In this study, we have illustrated that Mr. Keating showed excellent skills of combining boosters, experiential learning, and anticipatory discourse in his teaching, which turned out to be effective and have a profound influence on his students’ lives.
To further apply our findings to LE in reality, researchers joined the NTUST LE club, received voluntary training from Glory Foundation, and got volunteer licenses approved by both the Department of Social Welfare of Taipei City Government and Glory Foundation (See Appendix II). With the experiences gained from the club and the foundation, we integrated our findings and put it into practice. The application will be presented in this chapter, which contains two parts: 1) 2015 Summer Camp of
Life Education in Hualien, and 2) the mobile application. Details are provided in the
following sections.5.2.1 2015 Summer Camp of Life Education in Hualien
From August 10th to 15th, 2015, we, together with experienced volunteers from 10 universities in Taiwan, held a summer camp of life education in Hualien, which aimed at building up the correct concepts of life in the minds of the local youngsters (see Figure 5.1). In the camp, we designed a set of four life education lessons (see Table 5.4) based on our findings of Mr. Keating’s teaching strategies, integrated with the teaching material for LE 欣賞生命做我真好 by Glory Foundation and the abundant experiences of our partners, to help convey and reinforce the messages.
From the analysis of Mr. Keating’s teaching methods, we can see that he tended to let the students experience themselves and stir up their potentials while he taught, and it ended up being effective and influential. Following this model, many activities and games were also designed to assist our teaching in the four lessons and open discussions were led in each lesson.
Figure 5.1 Pictures of 2015 Summer Camp of Life Education in Hualien
Table 5.3 Four Life Education Lessons in the Summer Camp
Lesson 1 Lesson 2 Lesson 3 Lesson 4
5.2.1.1 Lesson One: Front of the Class
The purpose of the first lesson was to let the youngsters understand that life isn’t always good, but we should never give in to the difficulties. It could be divided into three parts: playing the game “Find the candy”, watching some clips of the movie
Front of the Class, and discussing and sharing ideas. Figure 5.2 illustrates how Lesson
One was designed.Figure 5.2 Design of Lesson One
The first activity of this lesson is a game called “Find the candy.” By its name, this ultimate goal of this game is to find the candies. The player would be blindfolded and have to revolve himself or herself at the beginning line for three times before he or she starts to find the candies that are spread on the ground. The correct locations of the candies are then provided by the teammates since s/he is unable to see anything.
After getting one candy at hand, he/she has to go back to the team and the next member sets out. The winner goes to the team that got the most candies within ten minutes. Through this game, we want the participants to experience the power of others’ help when they encounter some tough situations in their lives. Then, we showed them some short clips of FOC, which depicted the life of Bradley Cohen, a teacher who was born with an incurable disease named Tourette syndrome, and how he overcame the difficulties he encountered. After playing the game and watching the clips, the participants were required to answer some questions on the handout sheet: 1) what do you think is the difficulty you encounter? 2) how would you overcome it? 3) describe or draw the pictures of some people that always support and encourage you.
Table 5.5 showed the pictures of the class.
Table 5.4 Pictures of Class One
Game Find the candy Movie Front of the Class
5.2.1.2 Lesson Two: Who Am I?
Lesson Two was designed to help the youngsters understand more about themselves and accept all their advantages and disadvantages since every individual is unique and different. It contained an interesting personality test, a drama, and idea sharing, as shown in Figure 5.3.
Figure 5.3 Design of Lesson Two
At the beginning of the second class, the participants took a personality test retrieved from the Internet. With the result of the test, we roughly divided the participants into five new groups by their personality: the amity (those who are friendly and good at being a listener), the candor (those who dislike lies and hypocrites, and often have unique perspectives toward what’s right or wrong), the dauntless (those who have a strong sense of responsibility, and often behave out of intuition and impulsion), the erudite (those who are calm and believe elitism, but sometimes tend to be over stern and indifferent), and the abnegation (those who like to are self-disciplined and like to keep a low profile, and are often willing to sacrifice themselves for the whole good). Then, we played a drama titled the Story of Quack. It mainly talked about a duckling named Quack exchanged the characteristics of other animals (e.g., the eyes of a frog, the voice of a chicken, etc.) that he liked with them in his adventure, but ended up being no longer like his original self. Through this drama, we hoped the participants to understand that everyone is unique, and that we should accept not only our merits but our flaws, and be our true selves. At the end of the class, the participants were asked to write down their characteristics on the posters with their teammates and share with everybody. Table 5.6 collected the pictures of class two.
Table 5.5 Pictures of Class Two
Drama the Story of Quack Class two
5.2.1.3 Lesson Three: Are You One of the Sheep?
The aim of Lesson Three was to introduce the blind obedience and encourage the participants to prevent it and to follow their hearts. It was composed of the four activities: circle revolving, clips of the elevator experiments, storytelling, and discussion. Figure 5.4 presents the design of the third lesson.
Figure 5.4 Design of Lesson Three
The third class started with an activity adapted from one of Mr. Keating’s classes in which he asked his students to walk in the courtyard. In the camp, the participants were required to form a circle with their group members and revolve counterclockwise to the music. The rhythm of the music changed in a certain pattern, and we also clapped to make the rhythm stronger. Throughout the activity, we observed whether the phenomenon of blind obedience existed among the participants (i.e., whether they would follow us to clap, and change or unify their paces under the influence of the rhythm and their teammates.) After the activity, participants were invited to share what they saw or how they felt in the activity. Many found that they would blindly follow the rhythm or others without really knowing why. With the activity, we wanted the participants to experience what the blind obedience was like.
Then, we showed them some clips of a famous elevator experiment about blind obedience, in which the experimenters would take the elevator with their back to the door, which is not a normal phenomenon, and pretend nothing happened. The purpose of this experiment was to see whether the passersby would follow the experimenters and turned their backs to the door of the elevators. Interestingly, the clips showed that many passersby would feel weird at first, but gradually they would turn themselves until their bodies were totally in the same direction as the experimenters. We introduced the story of Weslandia by Paul Fleischman (1999), which implied the importance of self-uniqueness and not to blindly follow others. With these exposures to blind obedience, the participants were later on required to complete the handout sheet, which includes these questions: 1) did you follow your partners in the first activity? why or why not?, 2) please share at least two personal experiences that you blindly follow others to do something without really being willing to or even knowing why, and 3) after this lesson, please share your opinion toward the phenomenon of the so-called “Bandwagon effect” (e.g., the craze of Krispy Kreme among Taiwanese in recent years). The lesson was concluded with Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not
Taken (1920), reclaiming the importance of independent thinking, and that following
others isn’t always wrong and not following isn’t always right because the most important is that you really know what you’re doing. Table 5.7 collected the pictures of class three.Table 5.6 Pictures of Class Three
Activity Blind Following Activity Blind Following
5.2.1.4 Lesson Four: Non-Stop Marathon
Lesson Four talked about dream realization, aiming at encouraging the participants to pursue their dream. It included dream pen and the poem introduction, story of the famous Taiwanese marathon runner Kevin Lin, and a clip of non-stop marathon. Figure 5.5 shows the design of Lesson Four.
Figure 5.5 Design of Lesson Four
The final lesson began with the activity of dream pen, in which the participants were assigned to answer the following questions: 1) what is your dream?, 2) what plan do you need to realize the dream?, 3) what difficulties do you think you would encounter on the way to your dream?, 4) what do you want to do for your family or
society through this dream? We invited some participants to share their answers. Then, we introduced the poem To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick, urging that life is short and we should seize the day to do what we want. Next, we told the story of the famous Taiwanese marathon runner, Kevin Lin, including how he pursued his dream of running and the difficulties he encountered during the process.
By the story, we wanted the participants to know that there might be many tough situations on our way to our dreams, but we should persevere and never give up.
Determination would bring us to success. This lesson was concluded with a clip depicting a marathon in which the runners changed their directions in halfway, implying that there is no certain or fixed routine of life, so that we should be brave to pursue our own dreams and live our own life. Table 5.8 presents the pictures of the final class.
Table 5.7 Pictures of Class Four
Class four Student’s sharing
Making Dream Windbell
To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time
5.2.2 The Mobile Application: Learn from Dead Poets Society
Mobile learning has become a new learning trend (Prensky, 2001; Stockwell, 2014). Internet is useful in spreading information. To promote the importance of LE and the messages behind it, we applied our results to mobile app. There are six main sections in the app: how to use, the messages of LE, the application of LE, discussing area, about us, and contacts.
Figure 5.6 the Homepage of the App
5.2.2.1 How to Use
In this part, we introduced the overall functions of our app. We provided a brief introduction over DPS and its author in order to help users understand the excerpted scenes from DPS, which we would put in the next section. The introduction of LE is also contained to let users know LE and its importance.
5.2.2.2 The Messages of LE
The title of the section will be “Stories.” In this section, we excerpt some scenes
from the novel and movie of DPS and some poems. We put the original texts and the translations translated by the researchers. Those scenes mainly discuss the relationships between parents and children, the inspiring lectures of Mr. Keating, and the reactions of students in facing different obstacles and so on. Those situations are those teenagers may encounter. We hope we can utilize those stories and add some questions after the stories to guide the app users to think over some issues independently (see Figure. 5.7 and 5.8).
Figure 5.7 the Table of Contents of “Stories”
Figure 5.8 the Excerpted Scenes and the Inspiring Questions
In the following sections, we analyzed and discussed the messages behind those stories. The analyses are composed in a guiding manner. The purpose of providing the analyses is not to give absolute explanations but to provide users with different insights into the situations. If there is a poem, we also introduced the authors of the poem.
At the end of each story, a vocabulary and a grammar list are presented. The aim is to help users improve their English abilities while learning from the LE messages.
Figure 5.9 Vocabulary
5.2.2.3 The Instruction of LE
The title of this section is “Practice of LE” on our APP. In this section, we presented three major parts: the introduction of experiential learning, the course designs based on experiential learning and the analyzed results of boosters and IRF model.
The first part, the experiential learning, is divided into three sub-sections: what is experiential learning, the features of experiential learning, and the benefits of applying experiential learning.
Figure 5.10 the Introduction of Experiential Learning
In the second part, we provide four course designs, which we had performed in
2015 Summer Camp of Life Education in Hualien, and two activities, which are
“describe and draw” and “compromising and considerate.” Figure 5.11 presents the layouts. “Describe and draw” is an activity, which two people work together to finish a drawing. The host will show a picture to one participant. The person should describe what s/he has seen to guide the other participant to draw the picture. The meaning behind the activity is not about how precise their work is, but to reveal the idea that every single being will see thing from different angles. The activity encourages people to see the world from different perspectives and to put themselves in others’ shoes.
“Compromising and considerate” should be played by a group of people. The team needs to pass the rubber bands with straws from the first person to the last one. They can only use one of these four parts of body: the mouth, the elbow, the knee and the
feet. This activity conveys the meanings that it is important to understand others’
difficulties and to compromise and be considerate to others.
Figure 5.11 Course Designs
The final part presents four sections. First, we introduced boosters, including a list of boosters. Second, the features and strengths of boosters were listed out. Third, the example of how Mr. Keating used boosters will be provided. Finally, we proposed IRF model and showed some examples.
5.2.2.4 Discussing Area
The aim of the sections is to let users learn from others’ experiences. Everyone
can leave their thoughts over certain issue or situation, share their own experience, discuss some topic with others, and ask questions about the difficulties they encountered. The discussing area is also a platform for the researchers to communicate and interact with the users. Additionally, the researchers can revise the app and add more information relying on the comments they received.
Figure 5.12 the Discussing Area
5.3 Limitation of the Study and Future Work
We have drawn the conclusions and provided the applications in the previous sections. However, to delimit the scope of the generalizability of the results, it is important to note that there are still some limitations of the present study. First, the materials we investigated in are the movies and novel of DPS and FOC instead of real cases. Even though literatures can reflect the cultures or social phenomena in the
reality, they are still made-up stories rather than real events. Thus, the findings we have presented might not fit the real situations in our society. Second, both DPS and
FOC are Western literatures, and some cultural differences might exist between the
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APPENDICES
Appendix I
Frequency of Hedges in DPS
Hedges in Function Words (words with asterisk appearing both in the top of main corpus and sub-corpus)
Word Freq. Word Freq.
WOULD* 26 SHOULD* 16
COULD* 23 MIGHT* 9
MAY* 17
Hedges in Content Words (words with asterisk appearing both in the top of main corpus and sub-corpus)
Word Freq. Word Freq.
THINK* 44 HOPE* 5
PROBABLY* 7 THINKING 5