Ryan+Tozier+Greenwashing-+The+Truth


 * Greenwashing: The truth behind the "green" ads **[]

The curriculum was developed by Donna Schnupp for Thinkport a company the is funded by the US Department of Education Star Schools Program.

Thinkport is a the product of an on-going partnership between Maryland Public Television and Johns Hopkins University Center for Technology in Education. Thinkport is a company that aims to helps teachers teach, motivate students to learn, build bridges between schools and home. All the through the use of technology in the service of education.

 Through this curriculum, students will become media literate by learning how companies use greenwashing tactics to sell themselves as environmentally friendly. They will do this by looking at different examples of ads that have been greenwashed. The students will develop an understanding of how greenwashing is deceptive and how this can negatively their health or the health of the environment. This curriculum will force students to read, comprehend, interpret and analyze greenwashed text, and formulate a response advertisement.

This curriculum is designed in a way that will achieve these desired learning outcomes. This curriculum provides examples that make greenwashing easy to pick out for students who have yet to be introduced the topic. By going through and explaining students will understand many of the different tactics that companies use to greenwash their products. This curriculum forces students to then go further and analyze why the companies are greenwashing and how it affects them. It does so be examining past disasters caused by greenwashing. To foster creative thinking students are asked to create a greenwashed add of their own, and then an ad the responds to it.

//Greenwashing: The truth behind the "green" ads// teaches does teach the kinds of literacy goals promoted by EcoEd. Goals such as: understanding of their own health and well being as shaped by an array of both proximate and far-off causes; understanding of the history of disaster and decision-making failures; and the capacity to recognize the multitude of factors influencing what they are told about environmental problems, including vested interests.

More of the EcoEd literacy goals could be layered into this curriculum by explaining the role of government in greenwashing and talk about how it has the potential to change should new regulations more strictly limit what companies can say. By doing so, they would prevent greenwashing.