As I was reading the dimensional thinking Chapter of Root-Bernstein’s
Spark’s of Genius my thought’s wondered to my son and his current experience in
kindergarten. He is bombarded in his class with worksheet after worksheet
was one or two letters. I can see from the creases, scissor nicks and
coloring on both sides that he is struggling to ‘make’ something from the
otherwise numbing flat white piece of paper.
My son learns in a similar fashion as me. I love to build and do -
rather then read and repeat. My husband is still struggling with son’s
learning style. He could read at age 2, whizzed through flashcards and
aced any and every test. He still pulls out flashcards with numbers and
letters to practice with our son – and our son will take all those cards and
create an elaborate 3D puzzle with them. I was inspired to read about
Geller, in Sparks of Genius, and how, “she learned her 3-D skills from her
father, a crystallographer at Bell Labs, who bought any kind of toy that had
anything to do with geometry. Geller’s experience suggests that playing
with any type of 3-D puzzle can be useful.”
I love models as well. This module assignment is exciting to
me. I do think it is very challenging to depict environmental justice in
a model. One of the first models around Environmental Justice that comes
to mind (that I loved pulling together and pulling apart again) is a model I
helped to create with my organization and the network we work within called the
Just Transition. The concept of the Just Transition is to end the era of
extreme energy: by creating transition pathways to end the era of extreme
energy like fossil fuels, nuclear power, waste and biomass incineration,
landfill gas, mega-hydro, and agrofuels, and implement a Just Transition to
Local Living Economies in which good, green, and family-supporting jobs are
created for unemployed, and underemployed people, and workers formerly employed
by extreme energy industries. You can view the model below:
For environmental justice I first drew out and example of a local
environmental justice concern that I thought may appeal to everyone in this
course – air pollution near schools.
After I drew the model by hand – I created this model with
one of the online modeling programs I found:
It was difficult to figure out the best type of model to depict
Environmental Justice. I originally wanted to do something 3-D (inspired
by Sparks of Genius and my son) but once set that my mind was currently
confined to 2-D I got to sketching. Next I set out to list out the components
or variables: The obvious: teachers, students, volunteers; then the not so
obvious: time of exposure (on playground, walking to school, in school bus),
baseline on current health, facilities (garbage trucks, incinerator,
international bridge, HIGHWAYS) type of pollution (suffer dioxide, nitrogen
oxides, dioxin and furans, PCBs, PM (particulate matter - which includes: heavy
metals lead, mercury, methyl mercury, cadmium, chromium and arsenic - that I
know of). The Particulate Matter seemed (to me at least - I'm not expert)
- both large and small. So I looked at the main facilities, people that
are most impacted (by PM), and levels of exposure. The amounts were
massively estimated (full disclosure). The components were all connected
in that they impact children's environmental health and caretakers. The
incinerator (which in the case of the school I was using as the “case study” –
GoLightly in the Cass Corridor Detroit) is a large connecting factor for
impact, and the school is the main “target” as the impacted. The trash
trucks are delivering trash to the incinerator, they are coming across the
international bridge with international
garbage.
The most fun I had with this was creating little icons to represent
the multitude of variable within the Environmental Justice/ air pollution found
near school – such as the stick figure teacher and students:
Along with iconic icons like the Detroit Incinerator and the
Ambassador bridge!:
Which, of course, I could use none of because I could never figure out
how to upload my cute pictures into the online software (or figure out if it
was even possible). But such is the creative process!
For those of you worried about my son and the worksheet factory he
is currently enrolled in – don’t worry! We are in the process of
transferring him to a play based school experience. Do, however, worry
for the condition of charter schools in Detroit? (Due to the learning
environment and industrial environment outside???)
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