Futures: Preferred and Likely

Summary

Students post drawings on a large wall chart (timeline) to chronologically illustrate the past and imagine the future through environmentally sensitive eyes.

Learning Outcomes

Teaching, learning, and evaluation will focus on the student's ability to:

• Create a contextual visual essay of the past, present, and future;
• Express emotional responses to the world;
• Visually interpret an idea or event through the medium of drawing.

Materials

pens, pencils, paper, tape

Timing

This is a one week unit. Most of the week will be taken up with introduction of the activity, discussion, research and drawing. The end of the week will focus on the construction of the timeline and summary discussion of the activity.

Background

Both the process and product are important here. This activity is a useful art project because students readily pick up the idea as an interesting opportunity for expression of their understanding of their own place in history and the future.

References

Pike, Graham, and David Selby. Global Teacher. Global Learner. Hodder and Stoughton, 1988.

Classroom Development

1. Have students prepare a timeline along one wall of the classroom or hallway which has been chronologically divided in to years, decades, centuries or millennia. Make sure that the timeline extends logarithmically both forward and backward in time from the present to leave more room for contemporary material. Students are to create small drawings which reflect environmental history. They are then to tape them up in the appropriate chronological location. Introduce the need to illustrate ecological, industrial, urban, land use, painting, sculpture, architectural, religious, economic, social, and political dimensions-especially environmental themes associated with how the world has developed.
2. Suggest that students consider what they think has been positive as well as negative. Anything they think is positive should be placed above the tape timeline, and anything negative should be placed on the wall below the tape.
3. In the centre of the tape timeline is the present day. Here students are to try to illustrate they see the present to be, according to the agreed upon criteria.
4. From this point, on this line, students are to imagine what they would like as a preferred future. Make sure that they consider the near future and the more distant future. Both should be considered.
5. Students finally put up drawings which reflect what they feel the future will be like more realistically.
6. Discuss how the good points of the preferred future could be achieved and how the worst points of the likely future could be avoided. This is an opportunity for students to express their emotional responses to world situations.