for how life in the various regions would be affected. Specifically, the students were asked to contemplate what life might be like in the region in 100 years, and what people should do to attempt to slow down climate change. The students were intrigued and a little suspicious of the letter’s validity, but that became a humorous aspect of the unit, provid- ing an inside joke as well as motivation to work towards a meaningful outcome.
Format of the unit
A complete regional geography/climate-change study such as this requires three or four weeks of a social studies block. In our class, every student was assigned to a group repre- senting a particular region of the United States. We defined regions as they were defined in our textbook (Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Rocky Mountain, Southwest and Pacific regions); but depend- ing on your goals and resources, you may wish to look at natural bioregional divisions. If you have a large class, you can have more than one group studying a particular region so that no group is too large. In addition to the group region study, an important
component of the unit was an individual poster project that assigned a state to each student. In their poster displays, they were required to include maps and information on industry, tourism, state symbols, history, and physical or natural features of their state. This allowed each student to become an expert in a smaller area of study. The poster project was mainly completed as homework, but the exper- tise that students gained from it was shared with the class in the regions study. While the teachers formed the regional groups by considering group dynamics (rather than regional preferences), the students had some say in choosing which state they would study for the poster project.
Resources
You may wish to do some background research of your own, but don’t worry if the perfect resource to link geography and climate change is elusive. Our classroom had a motley collection of painfully outdated and dog-eared textbooks on regional geography that served as our main resource for in-class readings. These were not the ideal resources from which to base our study, but they provided a basic back- ground on the topics that students needed to understand. Using a traditional textbook for a geography study centered on climate change required only some adjustments to the
discussion questions and some new activities designed specifically for the unit.
Background and Region group interviewing a state expert.
prior knowledge Our students realized that the regions defined by our textbook were general- izations, and so early in the unit we brainstormed ideas to try to determine what really makes some- thing a region. The students wrestled with such questions as: Does a
region form a people, or do people form a region? Is a region culturally defined, or is it created by physical features? During these discussions, students arrived at questions of climate, which we decided is one of the major defining features of a region. As climate was a central theme of our region study,
Imagine being told that you are to become an active player in climate change issues, when normally you don’t even have a say about your bedtime!
it was essential that students have some background on climate change to help them understand the significance and relevance of the issue. The sixth grad- ers I worked with had watched Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth several months before the unit, and this served as a good
foundation for our work. Another way to provide that back- ground would be to ask students to bring in newspaper clip- pings or reports of television stories about climate change in the weeks before the unit. Any readings, films or presenta- tions that enable the class to tune in to the significance and relevance of climate change will prepare them for the ideas in the unit.
Unit outline
Our unit covered all of the basic topics in a traditional regions study, but with added emphasis on those related to climate change. Many of the topics came straight from our textbooks; it was the angle from which we approached them that shed light on questions of climate change. The topics included:
• the difference between weather and climate
• the physical geography, climate and natural disasters of the region
• the Native Americans of the region, with a focus on how they adapted to the unique characteristics of the region
• the natural resources and industry • tourism and major cities • water issues • specific climate change information
GREEN TEACHER 83 Page 25
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 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
