NE2019 P3: Media Environments and Embodied Education
NEXT EARTH: TEACHING CLIMATE CHANGE ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE
Panel 3: Media Environments and Embodied Education
“Cli-Fi, Interdisciplinary Archives, and Digital Exhibits: Strategies for Teaching Climate Change in the Literature and Composition Classroom”
Danielle Crawford (University of California, Santa Cruz)
“The Perceptual Experience of Nature in Digital Media: Researching Tools for Environmental Education”
Perla Carrillo Quiroga (Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas, Mexico)
“What You See Isn’t Always What You Get: Embodied Cognition and the Prospect of Climate Change Education through Computer Gaming and Simulation”
Gui Sanches de Oliveira (University of Cincinatti)
@Danielle I appreciate your advocacy of interdisciplinarity to addressing climate change-and I agree that the integration of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities is key. Using primary and secondary paired texts along with real time new reports must have created a real sense of urgency. How did you help students create the multi-modal narratives? Did you utilize iterative feedback or was publicly publishing narratives the primary source of feedback?
Hi cslown,
Thanks for listening to my talk! I really appreciate your comments and questions. To answer your questions about the multimodal projects, I assigned different components of these projects in stages. Everything was heavily scaffolded so that students wouldn’t get too overwhelmed. Towards the beginning of the class, I had them do a personal narrative that incorporated around three photos of their place of focus. So this got them thinking early on about how their writing could interact with images and other modalities.
I also heavily relied on support services from my university, and specifically the Digitial Scholarship Commons at UC Santa Cruz, which provided me with guidance when creating the assignment and provided my students with an orientation session on how to use Scalar, as well as serving as an additional resource for any students who needed helped. In terms of feedback, I did give my students iterative feedback on the different components of their final projects. They would send their different narratives to me in digital form, either via Canvas or Google Docs, and then I would annotate and write them letters for feedback. I also made detailed grading rubrics for their Scalar exhibits, which outlined my expectations for their use of media. Since it was such a non-traditional assignment, I think having a really clear rubric helped to resolve any confusion. And then my students were required to present their exhibits to the rest of the class, which gave them an opportunity to further discuss how the videos, images, and textual narratives of their exhibits were interacting.
I hope this answers your questions! If not, feel free to write me back. Thanks again for engaging with my talk!
@Perla Thank you for your talk! When you referred to the visual discourses dominating the media landscape, I was struck by the distinction between spectator, user, and participant. How do you measure degrees of perceptual realism?
The distinction between spectator and user has to do with the degrees of interactivity enabled by specific media. For instance, in the case of film or television the term most often used is spectator, while videogames or VR environments entail users, as they navigate and interact with the virtual environment.
When speaking of perceptual realism a key question is how the stimuli appear to our senses and in what ways it might resemble ‘real’ life or natural (unmediated by technology) perception – as opposed to realism in relation to factual information. And some notions that might help us think about degrees of perceptual realism in terms of 2D media are abstract shapes or vectorial graphics as opposed to photography and moving images such as film and video. Also, in 3D and immersive media, perceptual realism has to do with how convincingly the virtual environment appears to our senses. This depends on issues such as congruency between head/ body movement and represented space, also textures, sounds, light and so on.
Also… when I mention the term ‘participant’, I’m referring to people who participated in one of the EEG experiments with virtual reality.
@Perla; Thank you for the clarification.
@Gui “Climate change cannot be observed from a single point in space and time.” Are you familiar with https://toolkit.climate.gov/ as a pedagogical tool to teach?
Thanks everyone for these presentations! I have two specific questions for Danielle. First, I’m curating a page on cli-fi teaching resources for another UCSB-related project. (http://ejcj.orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu/nxterra-project-page/.) Would you be willing to share your syllabi and some of your assignments/rubrics with me? You can email me directly at nseymour@fullerton.edu. Thank you so much! Also, would you be willing to share with us (or just me if that’s preferable) an example of a student’s Scalar project? I’m curious to see what they actually look like.
Hi nseymour,
Thank you for listening to my talk! The UC-CSU NXTerra Project that you are working on sounds fascinating, and I would be happy to contribute to it. I’ll be sure to email you my materials soon.
As for Scalar, I unfortunately don’t have a public version of a student exhibit that I can share, but here is a link to a published Scalar exhibit that I helped to co-author: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/reading-nature/cover Although the subject matter is different than my composition class, hopefully it will still give you a better idea of what an exhibit looks like.
Thanks again for your questions!
@ Danielle Crawford (University of California, Santa Cruz); can cli-fi be introduced to students together with some online games such as those here https://kahoot.com/explore/collections/climate-challenge/? Have you ever tried this method as well? Thanks…
Hi deryaagis,
Thank you for your question, and for sharing this really useful resource. I have not used online games when teaching cli-fi, but I would definitely be open to using this method in the future. Have you had any experience using these online games in the classroom? If so, I would be very interested to learn more about how you have used this resource. Thanks again for your question!
I have asked some students to build new games on their topics of interest in an English class. I also asked them to play some of these games by using their cellphones: they liked it.
Some students built up nice quiz games with pictures from different stories. They also acquired some knowledge about copyright laws and correct citation techniques.
Danielle,
Thanks so much for your very interesting talk about cli-fi. I’m wondering if you would be interested in contributing an essay or upper level lesson plan to the K-12 instructional resource I am compiling. I’d love to see a submission on either Parable of the Sower or Flight Behavior if you are interested. Here is a link to the google doc that explains the project: http://bit.ly/2yISOjT-LiteratureforChange
Thanks for considering and for your work on this topic!
-Rebecca
Hi Rebecca,
Thank you for listening to and engaging with my talk. The instructional resource you are putting together sounds really important. Although I don’t have any experience teaching in a K-12 setting, I would be very interested in learning more about this project and how it might intersect with my pedagogy. Is there an email that I can reach you at so we can talk further?
Thank you so much!
Yes, of course. If you enter your information in the google form (in the google doc), I can send you my email (as I’m not sure it should be posted here?) and answer any questions you may have. I’m envisioning the lesson/essay suitable for an upper level literature course in AP or IB, for example.
Thanks!
Rebecca