Decomposition
Last year I taught the visual arts unit the Art of The Mushroom, which highlighted mushrooms as another potent bioindicator of environmental pollution that may have been overlooked because of the ephemerality and seeming insignificance of mushrooms around us. This unit will encourage students to appreciate the value of nature around them and ask questions about the world in their classroom that they will steward and investigate through artmaking. Both mushrooms and moss which seem to mysteriously emerge from damp and dark places exist as very diverse organisms that provides innumerable opportunities for artistic and scientific enquiry by students.49 Using these two units together student may be interested in explore other patterns in nature in biology and chemistry in the future enhanced by their articulation of ideas in art and writing from this process of enquiry.50
I found a personal connection mushrooms that have special significance in Baganda culture which is my heritage through my father, Jamson Sulemani Lwebuga-Mukasa, MD, PhD who a doctor, microbiologist, professor, researcher and environmentalist who studied the impact of asthma rates in Buffalo, New York. In the language of Luganda the words for moss and the words for mushrooms in Luganda belong to two different classes of nouns. The word for moss in Luganda is enkonge. In comparison there are many more words for mushrooms in the Luganda dictionary that describe where they can be found, their associations with clans, characteristics such as color and rules about who can eat them. In the book The Customs of the Baganda by the Kattikiro (Prime Minister) of Buganda Sir Apollo Kaggwa the practice of burial is described as ending, and installation of an heir beginning, with the following song sung first by men and then women at a feast:
A little mushroom
I have fallen and remained there
As a mushroom51
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