After going into three 5th grade classrooms and sharing a bit of what I do to advocate for the planet, for life on earth, I realized I needed to start at the beginning (no, not the big bang).
I hadn’t been in a classroom for a while and my first day reminded me what I’d forgotten. I forgot to start with a pre-assessment, to note where the students were starting in their knowledge and feelings toward the multiple crises we are facing. I forgot to base the learning on hope and resilience. So I started over.
I wove together some of the resources represented in my previous essay starting with three questions from the Active Hope training.
For question one, I used Active Hope’s “problem-ometer,” a semicircle going from 0 on the left to 10 on the right. O meaning no problems in the world at all, and 10 meaning catastrophic problems facing us. Students were instructed to choose the number that best reflected where they thought society’s problems were. (They must be learning decimals because many chose a decimal answer when I had only given whole number examples.) Problems mentioned were COVID, homelessness, global warming, extinctions of animals, pollution, plastic pollution…racism… the list grows.
Question 1) Considering our world situation, how serious are the problems we face? (Rate 1–10)
Question Two — Response-ometer for society
2) Rate our collective response (society — the folks around you). Again, looking at the graphic on the screen and watching the Active Hope video, where did the students think that the overall response of the government, news media, social media, movies, books, people around them fit on the response-ometer. Choose a number from 1–10 to rate how you think society is responding to its problems.
Question Three — Response-ometer for you personally
3) Rate your own response. Do you think about the problems we are facing, climate change, mass extinctions, COVID, homelessness, racism… a lot? Do you do everything you can or just a little? Any answer is fine, this is your personal self-assessment. Rate your answer from 1–10.
Generally, the problem-ometer rated the highest numbers (7–10), the response of society overall received the lowest numbers (3–5), and the student’s responses lay somewhere in between (4–7).
Question Four — Gratitude
4) Are you aware of how gratitude can help you cope with challenges like COVID and anxiety for the future? (if yes, explain).
I know that some of the 5th-grade teachers are diligent about bringing mindfulness into the classroom through online meditation practices, but I wasn’t sure about the group as a whole. I knew I wanted to ground future lessons in gratitude as done in the Active Hope Work that Reconnects.
For the second page of the self-assessment, I used an idea from a friend’s workshop Circles of Hope and Resilience. The graphic is a smaller circle labeled Sphere of Control surrounded by a larger circle labeled Sphere of Influence. Beyond the second circle to the border of the paper, is the area beyond our control, what we feel we have no influence over.
For my example, I put “eat less meat” in the sphere of control and explained that since I know that animal agriculture causes environmental damage and methane emissions, I personally eat very little meat. In my sphere of influence, I share articles and movies with my friends and family explaining the problems of animal agriculture and why it is better for ourselves and the planet to eat less meat. I also talk about it with people I meet. For the outside part, beyond my circle of influence, I put “agricultural policy.” I don’t really have a lot of influence over what farmers do and what laws we have to guide their actions.
We started with Sphere of Control first and spent the most time there. Since this was the pre-assessment, I made it clear that it was perfectly fine if they didn’t have a lot to write on their papers. Typical answers were ‘walk instead of going in a car’ or ‘use less plastic.’ At home, as I reviewed the papers, I made for each class a list of actions they are doing to respond to the world’s problems. I will add their new thoughts to the list as our time together continues.
Here is the list from Ms. D’s class.
I (can)… be more green, use less plastic, join the school green team, help the homeless, walk to and from school, use recyclable bags, eat vegetables, travel in an electric car, pick up trash/litter, save water, take care of my mom, don’t do drugs, eat plants, drive less — walk or bike instead, use reusable items not disposable ones, eat healthier, waste less, reuse plastic water bottles or reusable ones, plant a tree, eat less meat, re-use more- example, paper.
We then moved to the Sphere of Influence. Students listed their parents and friends as people they would talk to and make changes with. I did not focus much on “Everything Else” since I knew that would be challenging for 5th graders and it won’t be the focus of our lessons. We won’t focus on what we don’t have control over.
After they had finished the pre-assessment and I had collected the papers, I wrote the word Hope on the whiteboard with an underlined blank before the word Hope.
I ended our time together with an anecdote from Ayana Elizabeth Johnson co-editor of All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, former co-host of the How to Save a Planet podcast, and founder of the Urban Ocean Lab. She said that many people would come to her and ask her for hope. They want her to tell them something hopeful. She says she can’t do that, but she invites them to help make hope through their actions. This is the same as the concept of Active Hope.
I explained that I would be coming back to class to guide them through some of the major problems we face, the major players causing the problems, and how we could be engaged in solutions, ways of creating a better future. The work will culminate in a service project using Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots program as a guide.
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Previously Published on Medium
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