flaw, or hamartia, we are not living sustainably on our planet. Not by a long shot. More and more, I realized, our media is trans-


mitting a culture that seems destined to end up like an Aristotelian tragedy Augusto Boal warned us about in his book Theatre of the Oppressed. “[Aristotle’s] system appears in disguised form on television, in the movies, in the circus, in the theatres. It appears in many and varied shapes and media. But its essence does not change: it is designed to bridle the individual, to adjust him to what pre-exists. If this is what we want, the Aris- totelian system serves the purpose better than any other….” (p. 47). Realizing this, I decided it was time to transform my students from passive spec- tators in this unfolding apocalyptic narrative into bold “spec-actors” ready to rewrite the script. In short, we needed a whole new story.


The Rewrite With the Judeo-Christian principles and resulting narra-


tive clearly identified, our next task was to search our dis- course for evidence of the ideals of the Enlightenment. “But what exactly is the Enlightenment?” I asked. None of them knew, of course, so I first defined the term. “Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential thinkers of the time, described it as, ‘The freedom to use one’s own intelligence.’ So… instead of looking to the crown or the church for answers….” “People started reading and thinking for themselves,”


interrupted a student. “Exactly,” I said. “And one of those people was Sir Isaac


Newton, whose voice, more than any other, found a place of prominence in our story.” Thus began another gallery walk. I posted quotes from Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, but we focused mostly on Newton’s Optics and Descartes’ Meditations, because each quote from these works illustrated just how much these men were influenced by the Judeo- Christian principle of a transcendent, patriarchal Creator and His creation. In this world, dead matter, particles, and solids––without


purpose and devoid of spirit––were set in motion according to certain mechanical laws “the end for which…” Newton said, “God himself made one in the first creation.” And, according to Descartes, we represent nothing more than the mere “machine of the human body as having been formed by God for the sake of the motions which it usually manifests.” Now, the story was complete. I felt confident that we had


located the origin of our generative theme. For me, it was clear: Our Judeo-Christian principles provided us with a clear apocalyptic vision, and the ideals of the Enlightenment paved the path to help get us there. As characters in the story, we believe that with the proper use of the scientific method we have the means to manipulate the material world for almost anything we want. And because we’ve been made in God’s image, and are therefore superior to all other species in the Animal Kingdom, we have the complete arrogance to think that we have the right, even the responsibility, to do so. But from the looks of things, we seem to be failing in our efforts. The principles and ideals that had once propelled us to greatness are not working anymore. Because of our fatal


“So what are we going to do?” I asked, once our critical review of our dominant narrative was complete. “Can we change things? Should our story be rewritten?” “Yeah,” my students said. “We’ve got to try.” First, we decided to make some personal changes by


completing a carbon footprint survey. Right away students discovered that all of our footprints were way above our earth’s share! And because now everything seemed so incredibly urgent, at home students were immediately com- pelled to start making changes. Kids told their parents to take shorter showers, not to serve any more beef, to change their light bulbs, or to pedal to the store. In spite of all our personal efforts, the question always


loomed: “Will our small changes be enough to save the world?”. “Personally,” I said, “I think we need to change everything.” We needed big changes. And to do that we still needed to transform our thinking about the world, our gen- erative theme. “That means we’ll have to start over again. All over. Right from the beginning. Well, maybe not the beginning, but rather, sometime back in our country’s his- tory.” My young fifth-graders were really great at suspend- ing disbelief, so I next asked, “What do you say we travel back in time and go see the people we learn about in U.S. History to persuade them to change things? If you could, would you do that? Would you go back in time to make a few changes and then return to the present with the hope of finding a whole new world waiting for you? All because of you and your efforts?” “Yeah!” they all shouted. “Really?” I asked. They all nodded. Some shouted “Yeah!” again. “Okay,” I said. “Then let’s figure out a way to make a


time machine, and go!” Off we went, rewriting our world, each of us creating our


own alternative history. We were going to change the world through our stories, one narrative at a time. In order to write our stories, we first had to look for places to break into our culture’s storyline. We had to determine where and when we would go, and who we would talk to when we arrived. First, we wrote research reports on various historical figures—


GREEN TEACHER 93 Page 23


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52