Jun Watanabe
Although week 1 had many topics to introduce, I strongly believe that group one organized their activities and presentations well. Not only did they use course materials but also they came up with own examples from real life. What I also liked about the way they presented is that one of members did some drawings when he was explaining about moral and causal involvement. He came up with a specific case which was about a man killing other man or a man accidentally exploded a whole factory. The first one is morally involved because he had intention to kill a specific person whereas the latter one is causally involved since the cause was technological defect.
What I enjoyed most was the second group activity. I was impressed that group one divided students into different groups with a specific task. In the beginning all students filled in a survey about refugee problem which made us thinking about this topic. The second activity was about ranking eight different values that were food, education, health care, global leadership, sustainability, equality and etc. In my group, we ranked food and education as most important elements since it is impossible to do something when you are starving. Although I really liked this activity but the general statement they gave was not specific enough which was about coming up an innovative idea to solve refugee problem. I would rather solve a specific case, for example, what would you do if you actually take one refugee into your family as a high school student in individual level. This is more practical and more fun to do as an activity. Thinking collectively requires some skills such as political knowledge which consumes much more time. Since the time for class was limited I believe it was wiser to focus on individual responsibility.
There was one answer to the refugee problem which I still clearly remember. One of my class members said that we should create a flexible certificate for refugee. In most cases, although educated refugees had doctor degree in their country those degrees mean nothing in Europe or other developed countries. Therefore we have to support those educated refugees to let them contribute to society. In that way it is possible to accept some immigrants into Europe. I totally agree with this suggestion that is because I have some friends whose parents were refugees in the past and they struggled a lot in order to get a proper job in the Netherlands. I am also aware that there are no standards for this kind of issue yet.
In overall I enjoyed this class so much. It made me think about refugee more seriously and from now on I will take a close look whenever I see an issue about this topic. I learned an important lesson from this and I also want to remind my friends and family regarding refugees. It was interested to talk about this together because this is not directly related to our life.
