Curriculum Syllabus | Assignments and Activities | Year Long Plan | Tools and Resources
The curriculum focuses on environmental issues through the reading of ecocritical texts. There is no intended schedule for when classes should be held outside, but educators looking for advice should click on the tools and resources. Included in this curriculum are: 5 major assignments, 1 detailed assignment for the creation and continual use of daily blogs, 1 class development project, and 1 planned field trip. The goal of this curriculum is to facilitate student learning by engaging them with texts that focus on environmental concerns and allowing them to inhabit natural settings. By facilitating a class in an outdoor setting students will be invited to observe a natural space while they learn. This curriculum follows experiential education philosopher John Dewey’s philosophy by intending for students to engage in the learning process through continual educative experiences. As students progress through the year they should be taking and applying skills and understandings that have been learned and applying this knowledge to future assignments. Dewey argues that “every experience lives on in further experiences… education based on experience is to select the kind of present experiences that live on fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences” (1938, 27-28). With this understanding my curriculum has projects and assignments that build one another to create an educative experience. Using outdoor education pedagogy through the use of learnscapes, or safe and accessible places which may be natural or built inside or outside which are located in, near or beyond school grounds. Learning programs can be designated to permit students to interact with their environment (Skamp 2009). By connecting the space in which students learn and the the curriculum, I intend to create educative experience for students as the things that they are learning will be reflected in the environment that they inhabit. This follows the theory of biophilia by connecting learning to space and global concerns. Utilizing learnscapes, and the philosophy of experience, my curriculum intends to offer students learning connected to the environment. |