ELL Student Work Example: Resources, Population, and a Sustainable Future
Summary: In an 8th grade literature course, English Language Learners delved into fiction and nonfiction under a theme of human-environmental impacts, and cultural beliefs affecting this. Students traced the life cycle of everyday needs, such as food, mapping global sources of land, energy and other materials. Students examined data and trends on environmental, economic and social issues, and projected different scenarios for the future. The students also read and wrote fictional accounts of the future, putting themselves into the stories as characters striving to make positive change.
The unit offered multiple opportunities for visual learning. For example, students created concept maps of common foods that trace the materials, energy and wastes involved in production.
Some of the additional concepts, standards, and skills addressed by this unit:
- Reflecting on scenarios of the future presented in poems, literature, and films.
- Prioritizing needs and wants and debating the role of media in shaping them.
- Researching global demographic trends.
- Evaluating possible causes and implications of global inequities.
- Creating concept maps of the resources needed to support human needs.
- Using technology to calculate students' Ecological Footprint: the amount of resources needed to support their lifestyle.
- Generating ways to reduce individual and community "footprints."
- Writing about desired scenarios for the future and how to bring them about.
- Identifying barriers and opportunities for implementing these plans.
Learn more: Lessons on these topics--with adaptations for ELL students--are part of our Ecological Footprint program.