D & C Blocks Environmental and Social Sciences - Today we will spend the entire morning in 115 with Young and Benton. Since all January is Inquiry time, I guess we're at the "where do we go from here?" spot in the class. Let's start with these two videos:
Any idea how these two videos are connected? They both kind of address the concept of a liminal space. The liminal space is the threshold--the moment of becoming, the moment of intersection, the moment of occupying two spaces at the same time. From A Space to Inspire
The liminal space can be seen as a transformative space. It occurs when things such as our thoughts, knowledge or ideas are in some way challenged, when our understanding of something is unsettled rendering it fluid. That space of in-between is a state of liminality, a transition in the learning process, the crossing of a threshold. From here we begin to reconfigure our prior understandings, perspectives and conceptual schema.We let go of the conceptual stance we had.What Is A Liminal Space?
Why Feeling Uncomfortable Is The Key To Success
The Educational Power of Discomfort
Time to get a bit nerdy here. Megan Boler is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto) and wrote a book titled Feeling Power Emotions and Education.In the book, Boler introduces a "pedagogy of discomfort" where she indicates that living with ambiguity is discomforting, however it is necessary for people to become aware how they see the world and also to change it...In essence, attending to our feelings of discomfort is a key component of the struggle for social change.(196). This is an example of a liminal space.
In this class Benton and I have asked you to “bear witness” to ambiguities, contradictions, and internal struggles associated with environmental injustices, and have asked you to articulate the causes of and possible alternatives for them. We have tried to break you from a binary mindset of us vs them (environmental vs economic, Indigenous vs Western, holistic vs linear, circular vs pyramidal, slow vs fast, right vs wrong, good vs bad, etc...) so that you can move away from the self imposed isolation of sticking your head in the sand (the passive numbness of survival) and move toward true empathy and action.
So this morning we'll have a open space discussion and graffiti wall on "What do we do to heal our relationship with nature (empathy and action)?" We cannot predict the future with any certainty, it is ambiguous but we do know that a binary (either/or) answer will not work. We look forward to our morning with you.
B Block Human Geography - Today, we'll continue to look at the Key Issue "Where Is Agriculture Distributed"? this time focusing on developed countries. In developed countries "agribusiness" include mixed crop and livestock; dairying; grain; ranching; Mediterranean; and commercial gardening. Agribusiness is a broad area that includes food production and services related to agribusiness like food processing, packaging, storing, distributing, and retailing. Canada is the 5th largest agricultural exporter in the world, and the agriculture and agri-food industry employs 2.3 million Canadians (that's 1 in 8 jobs)
We only have two questions to add to yesterday's work:
- Why do some regions specialize in “milk products” like cheese and butter rather than fluid milk? Identify some of these important regions.
- What country is the world’s largest producer of dairy products?
A Block Physical Geography - Today we'll continue our map/poster on severe weather for elementary school students or our weather report for a newscast project in the library. Check the blog for sites to help. If you are doing the forecast option, Mr. Ingram is in room 003 and that is where the green screen is. You should have your script and props ready before you go and seeing as though there is no more class time, realistically today is the best day for your video recording.
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