Following on from yesterday's heads up on the Stats NZ interactive mapper resource, it is with great trepidation that I provide this link . I have often wondered if the study of global sporting events encourages more fragile understanding than deep knowledge.#
Caveat aside, if you take a look at the list of competing countries in the FIFA world cup you'll notice that Australia and NZ have been placed in the well known continent of 'Other'. Now, my memory of this mystical place called 'Other' is clear enough to recall the setting of 'Other' from the 1997 Social Studies Curriculum, but I'm sure NZ and Australia weren't in it (although the whole of Africa might have been!). Just goes to show, how we look at something may be greatly influenced by where we are looking from.
On a more serious note, how might this perception of Aussie and NZ be incorporated into some powerful learning about social constructs of geographical boundaries? For let us not forget, that Australia and NZ were both in Oceania before Australia jumped waka to the Asian qualification route. Can international allegiences be chopped and changed as quickly for countries as it can for Winston Reid or Irene van Dyke? Does this only happen in sporting contexts or are there geopolitical examples from history that we know of? Why might we re-draw maps? Are there economic and/or cultural reasons for doing so? Does redrawing maps create winners and losers? Who has the power to redraw maps? Do we all agree on the new boundaries of redrawn maps?
In any case, is any of this applicable, in a substantive way, to any of the social studies achievement objectives of the current New Zealand Curriculum?
# Deep knowledge of sustainability issues could be derived from the Sydney, Beijing and the forthcoming London Olympics. A far cry from the fragile understanding of flags, maps and biographies of the sporting elite.
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