Bill Silvert underscores a point I was trying to make in my original post. Humans are not only a part of the ecosystem; they have become one of the dominant ecologicaland geological forces on the planet.
My own approach to this has been to insert humanity into the picture as case studies to illustrate mainstream ecological themes. Examples: Talking about Biogeochemical cycling - Introduce a section on cultural eutrophication and Lake Winnipeg. Talking about different population growth models - lets apply that to the human population and discuss issues of carying capacity. Of course, my class is supposed to be a SCIENCE class, and talking about Hamanity's role in the biosphere could threaten to bring out passionate views. But I am careful throughout to emphasize that if we want to solve environmental problems, understanding their biophysical basis is essential as a precursor to policy. One or two other posts to this thread separated out environmental and ecological science. I do not think such a separation is real. When we are talking about environmental science, we are talking about aspects of ecology. And there is another thing: we appear to be at a critical juncture in history. We are in the process of altering fundamental aspects of the biosphere. Numerous environmental problems (climate change, overfishing, soil erosion, peak oil, invasives etc) are reaching critical junctures. Yet ( and I challenge teachers to probe student awareness of these issues) a majority of students are only vaguely aware of these problems. For this reason, I am continually thinking about ways to overhaul my teaching to keep the fundamentals but also teach about our new and unfortunate reality. Cheers, Andy Park (University of Winnipeg) Quoting William Silvert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I agree with Jeff's view that if an instructor also writes the textbook, the > students get a pretty narrow view of the field. There has to be an > alternative vision. > > I know one university where the entire department is collaborating on a > textbook, and that is a possible solution -- diversity of viewpoints, > consistent with department policy, and affordable. > > One point that has not come up is the scope of what we call ecology. I > attend a lot of international workshops and at the level where ecologists > are involved in policy issues it is clear that humans are port of the > ecosystem. To what extent is this taught? I think that if we compare this > discussion of textbooks with the parallel discussion of invasives we see > that trying to discuss any ecological issue without taking into account > human values as well as human intervention can be pretty futile. > > Bill Silvert > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Jeff Jewett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: <ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU> > Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 10:11 PM > Subject: textbook-free classes > > >> I have >> always had a problem, however, with instructors whose only "reading >> material" is something that they wrote themselves (whether it was a >> coursepack or something more formal). Every student learns differently, >> and not all students will relate well to any particular instructor's >> teaching style. >
