, but remember we didn’t know what that cycle looked like. I got the students to draw pictures of all the sad things the girls were singing about in the 'Break the Cycle' music clip, such as families fighting and drinking etc: 

"When we're home alone, 'cos our family's gone drinking, we get bored 'cos there's nothing to do"

"It's hard to stay in school"

"We want the fighting just to stop"

"Just looking for some trouble"

I printed pictures of the girls from the video and arrows and we tried to make a visual cycle and make up a bit of a story of how it links together. Although the lesson was very chaotic, unstructured and challenging (as decision making through discussion is not a strength of the class) this is what we came up with: 

The kids' explanation:

Families are unhappy so they drink, the drinking causes fights, kids watch the fights and learn to behave the same way, kids don’t go to school and cause trouble, they grow up and are unhappy so they drink.

It was obvious that the limitations of both my knowledge of the local language and my students' knowledge of English hindered the learning and understanding within this lesson. 

An alternative to the cycle

Although the students were enthusiastic about drawing the sad things from the song, they were even more enthusiastic about drawing the pictures of the happy things the girls wanted in the song. Here they are… 

"We want fun things to do"

"Families can be happy again"

"We want to keep our culture strong"

   "Got to think about the future"

Easy or hard?

I asked the students if they thought it would be easy or hard for the girls to 'break the cycle' and have the good things that they wanted in their life, rather than the sad things they were experiencing. The students expressed that it would be hard and we discussed the idea that people need to be strong and make strong choices to do hard things. 

Weak vs Strong choices

I gave the students a list of choices someone could make and got them to work together, sorting them into weak or strong choices. 

The power of a strong choice

I made the distinction that weak choices will keep someone in the cycle and that strong choices can help people to break the cycle.

Empowering ... well I hope 

I guess there is no way to really know, however I hoped that this distinction of a strong choice breaking the cycle would be empowering and confirm the same message from the song: that it's up to the individuals in the cycle to break it - but in order to do so they have to make strong choices.