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World
as a Village of 1000
Summary
Students
interpret global statistics which have been scaled down to a village
of 1000 people, and translate them into artistic productions.
Environmental lessons can grow from consideration of such statistics
and other forms of data.
Program
Area
This activity
is suited to the Grade 9 Arts section of the Transitional Years
curriculum. This activity could follow an activity introducing
concept of shape, and the integration of external ideas into art.
It could easily fit into any unit of the visual arts curriculum
throughout the Secondary grades in which ideas of the impact of
non-emotional factors, such as philosophy, religion or politics,
on art.
Learning
Outcomes
Teaching,
learning, and evaluation will focus on the student's ability to:
- Identify
and use shape as an element of art and a principle of design;
- Use creative
expression to communicate statistics;
- Show
process work which demonstrates experimental, exploratory, and
systematic approaches to ideas, methods, and materials;
- Demonstrate
psychomotor skills in manipulating and assembling patterns to
create designs.
Background
Several
works of collage and collagraph prints should be examined by the
class. Works by the following artists could be examined: Max Ernst,
Pablo Picasso, George Barque, Jean Apres, Jean Dubuffet, and Romare
Bearden.
References
Brommer,
Gerald. The Art of Collage. 142-145.
Ragans,
Rosalind. ArtTalk. 319 - 333.
Classroom
Development
- Students
are to be shown a variety of ways that art has been used to
interpret and present statistics. Make sure that the following
ideas are explored:
- how
can the unity of math and statistics be expressed in a work
of art;
- the
similarities the creative aspects of math and art;
- what
the arts can add to understanding of social issues through
the visual representation of abstract ideas such as are
represented in stastics.
- Give
out the handout: "If the World were a Village of 1000 People."
Tell students that they are to choose specific statistics and
translate them into visual terms.
- Next
students are to collect images themselves which illustrate things
related to the statistical information.
- Just
before students do any studio work remind them of the safety
precautions which are relevant to this particular activity.
Also explicitly refer to the introductory discussion/activity
on safety procedures from the beginning of the term/semester.
- Discuss
ideas or themes which will unify the students' composition.
- After
completing their collages, students should discuss their work,
in an open forum, commenting on other student's success in translating
the stastics into their compositions.
- The second
expressive art activity is to ink the collage with rolled cheesecloth
or other dauber. See the activity "Ecolage" for information
on how to make collagraphs.
- Students
then repeat the discussion step 4.
Cross-disciplinary
Links
In both
Geography and History the background of some of the statistics
could be further investigated. The reasons for the world being
in this condition could be investigated. In Mathematics the reliability
of statistics could be studied. In English the potential for the
abuse of statistics could be investigated.
Our world as a village of 1000 would include:
- 584 Asians
- 150 East
and West Europeans (including ex-Soviet states)
- 124 Africans
- 84 Latin
Americans
- 52 North
Americans
- 6 Australians
and New Zealanders
The people
of the village have considerable difficulty in communicating:
- 165 people
speak Mandarin
- 86 English
- 83 Hindu/Urdu
- 64 Spanish
- 58 Russian
- 37 Arabic
The list
accounts for the mother tongues of only half the villagers. The
other half speaks (in descending order of frequency) Bengali,
Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French, and 200 other
languages.
In this
village there are:
- 329 Christians
(among them 187 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 31 Orthodox)
- 187 Moslems
- 67 "Nonreligious"
- 132 Hindu
- 60 Buddhists
- 45 Atheists
- 3 Jews
- 86 Other
religions
One third
(330) of the 1000 people in the world village are children, and
only 60 are over the age of 65. Half of the children are immunized
against preventable infectious diseases.
Just under
half of the married women in the village have access to and use
modern contraceptives.
The first
year 28 babies are born. That year 10 people die, 3 of them for
lack of food, 1 from cancer, 2 of the deaths are babies born within
a year. One person of the 1000 in the village is infected with
HIV virus.
With 28
births and 10 deaths, the population of the village in the second
year is 1018.
In this
community, 200 people receive 75 percent of the income: another
200 receive only 2 percent of the income. Only 70 people of the
1000 own an automobile (although some of the 70 own more than
one automobile).
About one
third have access to clean, safe drinking water.
Of the 670
adults in the village, half are illiterate.
The village
has 6 acres of land per person (2400 ha in all) of which:
- 800 ha
are desert, tundra, pavement, and other wasteland;
- 760 ha
woodland;
- 560 ha
pasture;
- 280 ha
are cropland
The woodland
is declining rapidly; the wasteland increasing. The other land
categories are roughly stable.
The village
allocates 83 percent of its fertilizer to 40 percent of its cropland,
owned by the richest and best fed 270 people. Excess fertilizer
running off this land causes pollution in lakes and wells. The
remaining 60 percent of the land, with its 17 percent of the fertilizer,
produces 28 percent of the food grains and feeds 73 percent of
the people. The average grain yield on that land is one third
of the harvest achieved by the richer villagers.
In the village
of 1000 people, there are:
- 7 teachers
- 5 soldiers
- 3 refugees
driven from home by war or draught
- 1 doctor
The village
has a total budget each year, public and private, of over $ 3
million. This amounts to $3000 per person, if it is distributed
evenly which it is not.
Of the $3
million:
- $181
000 goes to the military
- $159
000 for education
- $132
000 for health care
The village
has buried beneath it enough explosive power in nuclear weapons
to blow itself up many times over. These weapons are under the
control of just 100 of the people. The other 900 people are watching
them with deep anxiety. If they do learn to get along together,
the weapons might be set off anyway through inattention or technical
bungling. And if they ever decide to dismantle the weapons, people
wonder where they would dispose of the dangerous radioactive materials.
Meadows,
Donella. Beyond the Limits. Mills, VT: Chelsea Green Pub.,
1992.
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