This Section will explore the idea that EfS principles can be approached within the Humanities and Social Subjects curriculum in some novel and interesting ways. In order to do this we suggest that EfS can be approached through the Humanities and Social Studies curriculum by seeing space and time in an integrated way. Here we are thinking of the space/time continuum as the framework. The aim of the activities will be to create a 'space/ time line' of forests and transport systems which illustrate changes over time and from place to place.
This approach does not claim that time is more important than space or that space is more important than time in understanding the relationships between people and their environments. Rather it suggests that these are interpenetrating concepts and that the sustainability of the environment (natural and manufactured) requires us to see and understand time and space together.
In this Section these issues will be addressed through the themes of forests and transport using learning and teaching strategies in the Humanities and Social Subjects curriculum.
This Section seeks, within the context of forests as a theme, to raise the following issues:
• What is
a forest?
• Historical and Social Construct
• Human Resource
- - Economic
- - Recreational
- - Spiritual
• Different ways of seeing/understanding the forest
- - folklore
• Different ways of exploiting the forest
- - exploitation/over exploitation
- - stewardship
- - husbandry
• Regeneration
• Conflict over ownership, use and access
• Pollution, Acid rain
• Different
cultural responses to the forest
- - 1st World/3rd World
• World Human ecology
- - conflict/mutualism
This Section seeks, within the context of transport as a theme, to raise the following issues:
• Why do we
need transport?
• Why do we need different forms of transport?
• What are the varying forms of transport?
• How can the varieties of forms of transport be seen as responses to local
geography?
• Can transport be seen to follow rules?
• How can transport be seen as a social activity?
• What issues arise in relation to the mass movement of human beings? (Here
perhaps we could illustrate with issues to do with cultural oppression and forced
mass transport, which would raise questions about the sustainability of culture
or the cultural responses to migration and the transfer of culture).
• Transport of information - from verbal to written to telematics
The sustainability messages might include:
• energy balance
• utilisation of resources
• pollution
The end result might include a view of what are sustainable forms of transport (culturally, geographically, spatially constrained) which use as a sustainability principle the minimisation of impact (this can be linked to the ecological footprint exercise in Sub-section 5.4.2).
The overall aim of this Section is that the exemplar materials will draw out some of the sustainability messages contained in Unit 3. Again the idea is to work within a space/time continuum framework in order to create a space/time line which illustrates the different issues referred to above in order to:
• turn the principles of sustainability into a language appropriate to the themes of forests and transport
•
imagine a space/time line - what would it include? - what resources are needed?
• identify the resources needed to be provided for children to construct their own space/time lines
• identify how we can raise sustainability messages with children.