So today I read a Fischbowl blog post by Karl Fisch about encouraging his students to make a quarter a day donation from now until the end of the semester so the class could make a micro-loan via the micro-lending organization Kiva. In Karl's classroom there is no reward (or punishment), gradewise or otherwise, attached to the donation. The students are just encouraged to give and learn more about how their donation can empower individuals to rise out of poverty. He has, however, generously offered to match the donations of his students at the end of the semester, and any student who wishes can make recommendations on where to loan the money. This post really inspired me. I think that anyone who wants to be an educator would agree that we have a teaching responsibility to our students beyond the specific disciplines we teach. Here is a way for teachers to bring about discussions of the global issues of need and social responsibility, which on their own are powerful, but we could easily work in other disciplinary discussions along the way.
I think this would make an excellent WebQuest project. Students would have the opportunity to learn more about the process of micro-lending and could even make some comparisons between the impact of traditional loans versus micro-loans. How about asking students to evaluate loan applications and make persuasive arguments as to why they think a specific loan is worth making? We would also need to consider the geography and culture of the area to make our lending decisions. We might even be able to have a discussion about the social impact of charity and talk about the pros and cons of a traditional donation versus a micro-loan.
Images used in accordance to permissions from Kiva.org
