Rethinking Schools, Spring 2011
Summary and Key Points: This is a rather, hrm... loud article, but by now we are used to this tone from Rethinking Schools. Dial it back, soften it a bit in your head, and look for the key points; that is the technique that I have found works best for me, when the rhetoric just gets too shrill. Anyway! The editors give a brief summary and accounting of global climate change and the things contributing to it. More interestingly, they tie this issue to education: what are the roles of teachers in teaching about this (regardless of your beliefs about its validity) enormously important issue? Which teachers are in particularly effective positions to teach about it? And the biggie: if no one is teaching about it, what will the next generation be doing about it?
Their proposals range from the immediate ("give children a sense of place—to invite children to braid their identities together with the place where they live by calling their attention to the air, the sky, the cracks in the sidewalk where the earth busts out of its cement cage") to the broad (textbook boycotts), but they do indeed offer specific advice. And the article acts as a preamble to this issue of RS, which focuses on environmental issues and the teaching of them.
Intended Audience: educators, general public
Relevance: I am an educator and an environmentalist. As a language teacher, people might see it as a stretch to integrate environmental issues into my classroom. However, the newest vogue in language teaching is "content-based instruction," which suggests that the best language learning is done in the context of learning real materials in the target language. Instead of sitting and reviewing verb forms in the contextless vacuum of the classroom, students say "the earth warms up" and "weather is warm" and "yesterday was warm."
As an environmentalist, I appreciate the efforts of the editors of RS to help educators bring these important issues into the classroom, contextualizing them for the social studies classroom, the art classroom, the LA classroom... Anything that we can teach about that is of actual relevance to students, whether to their daily lives or to the future they will live in, is, in my opinion, of the utmost worth.
One of my favorite things about RS is that it is apologetically loud. I love it. Even if it may be louder or more extreme than I would ever be on a topic, I like the things they say about teachers who aren't sitting back and letting canned curriculum take over their classrooms.
ReplyDeleteI liked this article a lot - I was an Environmental Studies major at the UO. I chose ENVS because as a junior in high school I took an Advanced Environmental Biology course. We talked about climate change, sprawl, wetland restoration, and loads of other environmental/ecology type topics. It was, without a doubt, my favorite class in high school, and I wasn't a "science" kid. If you had asked me my least favorite subject, I would have said science.
I will have to find this issue on my coffee table and read more about what they are saying throughout about other environmental issues and education.
Whoops! Just re-read my comment and realized that I wrote "apologetically". I meant they are UN-apologetically loud!
ReplyDeleteI agree with the idea of "content-based instruction." However, especially with political and some what controversial ideas, I think that we have to be careful not to indoctrinate our students.
ReplyDeleteIn the 1930s it would have been perfectly fine to use the Bible in content based instruction, in the 1970s a good number of people jumped on the "ice age" bandwagon (including Time magazine), and, while there are few scientists who argue the impact of humans on the earth's climate, we should be careful with what we present as "truth" to our students.
I personally know a PhD research chemist (college roommate's dad) who works in the UC system who outright disputes the ability of CO2 as a greenhouse gas to cause global warming, but he fears publishing his research in the current political climate. It should be noted that his as "liberal" (whatever that means) as it comes.
I just think that we need to carefully tread the line between content and context based and belief based education.
Jeff, I appreciate your comments as I would totally agree with you. I think since we have had the Learning Communities Class I am always looking at my motives for teaching something. All I know is it will be a never-ending process of continuing to look inside myself as to what my motives are for teaching the way I do.
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