This unit is an interdisciplinary, art-infused balm to environmental science courses that may overwhelm with data, yet leave the student feeling powerless to affect change. Students may be more galvanized into action when asked to connect emotionally and spiritually with the philosophical repercussions of our consumerist society. By giving objects voices, personalities and roles, students will be awakened to a more mindful consciousness around how to use, care for and respect the products of our environment. At the beginning of the unit, students will compose a draft of an environmentalist philosophy or contract for how to use the environment. After going through a sequence of lessons that include a Fishbowl discussion, reflecting on sentimental artifacts, exploring cultural idioms, imagining a dystopian future world of scarcity, personifying objects as agents of social change, and examining historical pieces of environmentalist propaganda and manifestos, students will revisit their environmental philosophy with more nuance. Their takeaway object will be a sculpture or portrait made of their own trash to represent their new ethic.
Students will investigate environmental philosophy, applying skills in eco-critical thinking to assert their own perspective on the core question, “How do I aspire to use stuff?” This unit starts with a survey of historical and multicultural environmentalist ideologies, recognizing there is a spectrum of viewpoints and not one single dogma. This content is accessed through the object-analysis framework to ground potentially theoretically heavy conversations in tangible consequences. Showcasing the spectrum of political thought aligns with content also taught in Civics, but more importantly allows for the visibility of various beliefs that students may accept or reject. This unit has multicultural and global representation, ranging from Western to indigenous, capitalist to communist countries, religious to secular, industrial to nonindustrial, while also leaving room for students to research an area of interest to them. This not only allows for culturally relevant pedagogy, but also increases the transferability of this content into other social studies courses, such as Modern World History. The unit culminates in students collecting a week’s worth of trash (cleaned, excluding personal hygiene items) and using it to create a sculpture representing their own environmentalist philosophy, partnered with an explanatory paper on the symbolism of each choice to serve as a declaration of their views.
I initiated the Environmental Studies class in the district as a social science counterpart to students’ typical experiences with environmentalism from a scientific lens. I work as a social studies teacher at Engineering and Science University Magnet School, a STEM interdistrict 6-12 school that attracts a wide range of students with different abilities and needs, socioeconomic statuses and cultural backgrounds. Students, by and large, are interested in the STEM subjects, or else may be attending the school for its smaller size and magnet school feel. The Environmental Studies class is a semester elective course for mostly 11th and 12th graders. Most students are enrolled in the course to fulfill a graduation requirement, and few come into the course recognizing it as a humanities subject and credit. They read it as an environmental science course, and so it is my duty to explain how the focus is different. Instead of digging through the chemistry and biology of environmentalism, students home in on cultural, historic, economic and political barriers to meaningful progress on sustainability goals. I have found students well versed in STEM struggle to have fluidity in the political due to the siloing of our subjects. In a typical climate change unit, the science may be well understood, but students struggle to answer “What now?” beyond “Raise awareness.” This class is intended to answer the question, “How do we transform our scientific knowledge into civic action?” and to encourage students to consider the philosophical practice of environmentalism by examining themselves as a consumer of contextualized objects. (Lessons in this course may also, then, be broken apart to be used in other courses, such as Civics, Economics, AP Human Geography, Modern World History, or even English.) By considering objects through the lens of material cultural studies, objects cease to be stagnant products of commerce but living records of cultural values and political intent. This is perhaps the most essential understanding a student can have while sitting in a room surrounded by “stuff”: “stuff” doesn’t happen ‘just because’-- every little item is the product of an active choice. The more we can encourage our students to think critically about the choices of the past, the more we can ensure the choices of the future reflect the authentic values of the populace.
Some essential course questions of this curriculum unit include: To what extent is it the responsibility of the individual versus the “system’s” responsibility to make progress on climate change? What are the various roles an individual can take? What are the barriers to systemic change and how are they overcome?; To what extent has the human-environment relationship been mutually beneficial, and how can it be optimized?; How can sustainable solutions honor our need for convenience and cost-effectiveness to ensure long-term implementation?; How has the modern mindset contributed to unsustainable practices? What has to shift to ensure the longevity of our ecosystems?; How do the answers to sustainability issues become politicized? Is bipartisanship possible? Currently, the environmental studies class I teach has an economic-history lens, and this unit intends to increase its interdisciplinary nature with more references to skills and content related to environmental philosophy through psychology, literature, and art.
