Teaching the Civics of Sustainable Living Through an Ancient History Course

• In Event: 56.053 - Developing Environmental Citizens: Leveraging Disciplinary Strengths to Address an Interdisciplinary Challenge

Abstract

This paper focuses on a compelling issue: the need for humans to live more sustainably within the natural limits of the planet's ecosystems. Some of these unsustainable living patterns, like CO2 pollution's influence on global climate change, may be among the world's most pressing challenges (Gillis, 2013; Farrell, 2011; Whitty, 2011). A cross-section of global stakeholders acknowledge the moral and civic imperatives for humans to simultaneously mitigate and adapt to the effects of such unsustainable choices (Cook, Nuccitelli, Green, Richardson, Winkler, Painting, Way, Jacobs, & Skuce, 2013; EPA, 2015; Yardley & Goodstein, 2015).

The educative challenge thus is how to overcome the gap between scientific imperatives about sustainable living and public receptivity. For example, what one knows about sustainable living and what one is willing to do to achieve it are typically very far apart (Gratz, 1971; Sterling, 1996). To compound matters, the millennial generation exhibits less concern about environmental issues than any other group since World War II (Twenge, Campbell, & Friedman, 2012; Twenge, 2006).

Science educators have long addressed this gap through instruction on ecological issues (Van Kannel-Ray, 2006). They have simultaneously lamented how such instruction rarely connects scientific knowledge about the subject to civic responsibilities (Summers, Corney & Childs, 2006; Siegel, 2006). Indeed, both science and social studies education researchers have called for instruction on sustainable living to introduce instructional components of citizenship education (Abassi, 2005; Crocco, 2013; Shuttleworth, 2015; Light, 2016; Shuttleworth, 2016).

While an impetus exists to teach sustainability education through a civic lens within the social studies classroom, key questions persist about its implementation. For example, how do we prepare young students (e. g., middle school level) to become civic actors on an expansive topic when their own worldview is comparatively small? Additionally, how do we teach this subject if it is not explicitly situated in an elective style course highlighting links between citizenship and sustainable living (Shuttleworth & Marri, 2014)?

This paper addresses such questions by describing a year-long study of a middle school social studies teacher's instruction in a course on ancient history. Data include observations of classroom activities and field trips (e.g., to the local farmer’s market and abandoned railways) and monthly interviews with the teacher. Findings indicate that throughout a two-semester course, she consistently introduced sustainability education themes (a survey of human history from its origins to the empire of Genghis Khan), including how humans can adapt to our changing environment. I also found that she consistently grounded her learning objectives in locally-bound situations to provide her pre-adolescent students with opportunities to experiment with a sort of “ecological citizenship." Therefore, this paper provides an illustration of how to bridge theory and practice by showing how this social studies teacher enlarged the conception of citizenship education to include responsibility for the natural environment and the living things dependent upon it.

Author

• Jay Shuttleworth, Long Island University, Brooklyn