Landscape, Art, and Ecology

TEACHING STRATEGIES

The following are teaching strategies to support the goal of establishing an understanding of the sheer length of history that precedes as, the goal of establishing an awareness of waste including plastic waste in our daily lives, and teaching students how to communicate concepts to an unfamiliar audience in a clear way.

WINDOWS TO THE PAST

The following strategy is adapted for the art room from exercises from the book Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now. In this strategy, students can visualize what their surroundings would have looked like at different points in time by researching how the people, animals, plants, and landscape would have appeared at their chosen date. Students can illustrate and display their research around the school to function as a ‘window to the past’.  This activity can, if desired, extend the understanding of time into the millions of years rather than the millennia dealt with in this curriculum's case studies and can also help dispel any common misconceptions or generalizations students may hold about history. Students would need to look up, for example, dinosaurs native to only their area at that time, rather than defaulting to a general representation. For example, in conducting this activity in my Richmond, Virginia classroom, students who were assigned to represent 340 million years ago the shores would have teemed with amphibians, insects, and sharks, but no mammals. 40 million years later, as Virginia and Africa met as part of Pangea, the Appalachian Mountains were formed. 35 million years ago a bolide - an extremely bright meteor - collided, forming the base of what would later be the Chesapeake Bay. The modern shape of the Bay was formed as a result of melting ice at the end of the Ice Age 3,000 years ago. ⁷⁷ Students will find that human history will occupy a very small portion of these ‘windows to the past’. A helpful activity may be to guide your students physically through the analogy made by Brooke Borel, where she states

If the timeline of Earth were mapped onto the human arm, it would begin around the shoulder where the earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago. Animals originated within the palm, but the myriad forms alive today exploded onto the scene around the first knuckle, in the Cambrian period. Blocks along the fingers represent the periods that followed, such as the Jurassic (dinosaurs!) and the Cenozoic (in which humans evolved, a microscopic sliver at the tip of a fingernail) ⁷⁸

PROXIMITY MAPPING

Another goal for this unit is for students to develop an awareness of the amount of waste generated in our modern lives, and the consequences it will hold for future generations. Part of this awareness can be generated by the strategy of mapping with students where your local landfills, nuclear power plants, and other similar local sites are. Maps can be found from local or federal government energy or sanitation departments. It can also lead to fruitful questioning with your students about why these sites were placed there. A map of landfills and associated energy products near me provided by the EPA shows five within a twenty-minute drive. ⁷⁹ A map of nuclear reactors provided by the US Energy Information Administration shows two operating nuclear power plants in my state. ⁸⁰ The awareness of this proximity provides immediate local consequences when talking about these subjects with my students: the question of where plastic waste goes when it is thrown away, and the issue of nuclear waste are not theoretical, they are in our backyard.

OUTSIDE AUDIENCE CRITIQUE

This strategy supports student understanding of an issue central to the design process for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and in the art room: how do you communicate themes to an unfamiliar audience? The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant must communicate danger to an unknown future without language. Students should understand how their artworks communicate themes to the audience, and not always the themes they intend. Oftentimes students in an art class have been so trained in how to look at art and are so familiar with the artist and the assignment, this makes certain themes seem much more obvious and clearer to them due to prior knowledge. To show how others may interpret their work, you can bring in an element of outsider critique.

For example, when students make art throughout the following lessons, display these artworks around the school along with an area for passersby to write their interpretations. You can then read the comments to students and have them reflect on how the comments of others were in line with their intentions and expectations, or not.

Assign students to share images of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant designs with friends and family members with no background knowledge, and report back on what their initial reactions and interpretations are. Have students reflect on if there were consistent reactions (Fear? Disgust? Interest?) and how they varied from student interpretation at the beginning of the unit before they had background knowledge. Incorporating the interpretations of those from outside the art space will show students how certain things are less obvious than they believe and will show them how to make choices that influence perception.