How+Have+Human+Impacts+Changed+Over+Time

**What organization developed the curriculum module you are evaluating?** The Green Education Foundation (GEF)
 * Link to curriculum:** __http://www.greeneducationfoundation.org/institute/lesson-clearinghouse/42-How-Have-Human-Impacts-Changed-Over-Time.html__

**What is the overall mission of the organization?** The organization aims to make "real-world applied learning models that connect science, technology, and math education with the broader human concerns of environmental, economic, and social systems” available for sustainability educators. They also offer online sustainability courses for the professional development of educators, and for credit, through the GEF Institute.

**What is the educational mission and philosophy of the organization?** It does not look like they articulate an educational mission or philosophy, but they do tend to approach sustainability primarily through the mode of changing individual and household habits. There seems to be very little discussion of disparate effects, environmental justice, etc., although there is one interesting “mock trial” where students representing Bangladesh sue the “ Nations of the Industrialized World” over damages due to global warming. They do take money from corporate sponsors, including Walmart and Miracle Grow, and utilities, like National Grid. While there do not seem to be any lessons with an outrageous corporate bias (at least not after a cursory look through other lessons GEF offers), these lessons also don’t seem to include much if anything on corporate responsibility for environmental problems, nor lessons that would be particularly useful for building “greenwashing” literacy, for lack of a better term.

**What does the curriculum module aim to teach? In other words: what are the learning outcomes supposed to be?** This lesson aims to teach how human habitation patterns have changed over time, and what some of the positive and negative consequences of such could be. It emphasizes the ways that basic needs have stayed the same while patterns of habitation have changed, becoming far more resource intensive, but also convenient and reliable. As such, it also aims to teach students about unintended consequences, particularly of technological progress. In terms of social science requirements (NCSS), it aims to help students understand “time, continuity, and change,” as well as “science, technology, and society.”

**Do you think the curriculum is appropriately designed to produce the intended learning outcomes?** The lesson, if not part of a broader class or section about changes in habitation, relies heavily on student assumptions about previous patterns of habitation (it asks for imagining the living situation 15,000 years ago), and seems to universalize these patterns. As such, it misses an important opportunity to teach students about technological diversity and (non-great men/big war) history. It also reenacts a distinction between the domestic and public that may actually serve to limit the historical imagination of students, rather than expand it. For example, the lesson asks students to break into groups and become “experts” in a particular “area” of habitation (kitchen, bedroom, building material). Yet, this essentially encourages students to imagine their own home stripped of particular technologies, rather than discussing how some of these areas (in terms of “rooms”) were in many cases not separate, and in other cases not typical for individual households (communal food preparation, “bathroom” facilities, etc.). One might say that this is one of the bad mental habits that history, anthropology, and STS, particularly, should aim to help students unlearn (Adam Smith, for example, could have used a similar lesson, as could every economist that has based their theories on the __barter myth__ ). It also seems to focus on the home but not where homes fit within a broader geography or patterns of development.

While the lesson does seem effective in allowing student to identify some of the unintended ecological and perhaps social consequences of some domestic/housing technologies, then, it needs to, at the very least, provide more scaffolding for students to be able to expand their historical, anthropological, and ecological imagination and understanding of difference.

**Does this curriculum teach the kind of literacies advocated by EcoEd?**

It does respond to:
 * Understanding of how their own actions have an array of proximate and far off effects.
 * Understanding of potential for change, and of alternative ways of doing things and organizing society

**What could be layered into this curriculum so that it addresses more of the learning outcomes advocated by EcoEd?** One idea, which incorporates concerns expressed above, would be include some kind of research component on actual differences in habitation in different times and places. This would address "Having creative info-seeking practices."