Fairtrade

Builth Wells High School

Fair trade

Peter Ward

As part of the WBQ our students have studied free and fair trade and we decided this year to make this the focus of our Application of Number (AoN) project.

This part of the Personal and Social Education element of the WBQ is delivered by the leader of our geography department and takes the form of lectures, handouts and directed reading plus students undertaking personal research, mostly on the net. Following the delivery of the first of these sessions the topics covered were considered and the subject of free trade in coffee taken to be the focus, as it was of interest to the students and seemed to give opportunities to extend knowledge and understanding whilst fulfilling the AoN criteria.

The resouces suggested and already visited in the WBQ sessions were trawled and others found and an introductory sheet created including the obligatory graph. The interpretation of this graph gave several opportunities to demonstrate teh AoN criteria, including:

reading and interpreting the graph
calculating incomes
calculating means
calculating profits
conversion between units (most data used $ and tonnes; the graphs used cents and lbs)

Additional data was gained from the UN statistics division which allowed further calculations giving greater insight into the difference between the international farm gate price and the fair trade price would make to a cofee farmer and his family and dependents. These comparisons were made for the most of the coffee producing nations of the world and the vast differences in their production rates and land usage became obvious.

Early on in the development of this project, it became obvious to all the students just how much easier, ie less tedious, the tasks became if done using a spreadsheet computer program. This proved to be a revelation to some previous Excel luddites. Additionally, some students who thought they had given up maths, actually enjoyed and agined a real sense of achievment and belief in their own abilities as they progressed through the project. The initial brief was then widened to include aspects of the Key Skills Information Technology (IT) criteria, particularly those involving spreadsheets and data handling. Our involvement with teh Key Skills conference and the creation of a montage allowed each of our students to contribute an image or item for consideration for inclusion, by email.

The end result is that our students have a better and deeper understanding of free trade coffee, its aims and implications; they have demonstrated thoer ability to apply their AoN, IT and communication skills and all will have produced a detailed and informative report.