Week Three : Post 2 Article, Introduction, and Video

 Williams urges us to move away from a schooling model characterized by discipline silos and mechanistic, technocratic worldviews. She advocates for a shift towards an educational approach that promotes a sustainable world, incorporating systems thinking and holistic learning. For example, she notes that living systems are not hierarchical but are networks nested within other networks, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. She emphasizes the need for greater ecological literacy, arguing that pedagogy should be grounded in place to better understand patterns and relationships.

Williams then details a program in a Portland, Oregon school district focused on food and garden-based programming. This initiative involved 3,500 K-8 students across eight schools, as well as multiple sites for school-based learning gardens and environmental and nutritional farms. The program fostered numerous partnerships, with university students forming a learning garden committee that included parents, community members, students, and school staff.

The program addressed local issues: the rising number of hungry children in Oregon, increasing rates of obesity and diabetes, urban students' diminishing connection to nature, and the widening achievement gap between white and ethnic minority students.

Learning about patterns and relationships was deeply integrated into seasonal learning, emphasizing care for oneself, the land, and the community. This approach extended beyond traditional curricular math connections like patterns of time, size, and quantity. These insights from deep student engagement is my first stop. I was blown away when a 12 year old had deep insights to the patterns and relationships of caring for land and nature. “It is strange that people can take pride in large lawns and waste their land by simply growing and cutting grass. If we plant gardens instead, we can also grow food, we can bring wildlife and at the same time eat healthy fresh food.” (p. 47)

My second stop is from this week’s video and the first week’s TEd Talk video. Seeing Dancing Proofs reminded me of week one - changing perspective is understanding. Viewing the body in motion, from above, is a change in the perspective of sight. Therefore, understanding of proofs has occurred. From a ground view to an aerial view.

My question for week three extends from my second stop and learning more about engaging the body and all of its senses. We can change perspectives within the sense of sight, ground view to aerial view. So could it be possible to change perspectives within another sense, say smell? And would such a change in perspective also result in understanding as put forth in week one’s TEd Talk? 

I used AI to generate an image of hearing on land and underwater.