Chapter Ten
Reflection and Practice
Conversation Strategies for Getting Started
In this chapter, the center for Ecoliteracy offers ideas to stimulate conversations with your colleagues. These suggestions use the four strategies introduced in the last chapter: personal reflection, structured conversation, collaborative lesson design, and teaching rounds. For each story in the book, you might choose one of the four strategies to discuss ideas with your circle. You might decide to use more than one strategy, or you might use these ideas as starting points for generating your own discussion topics.
Read the Chapter One sidebar, “Why Can't We Go Out and Play, Daddy?” Using a large piece of paper and colored pencils, express your feelings after reading this story. (Try putting yourself in the role of Little Bopper's parent.) On the other side of your paper, make a list of environmental threats that your school community faces that might affect its members' health and well-being. After responding to this writing prompt, gather with colleagues, allow time for volunteers to share their emotional responses, and then discuss ways that you and your colleagues could participate in addressing local challenges with students.
Chapter One, “Lessons from a Coal Miner's Daughter,” mentions how Wendell Berry points to a lack of understanding about the difference between the long-term value of a well-maintained forest ecosystem and the short-term gain of coal mining. He says that our education system plays a role in the perpetuation of ecological destruction, because it is based on the faulty premise of an economy that externalizes health, environment, and other costs. What does it mean to externalize health and environmental costs?
Berry calls for a shift from the economy to the ecosphere as the basis of curriculum, teaching, and learning. What do you think about Berry's statements? What are some arguments for and against his position? (Suggestion: Ask half of your learning circle to argue in favor of his position and the other half to argue against it.) Brainstorm ways that the curriculum might change if your school decided to implement his ideas.
With your colleagues, read the sidebar “What's My Connection?” in Chapter Two. Then view the application, “What's Your Connection to Mountaintop Removal?” at www.ILoveMountains.org. Enter your ZIP code to discover how your community is connected to mountaintop mining. Look at the map that links your community to its source of electricity, and read through the details that follow.
Then, starting in small groups by grade level, generate a list of ways you might use the application with students. (It is most appropriate for students in fourth grade and above.) What do you think they will learn from the application? How do you think they will respond if they discover that some of their energy comes from coal obtained through mountaintop removal?
Obviously, not all students will respond in the same way. In what ways can you help them learn from their reactions to this discovery? How can you capitalize on the diversity of their responses to teach tolerance and appreciation of different viewpoints?
Try your lesson ideas with your students and report back to your colleagues about what you learned.
In the conclusion of Chapter One, “Lessons from a Coal Miner's Daughter,” Teri Blanton identifies five lessons she has learned in becoming effective as a leader:
Talk with your colleagues about ways that you have taught one or more of these lessons in your classroom.
Read Chapter Three, “The Heart of the Caribou.” The chapter describes how indigenous leader Sarah James speaks for her people, the caribou, and the Earth when she educates others about oil drilling and how it adversely affects their traditional way of life and their environment. List some ways her perspective compares and contrasts with some of the perspectives that are predominant in American society.
Given the environmental crises we face, do we need to shift our society's priorities? Or do you think we can continue to live as we do and simultaneously heal the Earth?
If your answer to the first question is “Yes, we need to shift our priorities,” create a list of the top five priorities that should guide our actions. If your answer is “Yes” to the second question, make a list of strategies that would allow us to continue to live as we do and, at the same time, work effectively to solve the major environmental issues of our times. Whether you answer “Yes” or “No” to these questions, explain your thinking. After recording your personal responses, discuss these questions and your answers with your colleagues.
It is difficult to find ways to engage students in real-world change. Featured in Chapter Four, the Rethinkers group is an excellent model of one way to do so through an after-school program. Brainstorm opportunities in your school community for involving students in taking direct action and influencing a local issue. For the first part of the conversation, suspend talking about the challenges that make this kind of learning activity difficult. After you have ten to fifteen ideas, identify those that have the most promise of success. This may vary by grade level. Now, choose someone to record the conversation and talk through the process and logistics of carrying out one or more of the ideas. (You may want to divide into smaller groups if there is interest in more than one possibility.) Finally, determine who is enthusiastic about pursuing this idea and establish a time to get together and move it forward.
Read the sidebar “Using Circles to Cultivate Deep Listening” in Chapter Nine, which describes the Rethinkers process for working together. Join with your colleagues and develop lesson ideas that use circles such as those described in the sidebar to increase student participation and the quality of thought in class discussions.
Identify colleagues in the group who are willing to try conducting a circle with their students. Set aside time at a future meeting to share their experiences.
Students portrayed in Chapter Four, “Beyond Whining,” are solutions-oriented and, with the help of adults, find ways to take action in their community. With your colleagues, discuss ways you have moved students from a focus on a problem to a focus on problem-solving. What can students do to help solve a problem? If you have student work that conveys their thinking, bring it to share with your colleagues.
On the first page of Chapter Five, “Water Wars and Peace,” Aaron Wolf talks about a “sudden jolt,” which he defines as a “transformative shift in the room when suddenly everybody sees, understands, or experiences things differently from the way they did before.”
With your colleagues, think back over your experiences as teachers and see if you can each identify one or more times when you experienced a sudden jolt with your students. Although every single student might have not made a transformative shift, try and recall times when a classroom reached a collective “aha!” moment. Share with your colleagues the conditions that led to those moments.
Read the Chapter Nine sidebar, “Transformation in the Classroom.” Talk as a group about Wolf's “Four Worlds” frame of teaching and learning.
How can you incorporate Wolf's ideas into your classrooms? For example, how might you alter the physical conditions of space and time to improve teaching and learning? What strategies would enhance the emotional atmosphere in your classrooms? Are you interested in introducing a spiritual component to the atmosphere in your classrooms? (By “spiritual” we do not mean religious, but rather an inclusion of nonmaterial qualities such as compassion, responsibility, forgiveness, and interconnectedness.)
As a group, check out Google Earth's virtual tour of oceans at http://earth.google.com/ocean/. Brainstorm ways you can use this website, or other maps and resources available from Google, to address one of the five practices of emotionally and socially engaged ecoliteracy: Understanding how nature sustains life.
Read Chapter Six, “From Restoration to Resilience.” This story describes the STRAW project (Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed). Habitat restoration projects such as this one require that students practice perseverance and the ability to live with delayed gratification. These are practices that integrate emotional, social, and ecological intelligence. These practices may be unfamiliar to many of today's students, who are accustomed to instant rewards even for minimal efforts. Identify techniques that you have used or are considering to teach students to persevere, work harder, and accept delayed gratification for greater long-term returns.
In Chapter Eight, “Forging the Food Justice Path,” Tony Smith recognizes the need to improve school food as an equity issue. Do you think all students at your school have access to the same quality of food while at school? What about when they are out of school?
To answer the second question, draw a map of the school community, noting where students and their families acquire food. Do they seem to have equitable access to healthy, fresh food? Is there an overabundance of fast food establishments or liquor stores? Are there “food deserts” in the area? Examine your maps together and list any insights you gain from this exercise.
Discuss with colleagues the hidden messages that school food might send to students:
Read the two Chapter Eight sidebars, “The Rise of School Food Reform” and “The Curriculum Connection.” Refer to the academic standards adopted by your district and identify where these topics are addressed in the curriculum. Then share with your colleagues creative ways to teach students about food and nutrition.
Food choices can be a sensitive subject in the classroom. Many children come from families where food is in limited supply, and their parents are under pressure to keep every family member's stomach full within a severely limited budget. Often, this means eating inexpensive and unhealthy fast foods, using food stamps, and making regular visits to a food bank or other hunger prevention program. In addition, an increasing number of students are obese and feel embarrassed when questioned about what they eat. There are also ethnic differences in family food preferences, and some kids are self-conscious that their family's food choices are different from typical American fare.
Discuss with your colleagues how you can involve students in learning about healthy food choices while still being sensitive to their cultural issues and other food-related issues.
Sample Agenda for a One-Hour Learning Circle
Sample Agenda for a Half-Day Professional Development
Notes
1 Andrew Revkin, “Google Earth Fills Its Watery Gaps,” New York Times, February 2, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/science/earth/03oceans.html?pagewanted=all.
2 David Biello, “Ocean Impact Map Reveals Human Reach Global,” Scientific American, February 15, 2008, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ocean-impact-map.
3 National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, “Data: Impacts,” http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/globalmarine/impacts.