The culminating class project in Earth 103: Earth Futures requires students to research and write short essays about 6 different communities around the world that are actively in crisis or soon will be due to climate change. Giving students agency to select locations that are meaningful to them, like their hometown, a favorite vacation spot, or the home of their ancestors supports one of the main aspects of constructivism: that learning experiences should be student-centered. The culminating project assignments are spaced throughout the course so that as students build knowledge, their entries "level up" in understanding and sophistication. Students are permitted to submit drafts of their first two submissions to receive faculty feedback, which acts as a scaffold for future essays. The students choose whether to keep that score or make revisions and re-submit for a higher grade. In addition, the most unique way that this assignment is student-centered is that the authors of the best essays are invited to publish their work in Communities in Crisis: Student Voices on Climate Change, an open educational resource available on the web.
Assignment Details: Culminating Project: Communities in Crisis: Student Voices on Climate Change
The goal of the culminating class project is for you to focus on the impact of climate change on communities. We center this assignment on communities because while the impacts of climate change are global, certain communities will be hit harder, as we will learn about this semester. By community, we mean a village, a town, or, at largest, a city. A state or country is not considered a community. Likewise, the topic must be related to this course; earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunami are NOT eligible topics.
The project will require six entries, an entry every two weeks/modules, and we suggest that you think about a topic that is related to the material discussed in those modules. For example, you might choose hurricanes for Entry 1 (Module 2) since we are discussing hurricanes during that module. While it is not mandatory to focus on the topic of the week, you must choose six different topics and six different communities.
You will be responsible for doing the research, choosing the topic, and finding the community. We suggest that you use sources like the New York Times, Washington Post, Wikipedia, or Google Scholar to do your research.
Each entry must be a minimum of 300 words and a maximum of 500 words and must address the following questions, which are part of the grading rubric.
- What is the threat?
- Why is that community vulnerable?
- What are the forecasted impacts on the community?
- What are the solutions to the threat?
NOTE: You must write this in your own words -- paraphrase everything. This means no direct copying, even if you use quotation marks. That said, all your sources must be cited at the end of each essay.
Each time you write an essay, you will add it to the same document, so that in the end you will have one document with six different essays included.
Note: You will be able to resubmit entries 1 and 2 for regrading. All other entries are final.