ESL Greening Curriculum Project
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The goals of the following lessons are the basis of the rationale for developing the lessons. There are issues that are inherently involved in ecology and the environment that are not generally addressed in English as a Second Language class. Students from abroad often do not understand environmentalists’ concerns and in some cases do not understand the American perspective from a global position. They come with the traditional American Dream of high consumption and more is better. They often perceive our society as only offering choices within the conspicuous consumption framework. They feel tremendous pressure to conform to the perceived norms and find what values concerning the planet they may have had being eroded by the constant societal pressures.
There is further evidence that their sense of culture shock is also exacerbated by dislocation from their native bioregion, where many grew up with a deeper connection to the natural world than we do here. This disconnect can be at the root of their discontentment and is fundamentally at the root of the ideas inherent in the following lessons. There is a basic assumption in the lessons that reconnecting with the natural environment is healthy for the individual and the planet as both are joined together in the web of life.
Current curriculum within the ESL field does not much address these concerns. There are some readers which have a unit on some of the issues addressed in these lessons. These textbooks are cited and listed in the resource section.
It is the aim of the writers of these lessons to write up the experiences we have had and share these with a wider audience. The lessons offered here have been tried and all have been found to work well. Those that did not have been rejected, and the glitches that we encountered have been corrected.
The goals of the lessons are:
to stimulate students to reconnect with the natural world in their new environment even though it may be radically different from their native bioregion;
to rekindle students’ love of nature;
to build a connection between students’ wellness and the natural world;
to allow students to make the connections between the cognitively oriented academic world and the natural environment;
to facilitate students’ essential academic and social English language skills within an enriching and culturally significant set of experiences.
It is the not so hidden goal to stimulate our colleagues to participate in using these lessons and to develop, use, and share more of their own.