Page - 81 - in Reflective Cosmopolitanism - Educating towards inclusive communities through Philosophical Enquiry

HANADI (MANUAL) 81 3. Are some customs better than others? If you think so, explain the criteria you used in evaluating them. 4. Are there any customs that should be eliminated or exchanged for others? 5. Are some customs from one group incompatible with those from another group? Activity/Exercise: Multiple perspectives and customs Students are told that they are going to build a collective sculpture in which each student will be one of the pieces. They place themselves one by one and without spea- king. When they are all situated, the teacher takes one student at a time out of the sculpture and tells them to take a mental photograph of the scene (we can make some students look from far away, from close up, from one side, from the other side, etc). When they all have their mental photographs, they sit in a circle and we ask them to each describe what they have seen. We could continue with the “Seeing things as they really are” discussion plan in the manual to Christian, episode 8, leading idea 2. Episode 6: Meeting the shepherd Leading Idea 1: Global/Local. Butterfly effect The butterfly effect refers to the fact that what happens somewhere on Earth can have positive or negative effects on people and the environment somewhere else. The name “butterfly effect” comes from a Chinese proverb that says, “The beating of a butterfly’s wings may be felt on the other side of the planet.” This butterfly effect leads to thought on local actions in relation to global action, and expresses the need to take both into consideration when making decisions. In the field of environmentalism it has been translated into the action principle of “think globally, act locally,” which means that we must act on our surrounding environment without forgetting that we live on a common planet, where everything is intertwined. We now suggest two exercises, which are useful for working on the relation between the parts and the whole, the globalization of conduct and the generalization of behavior. You can find further resources on the concept of “global/local” in the manual to Christian, episode 12, leading idea 1, discussion plan and exercise on “Globalization and fair trade”. Leading Idea 2: Relation between parts and whole The relation between the parts and the whole is based on establishing existing connections between the aspects of something (an object, an event or a process) and that thing when globally regarded as a whole. The features or characteristics of the whole usually depend on the features and characteristics of its parts. Children normally think this way, and they confer the characteristics of the parts to the whole and vice versa. Thus, if a house is built with small bricks, they usually think the house is also small, or if a house is big, they tend to think that the rooms will also be big. But things are not always like that, and there are not any logical rules that can be applied directly to the relation between the parts and the whole. Bearing this in mind, understanding what the relations are based on is fundamental to understanding the nature of the relations themselves, because every time we connect