Interdisciplinary Middle School Unit

Emerson Middle School, Yonkers, NY

This project is an outcome of the 2009 Summer Institute for Sustainability Education sponsored by the Children's Environmental Literacy Foundation (CELF: http://www.celfoundation.org), with facilitation provided by Creative Change. During the intensive week-long institute, a team of interdisciplinary teachers from Emerson Middle School gained content knowledge, curriculum resources and instructional design support to plan a team-taught 7-8th grade unit that unifies required topics including energy, ancient history, graphing and language arts. Unit summary:

Unit guiding question: How do human choices impact society, and what leads societies to either collapse or achieve sustainability?

The content knowledge and planning support provided during the institute enabled the team to map connections among energy, resource use, and how human choices lead to either "collapse" or "sustainability." Connections by discipline:

• Science: The uses and forms of energy and energy transformation, the factors affecting energy choices (esp. of reliance on non-renewable fossil fuels), and the impacts these choices.
• Math: Using algebra and graphing to calculate depletion rates of oil; calculating BTUs (British Thermal Units) and other measures of energy.
• Social studies: The case of Easter Island and the multiple causes and impacts of its environmental collapse, including economic and cultural factors.
• Language arts: Making predications; cause-effect; creative writing; scenarios.

Teacher quotes:

• "The theme I heard all week was ‘interconnectedness', and so we focused on the connections among our disciplines."
• "This makes it much more meaningful for students. They can synthesize the information and find ways to use it in their lives. That's when the lights go on."