Getting Started in Social Education

Before you attend the available in-services in year 1 and 2 you can start with the following exercises for Module 1 Social and Health Education, and Module 2 My Community in fifth year and for Module 4 Contemporary Issues 2 and the Contemporary Issues Task in sixth year.

Social and Health Education (Modules 1 and 4)

  • Do a lifestyle audit of yourself in terms of sleep, nutrition, exercise, and how you spend your time to look at the effects of your lifestyle on your health. Make a list of all the items that are improving your health and all the items that are making it worse;
  • Make a list of all the significant relationships in your life and look at what are the common characteristics in them all;
  • Do some of the communication exercises in the LCA induction pack (available on the coordinators CD). Then make a list of all the ways of communicating effectively;
  • Choose one health, social or addiction issue and track its coverage in newspapers and television over the course of a week. Give a report to the class;
  • Write a role play showing a situation where you were either too aggressive or too passive and write about how you could have been more assertive.

My Community: Module 2

  • Do a community audit and look at:

A.Land Use/Use of Green areas/Park areas/employment areas/examples of poor planning

B.people that look after various groups and activities in the area.

C.Roads/CycleLanes/Footpaths/pedestriancrossing/Traffic/signage/bypass

D.GeneralEnvironment/Litterbins/RecyclingFacilities/Cleanliness/Rivers/

E.Air quality/trees, shrubs and flowers/seating areas/picnic tables

F.Youth Facilities/Sporting facilities/Amenities/youth clubs/community organisations

G.Transport/Bus stops and shelters/train /Bus Frequency

H.Visual Environment: Shop fronts/derelict buildings/estates, etc.

  • Do a plan on a blank sheet of paper of what a well planned community would look like if you could start with a green field site
  • Students could prepare an excellent ‘Then and Now’ photo display for other year groups in the school library/ assembly hall to show the history of the area.
  • Take a morning local history walk/tour with a local historian as a guide
  • Invite a senior member of the community to talk to the class and answer their questions about life in the past.

Contemporary Issues 2: Module 4

  • Revisit My Community, Contemporary Issues 1 and CSPE and examine some of the issues that came up;
  • Do an audit of a week of newspapers and TV news and see which issues are dominating coverage;
  • Run a mock election for their favourite LCA subject and show them the PR system works on the results;
  • Revisit research techniques and let them practice interviews in pairs as well as mock surveys, questionnaires, vox pops, etc
  • Get them to do a few sample bar graphs and pie charts for some of their results.
  • Make a list of all the issues that might be of interest to you and start to rank them in order of preference.