Here are the steps my students and I went through in this three-week unit. Before we began, I gathered resources and planned activities against thethree essential questions I wanted students to address:
- What is the balance between the interests of individual and the interests of business with regard to the environment?
- What role should the government play in regulating that balance?
- How do the country’s past actions inform its current policies related to environmental issues?
1. Introduce theme to students.
For me, this began with the current events connection. We started by reading and discussing New York Times resources on the Gulf oil spill using
this infographic to keep up with the news as it was known…and shown.
2. Spend time building background.
My class read and discussed the following to make historical connections to environmental disasters in general:
3. Focus whole-class investigation on one aspect of the unit’s theme.
Although I generally use a more distantly historic event, because of the uniqueness and enormity of the oil spill, I used it as the whole class investigation topic. To dig into the issues surrounding the spill, we closely studied infographics produced about it from a variety of news and other organizations.
All of our investigations fed back to the essential questions. For instance, I’d ask journal questions like, “Using the Times infographic we looked at yesterday, describe the potential impact on the wildlife living in the Gulf” and then ask them to further connect that impact to the potential economic impact on the individuals living in the Gulf. Then, for instance, we might go from there to reading/watching a segment on the projected economic impact.
4. Assign smaller collaborative investigations of topics that are related to the larger theme.
Students formed collaborative groups of three and then were randomly assigned one of the 10 disasters.
5. Provide students time and space to struggle with outside research and investigation, as well as to sort out the collaborative challenges.
Students were given four class periods (260 minutes) to research, collaborate and create the infographic. After a year of consuming infographics, they were well versed in the range of ways to represent information graphically. But when they were asked to tell a story with as little text possible, they had to evaluate what parts of a disaster were most important to tell, and how to best represent each piece of information. When they were stuck I would direct them back to
Krum’s 10 Tips for Designing Infographics and also encourage them to revisit the bank of infographic examples we identified earlier.
They had to contend with the fact that sometimes there was too much information about an event, while other times there was not quite enough. They had to make decisions about how to graphically represent the most salient facts about “their” disaster. They had to internalize research and then grapple with finding the most effective means of telling a story. And they had to call on skills in design, research, presentation, collaboration and inquiry.
The students used oil spill infographics as they went to identify trends that were common with the historical disaster they were researching in groups. They examined both the Gulf disaster and their “own” disaster to create infographics that
1. Related the basic ’story’ of their disaster;
2. Represented the public and governmental response directly following the incident;
and 3. Looked at the actions of the government and public over time.
6. Interact with the essential questions each day to discuss developing understandings, further inquiries and challenges.
We started each class with a journal question that continually focused the conversation around the three essential questions for the unit.
7. Present the work of collaborative groups to the whole class.
After the student conducted their research and grappled with the design of their infographics, it was time to unveil their creations. All of the infographics were printed out on 2’x3’ sheets of paper and displayed in the classroom for a gallery walk. We first discussed which infographic was “the best.” I didn’t qualify the statement or remind them of the requirements, just asked for their gut feelings.
Everyone in the class pointed out a particular infographic on the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. To them, its layout and visual appeal clearly exceeded that of any other example. I then asked the students to more carefully evaluate the infographics by taking time to read through the content. We reconvened and it was then that they realized the most visually appealing infographic did not have the best information. This was an enlightening realization.
8. Reflect individually, in groups and as a class as to learning successes and challenges.
Students were asked to reflect on the specific difficulties related to working collaboratively and creating their own infographics. They also reflected on similarities and differences between the Gulf oil spill and their assigned disaster. From there we projected forward to predict future behaviors by the American public, the American government, and business interests with regard to the Gulf oil spill, based on the lessons of the past. For example, during their investigations, students found that, regardless of the disaster, response followed a pattern: public interest was intense in the short term, but quickly shifted away from fixing the systemic problems that led to the disaster in the first place.
9. Revisit the essential questions and conduct a final conversation about the wealth of answers from the students.
Students were given a half-class period to respond to the essential questions in writing, giving specific examples. We then spent the other half of the class period discussing their insights.
10. Make predictions for or connections to other events, present or future, based on the trends and patterns observed in the thematic investigation.
Based on the information gathered in the research, students were asked to predict the future path of policy related to the Gulf oil spill and future man-made environmental disasters. For example, many spoke of the likelihood that the government policies would shift immediately following the spill — as they have after other environmental disasters — but that within a decade the strength of conviction for policy enforcement would wane.
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