Objective: Students will choose one object essential to everyday modern life and pretend that the materials to make it are scarce via a skit.
Teaching Plan:
Do Now: What are your fears about how the world would look if we do not address environmental concerns? Why do you think this? What are some defining features of this future?
The teacher then asks students to define scarcity and to think up examples of scarce items and not scarce items. Follow-up questions are:
- What happens when you run out of something? Has this ever happened to you before (consider pandemic)?
- What happens when there is a shortage?
- What happens when you can’t access an item you want or need?
- What helps humans adapt to these situations? What does not help humans adapt?
- Are the substitutes always better, the same, or worse than the original?
- What makes for an acceptable substitute?
Share with students the concept of smekalka from Soviet culture, where due to shortages in the planned economy, citizens created inventive and unorthodox solutions to material needs. It then embodied an ethos of resilience that Soviet citizens faced during communist rule (for more information: Smekalka, the perpetual solution to any problem -https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/smekalka-the-perpetual-solution-to-any-problem). This could also be an opportunity to discuss various economic systems and their strengths and weaknesses, leaving room to deliberate the question: “How do we get the stuff we need and want? How should we get the stuff we need and want?”
Students are then instructed to create a 4-5 minute (or more, depending on class size) skit depicting a world without an everyday essential modern item. One person in the skit must act and voice the character of the object. In a short writeup, students must explain the following:
- Why they chose what they chose
- Who the characters are and what their backstory is
- What the conflict in the skit is and why that is the case
- How the characters adapt
- Whether the resolution is positive or negative
Exit Ticket: How did your thinking change about the object you chose?
