Group items tagged

"Need I say more? We are that innovation! The human species was and is the 'ecological invention', the new 'natural technology', by which the biosphere saved itself! Those accumulations of photosynthetically useless carbon - initially the woody bodies of trees, and the corpses of other plants and animals, terrestrial and aquatic, as well as, later, coal, oil, and gas - entropy, waste, for photosynthesis - represent free energy for human praxis, that is, for that new form of 'synthetic' econo-ecological activity, biomass yielding and biomass sustaining, which is human industry and industrialized agriculture."

And so presumably once we've fulfilled our ecological function of redistributing this carbon back to the atmosphere we'll be superfluous and therefore annihilated, i.e. climate change will kill us off? I think these deniers should go back to the drawing board...

I hadn't realised how much full text stuff is available from ERIC otherwise I would have added it sooner. Just do a full-text advanced search for 'history' and Bob's your uncle. It's always good to know what the smart people are saying we should be doing. I don't know about you though, but sometimes those smart people strike me as a little stupid...

I thought I'd already saved this to the group. It's an excellent community of social studies teachers and has some really thought-provoking discussions going on. I've found the contributors there to be very smart and well-trained in history teaching (just like us!).

"Over the past several years, History Matters has organized twenty-five online dialogues with leading historians and teachers about the the teaching of major topics in U.S. history--from early settlement to the Vietnam War. Those discussions are archived here and contain many useful teaching suggestions"

There are a couple of pages on this site which might be useful for history teachers in challenging us to reflect on our practice. I don't know about you, but too often I get so caught up in the bureaucratic paperwork and day-to-day of teaching I forget to reflect on the big picture of what teaching history is all about...