LP+Curriculum+Review+3

Wangari Maathai Taking Root Curriculum http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/takingroot/classroom.html

PBS – Independent Lens, Taking Root, Classroom
 * What organization developed the curriculum module you are evaluating?**

PBS Independent Lens seeks to provide quality individuals with weekly independent documentary films from the best documentary filmmakers in the world.
 * What is the mission of the organization?**

The Community Classroom of PBS’s Independent Lens combines lesson plans with the documentaries in order to “build cultural understanding and media literacy, spark discussion and foster global citizenship through the power of public media.” http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/classroom/
 * What is the educational mission and philosophy of the organization?**

This curriculum aims to showcase how environmental issues are linked to other social issues and how individuals organize and mobilize to address social and environmental injustice. The first half of the lesson seeks to depict how a history of colonization in Kenya, along with succeeding governmental institutions, contributed to the challenges of deforestation, and how these challenges disproportionately affected certain citizens. The second half seeks to showcase how the emergence of the Green Belt Movement derived from both social and environmental concerns and instill in students a sense of appropriate strategies for facilitating collective action.
 * What does the curriculum module aim to teach? In other words: what are the learning outcomes supposed to be?**

I was particularly impressed with the learning models set forth by this curriculum and believe that they could be employed in younger classrooms to facilitate an understanding of scale and multi-faceted causation. In particular, the “tree of interconnectedness” model gets students to think about effects from a variety of angles, but also connects these with the problems and the problem’s causes. That being said, I believe that this curriculum was modest in the explicitly stated learning objectives. The curriculum certainly does a good job of showcasing how social, political, and economic issues play into both the causes and effects of environmental issues, and it also touched upon strategies that grassroots social movement organizations use to mobilize for change. Furthermore, this curriculum helps students outline the cultural specificity of certain mobilizing strategies, by having them compare the emergence and tactics of the Green Belt Movement with a grassroots movement in a developed nation. This has the potential for helping students underline how they can become local changemakers, and the strategies that they would need to employ in order to do so.
 * Do you think the curriculum is appropriately designed to produce the intended learning outcomes?**

However, in addition, this curriculum also teaches complex causation and how complex causation can render complex effects.

This curriculum addresses several of the literacies that the EcoEd Research Group advocates, including: This curriculum could address – //understanding of different scientific disciplines and medical specializations, aware that they rely on diverse methods, produce many types of knowledge, and are ever evolving.// In the film, Wangari Maathai discusses how the initial doubters of the viability of her endeavor claimed that trees could only be planted by those with the scientific background to do so. She fought this conception by encouraging women of all backgrounds to plant trees and to train each other on best practices. There is thus an opportunity to approach citizen science with this curriculum, critiquing the epistemic authority of science.
 * Does this curriculum teach the kind of literacies the EcoEd Research Group advocates?**
 * //People understanding the history of disaster and decision-making failures, the vulnerability of some populations and regions, and varied approaches to risk management, reduction and communication.//
 * //People understanding potential for change, and of alternative ways of doing things and organizing society (though familiarity with historical and cross-cultural examples, for instance)//
 * //People having capacity to conceptualize complex causation, without being paralyzed//
 * //People having capacity to use empirical understanding of complex causation to identify specific points of intervention//
 * //Understanding the challenges and value of deliberation and cooperative action//
 * What could be layered into this curriculum so that it addresses more of the learning outcomes that the EcoEd Group advocates?**
 * What could be layered into this curriculum so that it addresses more of the learning outcomes that the EcoEd Group advocates?**