Day 107

Agriculture is a complicated unit. Although the students have a degree of familiarity with how food is produced, the entire unit is intertwined. Since there is a lot of vocabulary in the unit, the students tend to memorize the definitions without seeing how they are connected.

One of the themes in human geography is sustainability. Agricultural sustainability seeks to make a profit for the producers, create a healthy ecosystem, and make society more equitable. Since most of the agricultural practices favor making a profit, the other to are sacrificed.

To get at connecting all of the terms to end the unit on a positive note, the students created public service announcements to encourage people to support more sustainable agricultural practices.

Overall, they didn’t take much time to create; however, watching the students work collaboratively to find deeper understanding of something they were interested in was nothing short of amazing. The students found more about organic farming than I thought was possible in a short time frame. They were connecting all of the terms into a cause/effect persuasive video. It was fun watch the students unearth the information themselves.

Here is one example that the students put together.