Conclusion
He asked, ‘What limit can be put to this power?’
He wrote, ‘We behold the face of nature, bright with gladness…’
He concluded, ‘There is grandeur in this view of life.’
…Everyone read On the Origin of Species in 1860 and everyone argued about it, but nobody read it more carefully than Alma Whittaker.58
During the process of writing this unit I read The Signature of All Things, a fiction by the American writer Elizabeth Gilbert which spans two generations of a family from the expedition to Tahiti by the father with on the second Cook Expedition to Tahiti and leading to the life story of his daughter a botanist named Alma Whitaker who is fascinated by mosses. Students have the opportunity to engage with enlightenment ideals and to think for themselves thoughts which many before them have and perhaps to find new appreciations of the world that have not been recorded before. In the story the protagonist comes to a theory of evolution before the publication by Darwin and is affirmed by the recognition that someone else in the world reached similar conclusions about how organisms and their environments are interconnected. The purpose of the commonplace book is to create space for students to test their ideas in a place where they can build knowledge using analytical thought and artmaking and writing with consideration of composition.
Mosses like mushrooms are seemingly innocuous organisms that usually do not get our notice. By bringing science and art together in this unit students will have a novel way to gain mastery over new artistic processes and develop metaphors for resilience and adaptation to deal with stressors they encounter naturally in their development at the 8th grade level. Students will experience mosses first hand and like real Enlightenment thinkers generate artistic and written responses in commonplace books. Climate change has become the most pressing concern facing humans today.59 Mosses like mushrooms have the potential to reduce erosion, increase the viability of soil and help prevent flooding because of their amazing capacity for absorption.60 By the completion of this unit students will have the skills to observe, ask questions and create theories and artwork about their changing world which they like mosses have a major impact in a sustainable world.61
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