Class 12
/ IDS 3920 / Spring 2004
Ecological Literacy
II: Problems and Promise for Sustainability
In short, planning
in higher education seldom reflects the central fact of our existence
– that aware of it or not, we are part of an ecological community
and that community is coming undone in no small measure because of
the choices and actions of highly educated people. . . .
Future generations,
the presumed beneficiaries of our strategic planning, will care
not a lick for how we stacked up against the conventional indicators
of institutional success. They will measure us, rather, by
our foresight and for what we were willing to risk on their behalf.
David
Orr
Speech at Florida Gulf Coast
University
March 6, 1998
Reading
Please read in David Orr’s Ecological
Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World,
Chapter VI, pp. 97-108, Chapter IX, pp.133-140 and Chapter X, pp.
141-148.
Pre-writing
The last essay is due in Class Thirteen.
Environmental Education
Short Paper Five is a four to
five page typed, double-spaced essay on environmental education. Your
paper shall be evaluated according to the criteria presented by the
assessment rubric and by your section instructor. You should
address the following concerns:
1) David Orr, in his essay “Ecological
Literacy”, claims “. . . all education is environmental education.
By what is included or excluded, emphasized or ignored, students learn
that they are a part of or apart from the natural world. Through
all education we inculcate the ideas of careful stewardship or carelessness.”
(p. 90)
Since everyone experiences an environmental
education, what indicators or characteristics would you suggest differentiate
an educative from a mis-educative environmental education. In
other words what, in your opinion, characterizes effective environmental
education? (two pages)
2) In the essay, “The Liberal Arts,
the Campus and the Biosphere . . .” David Orr writes “A genuinely
liberal education will produce whole persons with intellectual breadth,
able to think at right angles to their major field; practical persons
able to act competently; and persons of deep commitment, willing to
roll up their sleeves and join the struggle to build a humane and
sustainable world. They will not be merely well-read.
Rather, they will be ecologically literate citizens able to distinguish
health from its opposite and to live accordingly. Above all,
they will make themselves relevant to the crisis of our age, which
in its various manifestations is about the care, nurturing, and enhancement
of life. And life is the only defensible foundation for a liberal
education.” (p. 108)
What sort of environmental education
or education for sustainability do you think is appropriate in general
in higher education? (one or two pages)
3) Thinking of Florida Gulf Coast University,
your own College, and your particular course of study and major, what
suggestions would you make in order to meet the learning outcome of
ecological literacy? (one to two pages)
