ASSIGNMENT 2 Reflective Essay – Part 1

IN CLASS EXERCISE # 1 – Monday, January 8th

Learning about global environmental change issues

Exploration (in groups of 2):

1) Freewrite a list of issues you know relate to global environmental change at different scales (i.e. global, national, regional, community, family, UCSC).

Don’t worry about grammar or sentences, just jot down ideas in list form. What do you associate with climate change, what topics are familiar? This freewrite will be shared with a partner and the rest of the class. You will not be judged on this writing, you and your classmates will work together to come up with a full list of issues. (5 minutes)

2) Share list with partner and see if you want to add anything. It’s ok if you don’t think of something at every scale. (5 minutes)

3) With whole class: Compile student lists together, identify any others that come to mind. (10 minutes)

4) Identify one issue, from your list or identified by the entire class, that has some personal significance or that has influenced your opinion/perception of the global environmental/climate change debate.

- Freewrite for 10 minutes what you know about this issue and why it is important to you, how it affected you or your opinions, etc. Freewriting: Don’t stop writing for the whole ten minutes. If you’re stuck just write that you’re stuck, i.e. “…I’m stuck, I’m stuck, I’m stuck…” until something else comes to mind. You don’t have to pay any attention to punctuation, spelling or sentence structure. Lists, paragraphs, anything is fine. Just write whatever comes to mind.

- With your partner from before have one person share their freewrite while the other one listens. (5 minutes for speaking, 5 minutes for discussing, then switch rolls)

·  Listener: be attentive and non-judgmental; let the speaker have the entire 5 minutes to talk about their issues, why and how it became important to them.

·  Speaker: Talk about your issue, take the whole 5 minutes, be silent when you need to be, you will not be interrupted.

·  Listener: Let the speaker know how you feel about the issue and voice any questions you may have about the issue itself. Think, if you were reading an essay about this topic, what questions might you have that weren’t covered by the speaker? What might they need to investigate further?