Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Welcome back to our January Earthwatch Mondays series.

Dodge has been working with the Earthwatch Institute to offer Educator Fellowships to New Jersey’s K-12 public school teachers “so they can return to the classroom and community to advance an ethic of environmental stewardship and empower the students’ voices.”

You can see the first installment of the Teacher Chronicles here.  For the next three Mondays you will read teacher fellow responses to a series of questions regarding expeditions that have helped them build science skills, increase scientific literacy, and improve environmental stewardship through hands-on, inquiry based learning.

This week, meet Matt Farber, who participated on “Costa Rican Coffee – From Community to Cup” from August 9-16 2009 with Earthwatch Scientist Sebastián Castro Tanzi. Matt is a sixth and seventh grade social studies teacher at Valleyview Middle School in Denville, NJ.

Q. What did you learn in the field and how did you bring your experience back to the classroom?

The Earthwatch expedition I took, “Costa Rica Coffee – From Community to Cup,” was a natural extension of what I try to bring to my students. I am a social studies teacher at Valleyview Middle School, in Denville, New Jersey. This expedition was an excellent opportunity for me to show my social studies students how we can maintain a sustainable future. My ultimate goal was for my students to see themselves as global citizens.

In the field, we randomly picked coffee plants and counted productive and non-productive branches and berries. We also took soil samples. The coffee farms were sometimes very steep. We learned the benefits of having shade-grown coffee plants. Banana trees often provide the shade. The idea is that shade trees prevent erosion & return nutrients to the soil. This is a sustainable way to farm without using harmful herbicides and/or pesticides.

Q. What did your students think of the lesson?

The first topic we cover in seventh grade social studies is the Jamestown Colony. Jamestown succeeded due to its successful cultivation of tobacco as an exported cash crop. It was easy to point out the parallels that exist between the world of 1607 and today. My students got a lot out of the lesson. Three of my classes created a collaborative slideshow on VoiceThread.com:

2nd period slideshow

5th period slideshow

7th period slideshow

I created a bulletin board detailing my experience, as well as the town newspaper’s coverage of my adventure. I often refer to the pictures I posted when I teach about global citizenship.

This experience left a lasting impression on many of my students. From bananas to coffee to chocolate, I receive regular reports when my students spot the Fair Trade logo in stores. One of my students pointed out that his family gave out Fair Trade candy for Halloween. As a holiday gift, that student gave me a container of Fair Trade certified cocoa.

Q. How did you benefit both personally and professionally from your Earthwatch experience?

This experience helped me to become even more of a conscious consumer. I understand better that we have the power to “vote” simply by making better decisions when I shop. By paying a little bit more for Fair Trade certified products, we receive better quality products and help local communities. Witnessing the success of the Tarrazu region of Costa Rica was all the proof I needed to see the “win-win scenario” that can exist!

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For a really thorough and interesting look at his fellowship, you can visit Matt’s Earthwatch blog here.

For his terrific classroom blog, click here.

Dodge is in conversations with Earthwatch to explore how the fellowships might become more closely aligned with other programs that emphasize sustainable community practices, including the Cloud Institute’s NJ Learns program, the Monarch Teacher Network and Sustainable Jersey. We welcome your thoughts about the teacher expeditions and potential connections to related efforts in New Jersey.

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Earthwatch is the nation’s leading environmental volunteer organization supporting sustainable development worldwide, recruiting volunteers from stakeholder groups (notably teachers, students, journalists, community and government leaders and multi-national corporations) to participate in innovative research programs benefiting environmental issues and capacity building. Earthwatch’s mission is to engage people in scientific field research and education to promote the understanding and action necessary for a sustainable world.

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David Grant, President and CEO

I have been reading Michael Sandel’s book Justice, which stems from his popular course of the same name at Harvard.  In between chapters over the weekend, I have been reading proposals from nonprofit organizations seeking funding from Dodge in the new year.

In both cases, the predominant question on my mind has been Sandel’s subtitle: What’s The Right Thing To Do?

The book, by the way, would be a great holiday present for anyone you know who appreciates having his or her assumptions challenged.  Just when you think you know what “the right thing to do” is, Sandel asks you to look at it another way.

He begins with some fascinating questions of judgment and, inevitably, politics, using real life situations.  Should there be laws against price gouging in the wake of natural disasters?  Should Purple Hearts be awarded for psychological injuries?  Should the CEO’s and top executives of banks bailed out with taxpayer money get bonuses?

And he uses hypothetical situations.  If you were the engineer on a runaway train, with five people working on the track in front of you, and you could turn onto a side track where one person was working, would you?  Most people say yes.  If you were watching the runaway train from a bridge and could push one person onto the tracks to save the five people working further down them, would you?  Most people say no.  In each case, there is a choice: either one person will die or five people will die. Yet we make different judgments.  It is not just about numbers and outcomes.

Sandel’s theme is that there are three main ways to think about justice: maximizing welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue.

I began to cast the proposals to Dodge in these terms and realize our social investments of limited resources require us to reflect on these matters.  How shall we compare a local arts group with a local soup kitchen, for example? Do we support the educational organization that brings freedom of choice and opportunity to a small number of underserved students in a dramatic, transformational way?  Or do we back efforts to incrementally improve an educational system that affects thousands of students?

Sandel unpacks that last idea: the utilitarian idea of “the greatest good for the greatest number” – both its strengths and its weaknesses. That chapter helps me understand why at some gatherings of foundations, there are strong pleas for the whole field to drop everything except a focus on mitigating climate change.

At Dodge, we use the themes Creativity and Sustainability as if they were virtues.  But I imagine Sandel countering: “Do you value the creativity it takes to create a new weapon?  Is everything worth sustaining?”

Clearly not.  I appreciate how Sandel frames the process of responsible moral judgment as “a dialectic between our judgments about particular situations and the principals we affirm on reflection.”  It reminds me again of the importance of “Quadrant II” time in organizations – that precious time we set aside and protect for important matters that are not urgent.  It is our time to reflect on lessons learned from action and guiding principles for future decisions.

It is both disconcerting and liberating to understand anew through reading Justice that the right thing to do is not always clear to a single individual, let alone a group, no matter how much thoughtful attention you pay to a given situation or choice.  But as he writes, “Thinking about justice seems inescapably to engage us in thinking about the best way to live,” and for us at Dodge, that takes us to the heart of our mission of fostering a more livable world.

We will never, in Sandel’s words, “resolve (our) disagreements once and for all.”  But these discussions “can give shape to the arguments we have, and bring moral clarity to the alternatives we confront.”

Another cycle of grantmaking is underway.

By Wendy Liscow, Program Officer

Last week I wrote about the importance of recognizing and instilling public value for the arts. So how do we do this? Are there things you are doing as an organization or as an individual that are helping people recognize the importance of the arts in their lives?

Cultural institutions often approach the task of creating value by working to engage people in an experience that goes beyond the basic activity of witnessing the final product of a creative process. They look for ways to deepen the practice of viewing a play, dance, music event, or exhibition by finding unique ways to connect to the lives of their patrons. This requires ingenuity and thinking outside the standard marketing tactics box.

For example, over the past three years, the George Street Playhouse has been connecting their audiences to theatre through an innovative Book Club Package that converts the theatre viewing experience into a three-step engagement. Through a “Reading, Talking, Seeing” process they enhance a book discussion group’s ability to transform the solitary reading practice into a communal activity that takes the words off the page and live onto the stage. And, as an enthusiastic book club member, I am willing to bet it will be even more fun! (more…)

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

In “The Shout,” Simon Armitage tells the story of a grade-school science experiment where he and another boy were challenged to “measure the size of the human voice.” It could be argued that all poets face this challenge every time they attempt to compose a poem.

Describing the improvised experiment’s ultimate failure, Armitage says, “It’s at that point where the experiment breaks down that I try and get the poetry to rush in and fill the gap.”

Armitage has spent his adult life trying to “get the poetry to rush in and fill the gap.” It is, apparently, only through writing “The Shout” that he can approach the memory of his lost schoolmate. Even with all its humor, “The Christening” journeys through some complex and troubling notions before it reaches that closing line, “stuff comes blurting out.”

Poetry begins where the human voice, where common speech, break down. In “The Music of Poetry,” T. S. Eliot wrote that poetry should strike the reader or listener as “how I should talk if I could talk poetry.”

But of course, when we have the most important things to say, we discover we cannot say exactly what we mean. Maybe this is why poetry and all the arts emerged.

In times of great ecstasy or distress, syntax shatters. Our speech becomes highly repetitious and rhythmic. Where speech fails us, poetry begins. It could be that laughter and weeping, which are also highly rhythmic and repetitious, have had as direct an influence on the rhythmic shape of poetry as any of our notions about prosody.

“The Shout” can be found in Selected Poems. Simon Armitage’s most recent collection is Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid. Visit our 2008 Festival Poet Pages for a biography of Simon Armitage.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Patricia Smith, Robin Robertson, and others.

Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

In his poems “Ghosts,” “Country Fair” and “Sunday Papers,” Charles Simic brings us into a world were absurdity is accepted as a mundane fact of life.

Simic is sometimes called a surrealist. Yet the visitation in “Ghosts” is described by someone who remains utterly rational. The details are examined carefully, almost clinically. It wouldn’t take much of an adjustment for Simic to tell us that the poem is meant as a fantasy, or as a product of the unconscious. But he doesn’t. Instead, he confesses, “I don’t believe any of it, and still I’m scared stiff.”

Some commentators also credit Simic with an ironic sense of humor. The woman in “Country Fair” and the audience listening to the reading both laugh at the six-legged dog. If we laugh, too, is it because Simic is trying to be funny?

Simic’s poem about the relaxing weekend ritual of reading the “Sunday Papers” begins, “The butchery of the innocent never stops.” It ends with the couple preparing to share their Sunday roast. This familiar domestic image could suggest that together they have made a sanctuary against the chaotic violence of the time. Perhaps they have. But then is Simic’s inclusion of the detail that they are about to dine on a slaughtered lamb motivated by the desire to be ironic, humorous or surreal? Or by “the vague desire for truth and the mighty fear of it.”

“Ghosts,” “Country Fair” and “Sunday Papers” can be found in Sixty Poems. Charles Simic’s most recent collection is That Little Something. Visit the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet Pages for a biography of Charles Simic.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including C. D. Wright, Franz Wright and others.