February 2, 2015 - 23:57
In the first two weeks of class, I've found that I still have to remind myself what "Ecology" means. I understand that it is the ointeraction between humans and the world around us including people, nature, cities,etc, but when it is used in different contexts and variations such as "thinking ecologically" I have to really pause and make sure I have a grasp on what it means at that moment. Also, I get a little turned around when we have readings about education because in my head I'm confused about how education and ecology come together. Especially the reading "Teaching for Turbulence," I agreed with Maniate's points that we have to begin to teach and train students for crises that may arise, but I failed to really see the connection between educating and ecology. Is it ecological in the sense that we have to understand each other before we can teach each other? Or is it more of we have to change the way we think to teach ecologically? I don't even know if I'm asking the right questions about the relationship between the two. Some of the readings I most enjoyed were "The Multicultural Approach to Excopsychology" by Carl Anthony and Renee Soule because of its emphasis on identity and how we interpret the world around us as a result and David Gessner's " Sick of Nature" because of the calling out of writers who wrote about nature as a separate enity without involving themselves in it. I also enjoyed "The Ecological Thought" by Timothy Morton because it provoked me to think and dissect my own thoughts about ecology and provided me with one of the clearest definitions of ecology, that it is "profoundly about coexistence." For my web-event, I think I would like to explore the relationship between ecology and education. How are the two interrelated?