360掳: Eco-Literacy
This Eco-Literacy 360掳 cluster considers our participation in the environment from the perspectives of economics, education, and various forms of literary and visual expression. Our goal is to develop a vocabulary for thinking, feeling and talking about the ways in which the places we live affect each of us, and how each of us affects the places we live.
This Eco-Literacy 360掳 cluster considers our participation in the environment from the perspectives of economics, education, and various forms of literary and visual expression. Our goal is to develop a vocabulary for thinking, feeling and talking about the ways in which the places we live affect each of us, and how each of us affects the places we live.
Being ecologically literate includes an appreciation of earth systems, and of human impact on the environment. Our focus here will be on how such knowledge interacts with our values -- such as our love of nature, our yearning for social justice, our need for personal fulfillment -- enabling us both to cope with and be agents for change.
This Eco-Literacy 360掳 cluster considers our participation in the environment from the perspectives of economics, education, and various forms of literary and visual expression. Our goal is to develop a vocabulary for thinking, feeling and talking about the ways in which the places we live affect each of us, and how each of us affects the places we live. (As Aldo Leopold said in 1948, we will 鈥渆xamine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient").
Through discipline-specific and cross-disciplinary activities, field trips, artistic expression, community outreach and collective reflection, the Eco-Literacy 360掳 seeks, in part, to address two long-standing, and related gaps: that between 鈥渧alues and action,鈥 and the disconnect C.P. Snow famously identified between the 鈥渢wo cultures鈥 of science and humanities. We hope to grapple with the false silo-ing promoted by disciplinary thinking, gain perspective on the resilience of complex ecological systems, investigate possibilities for sustainability and social justice.
We are particularly interested in how the resources of economics, education and creative expression, as well as the intersections among these disciplines, might help us understand and convey our understandings in insightful and inciting ways to others, to engage in what radical literacy activist Paulo Friere calls 鈥渞e-writing鈥 or transforming the world.
For further information, see the cluster website.
Courses
Economists treat nature as providing environmental services that contribute to the production of goods and services that address human needs and desires. Taught by David Ross, 鈥淲orking with Economic Data鈥 will focus on the measurement and valuation of those services as part of quantifying market outcomes. Within the discipline, environmental harm is seen as a failure of the market. We will consider how economists measure the magnitude of this deviation from the ideal, and assess efforts to ameliorate the failure.
Taught by Jody Cohen. Environmental education is too often split off not only from its felt source, but also from matters of social justice, thus reifying a divide between 鈥渉uman society and culture鈥 on the one hand and 鈥渘ature鈥 or 鈥渢he environment鈥 on the other. 鈥淓cologies of Minds and Communities鈥 weaves these strands together: In order to elicit and develop diverse students鈥 ecological literacy, we will attend to 鈥渢he distinctive features of students鈥 emotional and imaginative lives鈥 (Judson), as well as to their community and cultural lives, including the raced, gendered, and classed dimensions of students鈥 experiences, concerns, and desires.
To this shared project, the discipline of English literary studies, led by Anne Dalke, will contribute an awareness of the limits and possibilities of representation, asking what is foregrounded, and what omitted, in each verbal, visual, aural or tactile re-presentation of the world. Asking, too, what might be imagined that has not yet been experienced, 鈥淩e-creating Our World鈥 will invite students both to create their own multi-modal representations of the spaces they occupy, and to re-create, in some way, the space that is 老王论坛.