Project Zero: Dandora

I am writing up my reflections from the Project Zero conference I attended last October - Project Zero Perspectives: Learning Together, Leading Together. See my post on Art and Contemporary Issues here and Stepping into Character here.

Global Lens:
​A Global Competence Curriculum

Veronica Boix-Mansilla
​Project Zero

From Project Zero: “The Global Lens project is creating a curriculum that aims to educate for global competence. Working in close collaboration with teachers in Boston and Washington, DC, we are exploring how quality interdisciplinary study of global issues and deep engagement with global media can develop young people’s global competence. Come hear about this new project and where our thinking is taking us.”

Most of the session was focussed on an activity where we looked at the photograph below...which also happens to be what I took most notes on and will share with you here.

Pausing in the rain, a woman working as a trash picker at Nairobi's Dandora dump, which spills into households of one million people living in nearby slums, wishes she had more time to look at the books she sometimes comes across. She even likes the industrial parts catalogs. “It gives me something else to do in the day besides picking [trash],” she said. Image by Micah Albert. Kenya, 2012.

When first looking at this photograph I thought it was a painting. Something about the soft tones and the lighting makes it look almost beautiful. It's only when you look deeper and find out more about the context that the ugliness is revealed.

We reflected on a picture about the Dandora trash problem in Kenya following different layers of implication to uncover a global perspective of the issue at hand.

• What is the story to me?
• What is the human story?
• What is the world story?
• What is the new story?
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Only through slow looking and purposeful conscious perspective taking we can develop global competence.  By developing global competence in ourselves we can create learning experiences for our students to develop global competence themselves. This was the perfect image for this activity, because at first it seems like a problem so far away that it is almost other worldly - only when you look at the story to you do you start to think more about the direct impact your actions have on places like this. It would be a great opening activity for a unit using the IB's Global Context Globalization and Sustainability, and a good opening lesson for a unit looking at recycling and waste.
 
Micah Albert has some other photographs which could also be used for this activity:

Other useful resources for exploring Dandora/Kenya and/or landfills/dumps:

• Dandora: Conflicting Views and Multiple Struggles
• ​Explore Dandora using Google Maps (satellite images and local photos)
• Google Arts and Culture - Search Kenya (Kenya Red Cross, GoDown Arts Centre and Vital Voices)
• Ben Curtis' photographs of Dandora
• The Guardian: Smelly, contaminated, full of disease: the world’s open dumps are growing
• The Guardian: The world's biggest and most dangerous dump sites  (interactive resource)
• African Slum Journal: Changing Faces of Dandora

All schools do units about recycling and waste, but they often don't look at the human stories involved - this activity and a focus on Dandora could be a great way to help students connect to this issue on an emotional level.