Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Crowdfunding Your Diy Project: Introducing Students To Kickstarter, Jason W. Luther

Open Educational Resources

The purpose of this learning module is to help instructors consider how crowdfunding can serve as a meaningful way to build culturally rich, entrepreneurial projects. Such projects — which include film, music, publications, video and board games, art, performance, and technology — invite amateurs to not only articulate their vision of the world, but to ask others to participate in it, telling their story publicly in such a way that their network feels compelled to support them. While the obvious value of crowdfunding is that it financially supports the work of creators, it also uses the exigence of capital to …

Scents Of Place: Exploring Self, Place And Planet Through Botanical Fragrance, Jennifer L. Kitson, Donna M. Sweigart

Open Educational Resources

This learning module provides instructors with an experiential field guide for introducing students to the United Nations Inner Development Goals Framework through self-guided mindful smelling activities and reflection prompts related to botanical fragrance. The interdisciplinary nature of this module allows for use or adaptation in a wide range of courses looking for outdoor, place-based and self-guided experiential learning to explore the role of botanical fragrance for people, plants and pollinators. The overarching goal is to deepen students’ connections to their senses (and scents) of self, place and planet through exploring botanical fragrance with mindful smelling. The learning activities in this …

Are Humans Natural? Part 4: Human-Nature Relational Values Through Time, Nathan Ruhl, Sirena Pimenta

Open Educational Resources

This activity assumes students have a background in evolutionary theory, so students without such a background should have additional instruction prior to conducting this part of the activity. Consider a discussion of mechanisms that drive evolution, including genetic drift, natural selection, and gene flow. Evolution is a change in gene frequencies in a population over the course of several generations.

Genes are the genetic code controlling many individual characteristics or traits, so the frequency at which genes occur dictates, in large part, the frequency at which individual characteristics or traits exist in a population. The frequency of a gene can …

Exploring Environmental Issues Using Eco Art, Mahbubur Meenar, Ted Howell

Open Educational Resources

Ecological and environmental art, or “Eco Art,” describes works of art that engage issues related to the environment, ecology, and/or sustainability. Broadly, Eco Art serves as a compelling means of conceiving humanity’s relationship to the natural world. In part because ecological topics such as climate change, extinction, and pollution are dominated by scientific discourse, Eco Art offers new pathways for artistic expression and for understanding ecological issues. In the words of art writer Linda Weintraub, Eco Art “stands out from the din of environmental warnings, policies, and campaigns because its content is enriched by artistic imagination and its strategies are …

Are Humans Natural? Part 3: Nature Relatedness And The American Dream, Nathan Ruhl, Taylor Dobson

Open Educational Resources

This learning module is part of a series of activities designed to encourage students to develop relational values with nature. In this activity, students reflect on their relationship with nature and consider the impact of their plans/goals for the future on the environment and the larger goal of sustainability. Students evaluate their relationship with nature through the Nature Relatedness (NR-6) Test (Nisbet and Zelenski, 2013), compare their NR-6 score to others, consider how their goals (“dreams”) are related to the American Dream, and speculate on the attainability of sustainability given our individually driven goals for the future. This activity challenges …

Are Humans Natural? Part 2: Exploring Human-Nature Relational Values And The Balance Of Nature, Nathan Ruhl

Open Educational Resources

This learning module is part of a series of modules that seeks to help students develop human-nature relational values. Relational values are more readily developed when the methods employed reference species/environments/landscapes/situations that students are familiar with already and may encounter during their everyday lives. In this activity students are asked to consider whether nature is in balance. The idea that nature is in balance extends deep into human history, but modern scientific evidence clearly demonstrates that nature is not in balance. Despite scientific evidence, the perception that nature is stable or in balance persists in human culture. This activity challenges …

Contingency, Evolution, And The Nature Of History, William Carrigan

Open Educational Resources

This module explores the nature of history. Popular perceptions of history rely upon two flawed ideas. First, employing a naive interpretation of the theory of evolution, many believe that history is a slow march of progress toward more complex species and, after the development of humans, more complex human societies. Second, another prevalent attitude is that the history of life contains patterns that repeat and can be predicted if studied. Instead, this module emphasizes the role of luck and contingency in the history of life both before and after the arrival of homo sapiens. Beginning with an exploration of why …

Are Humans Natural? Exploring Relational Values In The Human-Nature Relationship In An Evolutionary Context, Nathan Ruhl

Open Educational Resources

This learning module is a three-part series of learning activities focused around the following themes:

1. The words “nature” and “natural” mean different things to different people;
2. Humans and other species both effect and are affected by the environment;
3. Most “human-traits” are not unique to humans and are adaptive traits shared by other species.

The larger goal of this set of learning activities is to promote a holistic/equalistic view of the human-environment relationship by leveraging humanistic content to support learning goals in both introductory post-secondary courses and general education courses (secondary or post-secondary) in the biological sciences. The learning activities in …

Sustainability As A Moral Problem, David Clowney

Open Educational Resources

This module explores the ethics of sustainability. “Sustainability” has become a buzz-word for any kind of environmentally positive activity. The word inherits its special meaning from the term “sustainable development,” introduced in Our Common Future, the 1987 UN commissioned Brundtland Report, as a way of describing the joint goals of economic development for poorer countries and environmental preservation/restoration. In the words of that report, sustainable development is development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” and is constrained by “the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects …

Thinking Through The Future Of Climate Change With Fiction, Ted Howell

Open Educational Resources

What happens when scientists use fiction to envision our future in a world radically altered by climate change? Who is most thoroughly to blame for our inability to sufficiently react to the horrific, even apocalyptic, future we’re told is coming for our children and grandchilden? This module dives into these questions via the short book The Collapse of Western Civilization, written by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. In this short, reader-friendly essay, Oreskes, a science writer who permanently changed how we talk about climate change, and Conway, a NASA historian, write a “history of the future” from the vantage …