Introduction
In my high school English language development class, my students have an acute sense of the environmental issues and hazards that threaten human populations; this sense has been sharpened by their exposure to popular culture conversations about the environment via social media. If prompted to identify the most prominent environmental issues that affect people, I would expect them to describe air pollution and water contamination from industrial factories and activities, as well as the ubiquity of ocean plastic pollution that has resulted from the global dependence on the cheap and easily-produced material. Additionally, I expect that my students could easily compose a list of the effects of climate change, some of which we are currently experiencing in the state of Delaware. However, I anticipate that my students would have more difficulty in identifying the root causes of these environmental problems, and even greater difficulty in describing the events of the industrial revolutions of developed nations to which most ecologists attribute the initial rise of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere that set climate change into motion.1
In this 6-week supplemental curriculum unit, I will capitalize on my students’ background knowledge of current environmental issues to teach them the language and content to confidently make an evidence and research-based claim about an artists’ theme through the lens of ecocritical art analysis.
Comments: