Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Connecting Levels of Awareness

Reading about the work that is being done at the Batey was fascinating and inspiring in the ways that they took an interest of the youth to give them a voice, instruction and help their sense of awareness among themselves and society. I really liked their levels of awareness that they wanted to develop in youth. From self, social and global awareness, the program moves to invite youth to build a self-identity, recognize social issues and global issues. These levels of awareness seem to hit at similar ways I would like to build awareness in my own ecocriticism curriculum. In looking at the three levels of awareness that are used in the Batey project, the projects that I want to develop look to focus on the same levels of awareness.

            Looking at self-awareness “a critical understanding of who they are” I will not be looking directly at the same issues but rather developing an understanding of self-awareness and connection to nature. I plan on building the first project to have students understand the ways in which nature and the environment is related to everything. Through inquiry of personal interests I plan to have students investigate the ways in which their interests relate to the natural world. Similarly I want to have students build their awareness on a societal level. “Critical[ly] understanding of how social forces shape inequality and how this affects their communities” I want to build an ecocritical view on the world. By having students read a collection of books addressing different ways in which individuals interact and understand the environment, students should become more aware of the their natural surroundings. This project will look at the different ways in which students can look at the environment and interact with it. Finally “global awareness” will look at the ways in which people are becoming activists in their own right even if they are not personally an active member of the science community or part of an environmental activist community. This will look into the ways in which students themselves can become part of the global community to make a change and give a voice to the environment. 

1 comment:

  1. Ian,

    I really enjoyed the ways you connected your own project with the use of Batey Urbano for Latino youth culture. It is clear that you draw a lot of similarities between this chapter discusses the process of rehumanizing Latino youth experiences and your own work on developing an ecocritical view of the world. I think your focus on self-awareness is vital towards understanding how students interact with and feel about their own natural environments. It would be interesting to see how youth who may not have experiences with the natural world still become activists for and within their own environments (even if their environments might be full of concrete).

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