Awareness raising
Ask students to consider the types of predicaments
they may occasionally face, where they have to make a decision about
what course of action to take.
Give students an example scenario, and discuss the
importance of not betraying anyone's confidence by mentioning names or
other details that may cause someone embarrassment.
An example scenario could be: When I was a
teenager, there was a girl/boy who wanted to impress me and become my
friend. When we were walking through the bush near the local shop, she/he
'found' some chocolate bars which we ate. After this had happened around
five times, I realised that she/he was probably stealing them from the
shop and planting them in the bush as a special treat for me. I was
really uncomfortable, but I didn't know for sure what was happening.
Ask students to brainstorm all the things you could
possibly have done, and list these options on the board. These could
include going on finding and eating the chocolates, telling other
friends that you thought this person was a shoplifter, confronting the
person, discussing with parents, etcetera.
Ask students to consider
how they would have decided what to do if this was their problem?
Eg They might think / pray about it and make a decision based on their own moral
code; they could ask for advice from someone else whom they trusted;
they might make a list of options and weigh up the positive and negative consequences
of each...
Have them consider the following questions:
- How do we 'know' when something is right or wrong?
- What were the possible consequences of each of the
suggested options? (NB there would be several possible consequences
for each option).
If they ask you what you actually did - either choose
your own action or use this one: When we found two more chocolate
bars I said that I was worried about how many there had been recently
and that we should take these back to the shopkeeper and say
that we had found them in the bush. We did that. The shopkeeper was
quite suspicious and stared at us very hard. We didn't ever find any
more chocolate bars in the bush.
Students may wish to debate whether this was a cowardly way of
solving the problem or whether 'saving face' is actually a socially
acceptable way to address problems.
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