Global climate change, human rights, hunger, and political corruption

¶ … Global Environmental & Social Problems

The four unit course in Contemporary Global Environmental and Social Problems explores and critiques some of the most pressing global social / environmental issues and problems that are not limited to one nation or region. Thesis: The most serious environmental and social issues on the planet -- issues that threaten the health, safety and productivity of the human race -- should be given serious, critical thought and research by students, because they will inherit the ramifications and problems related to those pivotal issues.

While the science will be reviewed, the focus is on how climate change impacts people and the lands and waters they depend on, and on the wildlife. The world is already being impacted by global climate change.

Unit Two delves into the problems associated with human rights, including the nations and political movements that abuse human rights and the leadership that informs society about the horrific abusive policies that are ongoing.

Unit Three examines hunger and world food production, including the efforts to provide food for the hungry (including hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war-torn regions) and the potentially serious consequences of corporations' widespread efforts to grow genetically modified organisms (GMOs), i.e., foods, including rice, wheat, and other staples of human diet.

Unit Four -- money and politics in democratic societies -- examines how governments and societies are shaped and directed by the infusion of money; to wit, it has become an accepted norm for wealthy individuals and groups with large quantities of money and other resources to dictate their desires and policies to society.

The four-unit course offers students the opportunity to learn and to utilize pure investigative strategies -- using for the most part scholarly academic sources while eschewing the ideological biases projected by contemporary media members -- in order to present their own potential solutions to social and environmental problems. Utilizing structured, well-founded research strategies and critical thinking skills, students' work will be evaluated on originality, validity of sources, and on thoroughness of subject presentation.

Prerequisites: at least one course with a concentration in the social sciences or history. Junior college level reading, comprehension, and writing skills.

Course Learning Outcomes -- Unit One

The first unit, Global Climate Change is concerned not just with the science (rising temperatures and a changing global climate empirically recorded by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - IPCC) but climate change's impact on human society and the natural world. This unit explores the rising sea levels and how rising tidal flooding impacts societies that live near the oceans and depend upon the oceans for their survival. Rising sea levels will impact iconic and historic sites like the Everglades, Ellis Island, and Cape Canaveral among other places.

This unit examines how intense heat waves and wildfires -- due to climate change -- affect societies (health risks including aggravating existing medical conditions). The natural world is already being negatively impacted as tens of millions of trees in the Rocky Mountains are already stressed and/or dead from heat and from attacks by tree-killing insects. Migratory birds are impacted as spring arrives earlier; marine life are changing patterns as sea temperatures rise. Droughts are more severe and on the other hand there has been an enormous increase reported in the amount of rainfall in the Northeast region of the U.S. .

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that climate change is increasingly seen as a current and future cause of hunger and poverty; that is because droughts, flooding, and changing climatic patterns that require crops to be farmed in different ways and those adjustments may not be accomplished in a seamless way (WHO, 2013).

Unit One also delves into the stubborn resistance to accepting global climate change on the part of conservative politicians, conservative talk radio and television personalities, and on the part of evangelical religious groups. Some religious organizations deny science (including evolution) and believe the God made the planet about 10,000 years ago. This unit delves into the beliefs of Evangelical Christians vis-a-vis Creationism; and it encourages research into how their faith provides them with spiritual answers to environmental and social problems -- and in effect encourages them to turn their backs on science and to insist that alternatives to evolution should be published in high school science textbooks.

Interactive / Multimedia Element: Students will arrange a debate between a noted local expert on climate change (preferably a scholar or scientist) and a credible person who does not accept that humans are the cause of global climate change. A key for students will to be thoroughly informed as to scholarship on the topic. It will be important to research a peer-reviewed article by Schuldt, who explains that a third of people who have been polled say they have no knowledge of climate change (Schuldt, 2014). It would be an important event to share with the entire campus community, if possible. A public debate with worthy, credible individuals squaring off on this contentious issue would get local news coverage and advance the reputation of the college and of the course as well. A very positive learning experience for students; also, this debate should be streaming live on the Internet.

This event is to be considered an assignment, with up to six students working together to produce the debate. Another assignment to be given would be to interview a pastor of a local evangelical congregation, offering him the chance to explain how the interpretation of the Bible offers the church the needed information on climate change and evolution.

Course Learning Outcomes -- Unit Two

Unit Two -- human rights investigations provide students with an opportunity to learn from ongoing and unconscionable contemporary abuses that have caused the deaths and brutal detainment of millions of innocent people. Human trafficking -- including the kidnapping and forced prostitution of tens of thousands of young women in particular -- is a key study area in the human rights genre. There are a number of subjects within the area of human rights abuses that will be studied, including: a) prisoners incarcerated without due process; b) the death penalty and how and where it is administered; c) hundreds of thousands of refugees that are living in ramshackle tent cities in Africa and the Middle East, driven from their homes by civil war and extremist / jihadist violence; d) torture is a policy that has even been utilized by civil societies like the United States; e) children prevented (by radical Islamic groups) from achieving an education are actually being denied their human rights; f) gender-based violence is perpetrated on women in numerous societies around the globe; g) genocide, currently conducted in Iraq and Syria by the ISIS terrorist organization, is just one example and there are more worthy of investigation by students; and h) gay and lesbian people have their human rights abused in various places around the globe, and this, too, is a worthy human rights issue to review.

In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations. How many nations signed on to the Declaration, and how effective has it been? This and other questions germane to human rights will be covered in Unit Two.

Interactive / Multimedia Element: Students will arrange for a member of Amnesty International to be part of a Skype video interactive conference on campus. The questions that need to be prepared prior to this interactive dialogue will be reviewed by the instructor, so that a factually accurate interrogative presentation can be made by those taking the course.

An assignment for this unit would involve students interviewing law enforcement (preferably an FBI officer that has worked on human trafficking issues, or a U.S. Attorney with experience in this genre).

Course Learning Outcomes -- Unit Four

The influence of money in America's democracy has been a subject of discussion and debate for many years. But in recent years, since the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, This unit will place emphasis on how a 5-4 decision by the High Court (five Republicans and four Democrats) determined that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives the right to any person or corporation or for-profit group the right to spend any amount of money on a campaign with no accountability required whatsoever. This, in the view of many scholars, has opened the floodgates to shadowy sources of money being lavished on candidates that agree with the political ideology of the person or corporation with the deep pockets.

Questions for examination: a) has the Citizens United Supreme Court decision changed the way democracy functions in the United States? b) How much shadowy, mystery money went into attack ads against Democrat candidates in the 2014 election? c) What form of legislation could level the playing field and allow candidates who are not friends of billionaires a fair chance at getting elected? And d) what are scholars and historians saying about how Citizens United has changed the landscape of American electoral politics?

Interactive / Multimedia Element: Students will access the audio portion of the Justices of the Supreme Court as they debated Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2012 in Washington, D.C., and write a screenplay based on the quotes from the 9 justices. The screenplay also incorporates views from scholars who have researched the issues and found that democracy has been (and is being) hijacked by billionaires with ideologically-driven agendas.

One of the possible assignments could be an interview with a professor who has published a book on democracy and the influence of money -- and included in the assignment should be a balancing interview with a local Republican leader who sees no problem with the Citizens United High Court ruling.

Course Design

An excellent design for this four-unit course would be to follow Fink's Framework in the Third Edition of Teaching at its Best, authored by Linda B. Nilson. Fink's Framework is attractive in this context because it is not hierarchical but rather it allows students to accumulate data and information from resources at their own speed, and brings in interactive technologies as well. This course begins with foundational knowledge and then allows students to add outcomes as they follow guidelines and learn by doing the research (Nilson, 2010).

Actually, the course design for this learning experience also borrows from Anderson and Krathwohl (2000). First, the student must remember what the goal of the course is, and understand the foundational knowledge that is presented at the outset of the course. That, in the Anderson and Krathwohl presentation is Remembering = Knowledge (Nilson, 2010). The second step in their effort to succeed in this course is Understanding = Comprehension (Nilson, 2010). Third and fourth are: Applying = Application, and Analyzing = Analysis (Nilson, 2010). The fifth step in the Anderson and Krathwohl's friendly amendments to Bloom's Taxonomy is Evaluating = Evaluation, and number six is Creating = Synthesis (Nilson, 2010). This course design lends itself to quality assessments of students' learning.

Resource Bank for Knowledge Discoveries

Carrying the framework for the course design further, students will be asked to create a database in which they may catalogue new-found, provable data and other evidence that trumps existing misconceptions and misinformation in any of the four units (Nilson, 2010). For example, students digging into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will find empirical evidence that humans are indeed contributing to the greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere and cause climate change. That knowledge should be synthesized and logged into the database.

The Role of Assessment in Learning and Teaching

Without a proven formula for assessing the learning that is taking place in this four unit college course an instructor cannot know how effective his or her presentation has been. The bottom line for a college instructor is that assessments are needed in order to measure the true value of the learning experience. Nilson points to the use of classroom assessment techniques (CATs), which the author explains allows the instructor to review the approach taken to learning, and if the CATs indicate that there are gaps in the learning process, the instructor can make the appropriate adjustments in the presentation of materials (Nilson, 2010).

The CATs strategy is not designed to be a once-over process; it should be an ongoing process, Nilson explains. One idea that has been successful is to have the instructor first of all to fully explain the assessment process to the students, and hence there should be transparency as to the instructor's motives and intentions. That way, students will likely be more cooperative when asked to provide input as to the quality of the instruction. The four categories of CATs that an instructor may choose from include: a) declarative learning has to do with the principals and facts of the course -- the level of comprehension, not memorized facts or data; b) procedural learning relates to reasoning and critical thinking -- plus the ability of students to write with good discipline; c) conditional learning has to do with students' skills at solving problems; and d) reflective learning challenges the values and beliefs -- and motives -- of students as they work their way through the course (Nilson, 2010).

Noted scholar K.L. Webber insists that learning should be a holistic experience, a learner-centered experience, not focused necessarily on the retention of knowledge but rather on problem solving and self-assessment of progress in leaning (Webber, 2012). Another scholar, B. Stivers, explains that an effective assessment not only shows the instructor how effective the presentations are enhancing learning, assessments must also improve relationships between students, instructors, and the college administration as well (Stivers, 2009). Providing the best, most open path to feedback by students should always be a goal of any assessment, Stivers continues; and honest, candid feedback should present the instructor with the kind of critique of his or her teaching style that can help improve presentations.

Discussion

Students in colleges and universities cannot be allowed to be ignorant of the most serious environmental and social problems on the planet. This four unit course goes into depth about global climate change (and its impacts on people, the land and wildlife), about human rights violations, about hunger and food production, and about the corrupting influence of money, further made undemocratic by the Citizens United. Completing this course with high marks will not offer the student all the problems and all the answers. But it will stimulate critical thinking and give students a chance to learn how to conduct research.