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Becoming a Good Creature

Enduring Understandings and Guiding Questions for Exploring the Big Ideas of Sustainability

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Big Idea of Sustainability: Place

Natural and human communities together make up one’s place.

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Place: Enduring Understandings

  • Human culture shapes, and is shaped, by the land.
  • Landscape impacts how we live.
  • Human and natural communities interact in a place.
  • We are connected to the people that lived in this place before us.
  • Each person, living, and nonliving thing is influenced by place.
  • Living and nonliving things influence and contribute to their place.
  • The needs, concerns, systems, and cycles in each place are different and indicative of the ecological, geological, cultural and historic cycles that have happened and are happening here.

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Guiding Questions for Place

Elementary School:

    • What and who makes up your place?
    • What stories are here?

Middle School:

    • How do humans and the natural world interact?
    • How are people connected to the past?

High School:

    • How are we shaped by the land? How do we shape the land?
    • How does where we live impact how we live?

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Big Idea of Sustainability: Interdependence

All living things are connected. Every organism, system, and place depends on others.

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA-NC

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Interdependence: Enduring Understandings

  • All things are connected.
  • Every organism depends on others.
  • Every system depends on others.
  • Every place depends on others.
  • Human communities can learn from natural systems and other human systems.
  • Human systems depend on natural systems.
  • Our choices have multiple impacts on human and natural communities.

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Guiding Questions for Interdependence

Elementary School:

    • How are we all connected?
    • Who or what depends on you?

Middle School:

    • In what ways do you depend on others?
    • In what ways do you depend on natural systems?

High School:

    • How do our choices affect us, our community, and the world?
    • What can communities learn from natural systems to improve our common future?

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Big Idea of Sustainability: Ability To Make A Difference

Everyone has the ability to change or impact a system, community, and themselves.

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Ability To Make A Difference Enduring Understandings

  • Our choices impact ourselves, our communities, and our world.
  • I can make a difference.
  • We can make a difference.
  • Everyone has the ability to make a difference for themselves, their community, and their place.
  • No can do everything, but everyone can do something.
  • Everyone can, and does, affect systems positively or negatively.

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Guiding Questions for Ability To Make a Difference

Elementary School:

    • How can one individual make a difference?
    • How can a group of individuals make a difference?

Middle School:

    • What does it mean to be a citizen in our neighborhood?
    • What can you do to make a change in a system?

High School:

    • How do our choices affect ourselves, our communities, and the world?
    • What is your responsibility to yourself, your community, and the world?