Concepts are understandings that cross time, place and culture. Imagine that you had a series of telescopes or lenses that when you looked through them you would see the world in a very particular way. This is what concepts help learners do, see that regardless of disciplines or subjects all things are connected and can be viewed in particular ways through conceptual understandings.
The IB PYP has identified seven key concepts to focus all learning in the primary years. However conceptual inquiry is not unique or limited to teaching within the IB. For more ideas feel free to contact us and we can help you develop concept driven inquiry for you and your learners.
RESPONSIBILITY: What are our obligations or choices?
If you are looking through the RESPONSIBILITY ‘telescope’ you will be able to uncover an idea stretches across time place and culture inviting people to examine and make visible the choices and obligations people may have according to the power they have access to in different communities. Responsibility, choices and obligations are informed by belief and value systems and the identity claims. Access to power is an absent but implicit foundational construct in ‘responsibility’.
For example:
What choices are there?
What actions could be taken?
Who has the power? Where does the gaze of responsibility lie?
Why should different choices be made?
What values, belief systems or identity claims are the foundations to choices, obligations and responsibilities?
Use the RESPONSIBILTY lens to look at these photos…
Image © 2019 Morgan-Belle Holmes- Bradshaw
IMAGINE…
If you were a tourist what choices or responsibilities might this have you thinking about?
Image © 2019 Beconwiz
If you were an historian what choices or responsibilities might this have you thinking about?
Image © 2019 Beconwiz
If you were an environmentalist what choices or responsibilities might this have you thinking about?
Image © 2019 Beconwiz
BOOKS LINKED TO THIS CONCEPT
Audrey The Amazing Inventor
By Rachael Valentine
Illustrated by Katie Weymouth
Words & Pictures. 2018
Queen Celine
By Matt Shanks
Walker Books 2019
One Well
The Story of Water on Earth
By Rochelle Strauss
Illustrated by Rosemary Woods
Citizen Kids 2007
*BCW will now use‘They,their — themself’ as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun in all subsequent material generated on our website.
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