Teaching Students Ecological Literacy In the Secondary English Classroom

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Teaching Students Ecological Literacy In the Secondary English Classroom

In today's world, we are bombarded with industry, economic advancement, and progressivism with new technology. As our world becomes more high tech and produces more products for our consumer world, we may soon face many environmental problems, due to our over-consumption of resources and our excessive, industrial lifestyles. Within all curriculums, I find it highly important to address these issues concerning environmental awareness as well as advocate environmental activism. When many educators think of ways to implement ecological literacy in their classrooms, they tend to find it challenging, and are unable to integrate it into the curriculum. However, students can be taught to think in ecological terms in a plethora of ways. Through researching current methods of integration of ecological literacy in the secondary English classroom and through compilation of my own approaches to these issues, I offer a great proposition for prospective educators like myself. This paper will examine what ecological literacy is, what ways this integration can be successfully achieved, and why it is important to integrate it into the English curriculum.

Ecological literacy is teaching students to view the world around them from an environmental perspective, examine their own practices in relation to nature and society's toll upon the earth. For students to become ecologically literate, they must examine social issues on a local and global level in order to develop their own model of individual responsibility to preservation and respect of our world. As time passes and newer technology develops, students sometimes become more involved i...

... middle of paper ...

... Educators in all subjects, must begin to integrate environmental education, promoting ecological literacy for young adults to promote the sustainability of society and the beautiful world around us.

Works Consulted

Berry, Wendell. What are People For? North Point Press. San Francisco: 1990.

Berry, Wendell. The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Counterpoints Publishing. Washington D.C.: 1998.

McConnell, Malcolm. "Miracle at Adobe Creek." Reader's Digest. April 1999: 78-84.

Orr, David. Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. State University of New York Press. New York: 1992.

Prakash, Madhu Suri, and Gustavo Esteva. Escaping Education: Living as Learning within Grassroots Cultures. Peter Lang Publishing. New York: 1998.

Wigginton. Moments: The Foxfire Experience. Doubleday and Co. Inc. New York: 1975.

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