UWCSEA Teachers

Scientists and development experts across the globe are racing to increase food production by 50 percent over the next two decades to feed the world’s growing population, yet many doubt their chances despite a broad consensus that enough land, water and expertise exist.

The number of hungry people in the world rose to 1.02 billion this year, or nearly one in seven people, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, despite a 12-year concentrated effort to cut the number.

Agronomists and development experts who gathered in Rome last week generally agreed that the resources and technical knowledge were available to increase food production by 50 percent in 2030 and by 70 percent in 2050 — the amounts needed to feed a population expected to grow to 9.1 billion in 40 years.

once he realised – or was made to realise – how much more work it would take both for his pupils and himself to satisfy the time-lords of assessment, "I collapsed back on Hitler and the Henries."

My own anecdotal evidence suggests that right across the secondary school system our children are being short-changed of the patrimony of their story, which is to say the lineaments of the whole story, for there can be no true history that refuses to span the arc, no coherence without chronology.

A pedagogy that denies that completeness to children fatally misunderstands the psychology of their receptiveness, patronises their capacity for wanting the epic of long time; the hunger for plenitude. Everything we know about their reading habits – from Harry Potter to The Amber Spyglass and Lord of the Rings suggests exactly the opposite. But they are fiction, you howl? Well, make history – so often more astounding than fiction – just as gripping; reinvent the art and science of storytelling in the classroom and you will hook your students just as tightly. It is, after all, the glory of our historical tradition – again, a legacy from antiquity – that storytelling is not the alternative to debate but its necessary condition.

“When the Water Ends,” a 16-minute video produced by Yale Environment 360 in collaboration with MediaStorm, tells the story of this conflict and of the increasingly dire drought conditions facing parts of East Africa. To report this video, Evan Abramson, a 32-year-old photographer and videographer, spent two months in the region early this year, living among the herding communities. He returned with a tale that many climate scientists say will be increasingly common in the 21st century and beyond — how worsening drought in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere will pit group against group, nation against nation. As one UN official told Abramson, the clashes between Kenyan and Ethiopian pastoralists represent “some of the world’s first climate-change conflicts.”

But the story recounted in “When the Water Ends” is not only about climate change. It’s also about how deforestation and land degradation — due in large part to population pressures — are exacting a toll on impoverished farmers and nomads as the earth grows ever more barren.

The video focuses on four groups of pastoralists — the Turkana of Kenya and the Dassanech, Nyangatom, and Mursi of Ethiopia — who are among the more than two dozen tribes whose lives and culture depend on the waters of the Omo River and the body of water into which it flows, Lake Turkana.

I teach document design. When I teach composition, I spend a significant amount of the semester on visual design. I’m also a scholar of visual design. Obviously, then, I care about design, perhaps unhealthily so. And I want everyone else to care, too. But, even if you can’t bring yourself to care about visual design, then you should still care about formatting requirements on assignment prompts and/or syllabi. Everything we put on these documents tells our students something about us, about what we value, and about what they should value

while the ability to follow conventions of all stripes is certainly important, the ability to understand, historicize, negotiate, and even resist those conventions is far more important. Formatting conventions do not exist in a vacuum, and while they are solidified in style guides and other texts, they are often fluid and change depending on technologies and rhetorical situations. For instance, the gold standard of student paper formatting exists for several reasons, not the least of which involves Microsoft’s push to use Times as the default font in word processors and web browsers. A knowledge of why those conventions exist, how to negotiate them, and the consequences for following and/or breaking them is far more useful for students than simply being forced to follow them blindly.