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Site Overview | Content Areas | 'Partial Perspectives'
Site Overview
The Two Cities website, focusing on Belfast and Mexico City, addresses areas of all the nations curricula at Key Stage 2 and the Scottish Curriculum 5-14 Guidelines in providing pupils with the opportunity to enhance geographical enquiry skills and to understand similarities and differences in the way people live and in their environment.
The website offers different routes and means of interaction. Belfast and Mexico City are both capital cities, in the UK (Northern Ireland) and Central America. A geographical study of Belfast introduces opportunities to address possibly sensitive issues beyond geography, especially within citizenship and RE, should you wish to do this. Mexico City, in a less economically developed country, has an interesting location. It is a capital city in a mountain environment, not on a major river (like many capital cities) and within the Tropics.
Study of Mexico City could complement the Key Stage 1 study of Tocuaro - a rural village in Mexico (QCA Unit 22). (It is important that children learn about urban as well as rural areas, yet most photopacks designed to resource LEDC work are about rural localities which could perpetuate 'mud hut' stereotypes.)
As well as studying Belfast and Mexico City in their own right, children can use these localities to compare with their own local area, with other localities studied at KS1 and KS2, and with other UK capital cities.
Work on Mexico City could be linked with work on the Aztecs in History.
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Content Areas
Belfast and Mexico City are the focus of two main sections:
Within the City Life section users can access children's responses to several questions. This should enable users themselves to answer the questions:
- What is it like living in Belfast?
- What is it like living in Mexico City?
These are specially designed to offer constant comparison of the content areas for both cities. Within the City Tour section users can select to tour the main sights in either city, with anecdotes from local children. An extension activity, How maps work, demonstrates the concept of a map - from eye-level view, to aerial view, to graphic representation.
From each of the main sections can be accessed a comprehensive Fact File, with information on:
- important places
- sports centres
- parks
- transport and traffic
- annual events
- weather
- school life
- food
- population statistics
- visitors / tourism
- language
- Past & Future (audio and transcripts of elderly people from each city)
Information is presented as text and graphically, as appropriate.
Alternatively, the same material can be accessed by selecting Belfast or Mexico City from the homepage. This allows for the study of either city independently of the other. Pages are designed to encourage users to remain within the content area for the selected city, but allow connection with the other city if desired.
You may wish, for example, to use the content for Mexico City to compare with a UK city already studied. If you want to compare two UK localities then the Belfast content can be used in isolation together with your own material.
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Partial Perspectives
If you take a class of 30 children on a visit to an urban or rural locality they will all visit the same place but they will all experience it differently. They will all have their own, unique responses to the questions "What is this place like?", "What would it be like to live here?" Similarly they will all have different responses to the same questions if asked about their own local area, since 'places' are 'social spaces' where people interact. Their responses will depend on their own experiences and interests.
Each response, although different, will be 'right' for the child giving it - there is no 'wrong' answer. This is an important aspect of geographical 'place' work. The term 'partial perspective' is used - there is no such thing as a complete perspective on a place, since everyone's views, opinions, values differ.
The important thing about 'partial perspectives' in the primary classroom is that we should value each child's views and encourage them to express and justify their opinions, even though they may differ from those of their 'best friend' or their teacher. (Children should also be helped to appreciate that photopacks can only present a partial perspective about a locality - that of the photographer or person who compiled the resource. Resource packs are rarely put together by people who live in the locality being portrayed
- local people would almost certainly present a different view or partial perspective.)
Children should be helped to appreciate that, in the website, Belfast and Mexico City are represented by the partial perspectives of adults and children who live in them - but other people who live there will have different ideas and different responses to the questions asked.
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Curriculum Relevance | Offline Lesson Plan | Online Lesson Plan
Printable Worksheets | Extension Work | Useful Links
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