Nestled away, in the back corner of G.P. Vanier, you'll find room 115 (we used to be 611). Lurking in the shadows of this room is Mr. Young...waiting to pounce on unsuspecting students and natter on about volcanoes, hail, psychopathy, criminal law defenses, cultural diffusion, media theories, crime, and urban models of city development. He loves his job in 115 and can't wait to work with you this year.
9:15 - 11:50 D Block Social and Environmental Sciences
12:30 - 3:05 A Block Criminology
D Block Social and Environmental Sciences - Remember, please enter the school in the back by room 115 and hand sanitize either at the back doors or when you come into the room. Today, after attendance and check in you'll head with Benton to his room. With Benton, you will start our environmental journey with a look at freshwater. At a biologically microscopic, atomic and sub-atomic level water is extremely complex and without it Life would not exist. Water is essential to all animal and plant life on Earth. Plants, for example, use water in photosynthesis to make their food. Roughly 60% of the adult human body is water and it performs many functions, including:
Dissolving vital nutrients in the bloodstream and delivering them to cells.
Regulating our body temperature.
Dissolving waste substances and carrying them out of the body in urine, feces and sweat.
Protecting tissues, joints and the spinal cord.
Ecological connections to water will be observed while mapping the riparian features of Towhee Creek (tomorrow through Friday). Many beings depend on freshwater and understanding the whole can help guide us to make better decisions for the future. Today you'll start with a water analysis.
After Benton, you will come back to 115 with Young. In class we'll begin our look at Environmental Worldviews which are connected to Environmental Value Systems (that we'll look at later). People disagree on how serious different environmental problems are and what we should do about them. These conflicts arise mostly out of differing environmental worldviews—how people think the world works and what they believe their role in the world should be. Part of an environmental worldview is determined by a person’s environmental ethics—what one believes about what is right and what is wrong in our behavior toward the environment (also called an Environmental Value System).
Some environmental worldviews are human centered (anthropocentric), focusing primarily on the needs and wants of people; others are life- or earth centered (biocentric), focusing on individual species, the entire biosphere, or some level in between.
So you'll get a handout to begin working through...
Consider these three words: Environment, Natural and Nature. Think about what they mean to you and quickly write down your answers and after a bit, share what you wrote with two classmates. What did you write that is similar / different? Can you think of other phrases or words that describe our relationship with the Earth? What do your phrases or words say about how you feel about or view nature and the environment? Then I'll ask you
How am I connected to the earth and other living things?
Where do the things I consume come from and where do they go after I use them?
What is my environmental responsibility as a human being?
We'll see what a worldview is, how it is informed and how it shapes our actions.
A Block Criminology - Today I would like you back in your pod/groupings where I'll give you a handout to help you with crime theories and I'd like your group to see where your crime theory categorized clusters (similar categories) fit in terms of Choice, Trait, Social Structure, Social Learning, and Conflict theories. The goal of criminological theory is to help one gain an understating of crime and
criminal justice. Many disciplines factor into criminological theories, such as psychology, sociology,
biology, political science, and criminal justice. Theories cover the making and the breaking of the law, criminal and deviant behavior, as well as patterns of criminal activity. Individual theories may be either macro or micro. Theories can be used to guide policy making, and can be evaluated on a number of criteria including: clarity, scope, parsimony (concise), testability, practical usefulness, and empirical validity. Many theories have common traits, but differences among them still exist. Understanding these differences is key to understanding the often contradictory views of crime and deviance they try to explain.
After this, we'll begin our look at the nature vs. nurture debate by focusing on the history of psychological and sociological criminology and our brief history of criminology (from B.C.E up to and including the current theories, which will help you with your first activity in the course).
For Monday, you need to create your own theory of why crime happens. You can use the handouts I've given you and the following sites for help:
Tomorrow we'll start with a NOVA documentary Mind of a Rampage Killer and then we'll begin a look at the difference between criminal and deviant behaviour.
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