Activities

Scenario mapping is a visual tool to help students show how an everyday activity depends on resources from the Earth and energy from the Sun. 

What is this learning strategy for?

Scenario mapping asks students to focus on and brainstorm about the resources required to carry out a particular human activity. It begins by looking at the people who are involved in the activity and then proceeds to identify the resources that these people depend on. Carefully chosen activities can highlight how hidden or “embedded” the natural resources required can be.

How to Introduce this Strategy?

• For younger children, consider using books such as David Suzuki and Kathy Vanderlinden’s You Are the Earth, David Suziki Foundation and Greystone Books, 1999.

• For older students, Annie Leonard’s short video The Story of Stuff will provide you with a dynamic way to take a deeper look at the life cycle of our consumer economy. Life cycle posters downloadable from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are another way to introduce this kind of systems thinking.

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How to use this strategy?

• In groups of 3 or 4, ask students to brainstorm a given scenario answering these questions:

  • Who are the people in this scenario?

  • What technologies, machines, and/or natural resources do these people use to do their jobs?

  • Where do the resources to make these technologies and machines come from?

• Choose an activity that is very familiar to students. 

  • Try, for example, a scenario that has become ubiquitous in North America: using the internet. 

  • Within that simple scenario, ask students to assume the role of friends using the Internet to chat. 

  • It is easy to show how this activity is dependent on matter and energy. Computers and modems require electricity to work. The electricity depends on coal, uranium, natural gas, silicon, moving water, and air. The hardware itself is made of a variety of materials: plastic, glass, metals, and semiconductors. And, so the world depends concretely on natural resources that come from the Earth or the Sun.

Tools for Thinking in System Terms

All maps or webs allow us to uncover or discover connections that are hidden or ignored. Once made visible by mapping, this connection-making is a main building block for learning to think in systems terms, or systems thinking. 

Supporting Students

• Start with a simple scenario that most students can relate to, such as the “Operating a Bakery” example on the next page. Provide students with an incomplete scenario map, and provide time for them to complete the map using a given word list.

• Model the development of another scenario, perhaps something like buying shoes, or borrowing a book from the library.

• Then ask students to map out a scenario of their own choosing in small groups. This can be more difficult than it seems. You may want to provide more examples, or start with whole-class brainstorming.

• Provide time for students to share their maps and ask questions that lead them to look deeper as needed.

Assessment and Evaluation

Students who can draw an accurate and in-depth scenario map have demonstrated knowledge and understanding of content, creative and critical thinking, expression of ideas and information using a visual form, and making connections between science, technology, society, and the environment.

A dependency web is a visual tool to help students uncover and then trace what we depend on for our daily lives. 

What is this learning strategy for?

A dependency webbing exercise provides focus for students to map out how they depend on a system, product, or resource (Smith, 1994). The dependency web puts the student at the centre of the map (in contrast to the scenario map which starts with the activity as the focal point). For example, students might be asked to make a web of their dependence on water. Students’ initial map might look like the diagram to the left.

After further discussion and questioning, students may come to realize that we depend on water in many other ways. Water is used in almost every industrial process - and so there is “embedded” water in everything we use. Also, in some buildings, water is used to carry and distribute heat. In Toronto, lake water is used to cool buildings as in Enwave’s Deep Lake Water Cooling system, which is the world’s largest. Needless to say, every plant requires water to grow, and so water is needed for the food we eat, and for the trees that shade us.

How to Use this Strategy

• Provide students with the name of the product, resource, or system related to the content you will be studying. Let’s call it “the topic”.

• Ask students to brainstorm ways in which they are dependent on what is being investigated as the topic.

• Then ask students to write the topic at the centre of a blank page and draw arrows that point away from the topic to show how they believe themselves to be dependent on it.

• Next, ask students to change their perspectives to generate ideas. For example, provide students with one minute each for thinking about the costs, the benefits, the short term, and the long term. Or, ask students to put themselves in different roles: as a baby, as a parent, as a sibling, or as a spouse.

Ideas for Introducing this Strategy

• A dependency web is especially useful in helping students see their reliance on technology, something that is often taken for granted. Ask students to brainstorm the many ways a particular technology may contribute to their lives as content for their dependency web.

• The sample web that follows illustrates what a biotechnology dependency web might look like. Adding “add me” to the technology being considered helps to focus students’ thinking on personal connections.

Dependancy Web and Systems Thinking

Ask students to imagine their lives after a city-wide system has failed. Questions to provoke systems thinking:

• How would your life be affected if the subway were disabled for one day? One week? One month?

• How would your life be affected if the electrical network were disabled for one day? One week? One month?

Supporting Students

• Students may need guidance in broadening their understanding of systems and subsystems. For example, students may not be able to trace their dependency on food to fuel for trucks if they haven’t given any thought to how food arrives at their homes.

• Some students may benefit from linear diagrams that illustrate such dependencies. For example, to promote thinking about how we depend on fuel, teachers can present students with a simplified view of food production and ask them “how is fuel used at each stage of the process?” Then, students can be prompted to think of how we all depend on fuel in other areas, such as health care, entertainment, and housing.

Literacy

• Provide students with the opportunity to convert their dependency webs into short paragraphs to address such questions as “Why is this material relevant?” “To what degree am I dependent on this?” “What would happen if it no longer existed?”

• Provide students with a list of words that convey dependency in different ways, e.g., reliant, dependent, crucial, critical, indispensable, vital, necessary, important, essential, key, required. Near the end of a section of study, students can use their dependency web diagram as a reference for a persuasive writing piece.

Technology

To raise students’ awareness of our dependency on “keystone” technological devices in our society, try using a dependency web for a light bulb, a transistor, an antibiotic, a needle, or a transformer. In some cases, students may be required to do research to complete a dependency web. 

Assessment and Evaluation

Students’ dependency webs reveal how well they are able to account for the relationship between their own lives and the topic under discussion. Students who can draw an accurate and in-depth dependency web have demonstrated knowledge and understanding of content, creative and critical thinking, expression of ideas and information using a visual form, and making connections between science, technology, society, and the environment. 

A concept map is a visual representation of ideas where relationships are made explicit through arrows and linking words. Concept maps are different from mind maps which are often used to flesh out a set of ideas or to brainstorm how tasks, ideas, and concepts are related. A concept map usually begins with a central or main ideas under which related, subordinate ideas are placed. 

What is this learning strategy for?

Concept mapping is a visual tool that can help reveal students’ prior experience. Importantly, concept mapping also enables students to create new knowledge through discovering connections among seemingly unconnected ideas and realities. The webbing of concepts, which students construct and deconstruct, also mirrors the complex relationships among people, nature’s “good and services,” and technologies as they exist in the real world.

How to Use this Strategy

• Identify a key concept or an issue related to the content under study.

• Provide time for pairs or groups of students to brainstorm sub-concepts that are related to the main concept or issue. Further elaborate on the sub-concepts by finding concepts that stem from them.

• Ask students to link the concepts with arrows. Over each arrow, there must be a linking work or phrase that describes or defines the relationship between the concepts.

• Provide time for students to revisit their concept map after further learning from videos, textbooks, or classroom notes.

Ideas For Introducing this Strategy

• On an overhead or a handout, engage students by showing them a sample concept map. Many concept maps such as the one on the next page can be found in teacher resource books or on the internet

• Introduce the idea of a concept map to students by explaining it as a visual organizer of ideas. Especially in the secondary grades, many students may already be familiar with visual organizers, since they are widely used. A compare/contrast discussion of concept mapping with other visual organizers may be useful.

• Ask students to study the sample concept map, and give them time to discuss questions and explore their ideas of a concept map. For example:

• How do you construct a concept map?

• How can the concept map help you organize what you know about the relationships or connections about the different components or parts?

• How else can concept maps help you in your studies?

• Construct a large concept map on the board, demonstrating its use with a concept that the students have chosen from a list provided that opens up the topic being pursued (e.g., fairness, animal rights, environmental degradation, sustainable development, participatory democracy).

How is Concept Mapping Effective?

• Environmental concepts are highly interrelated

• Information is organized in many ways, and students learn in many different ways, including visually.

• Concepts can be understood more fully in relation to other concepts.

• Visualizing connections helps students engage in more meaningful learning than does memorizing definitions.

Supporting  Students

• Provide support to students for whom this work is a new way of learning. For example, explain the social and academic benefits of group work, and use co-operative learning techniques to keep students focused on the task and to help them learn the necessary social skills.

• Post concept maps around the classroom.

• Conduct small-group instruction for teaching concept mapping. Encourage peer coaching by organizing students to work in mixed-ability groups.

• Provide opportunities for English as a Second Language/ English Literacy Development (ESL/ELD) students to rehearse or explore ideas in their first language. For example, students may sometimes work with bilingual peers or tutors to confirm their understanding in their first language before transferring to English. Some students may wish to make notes, complete graphic organizers, or write a first draft in their first language in preparation for doing so in English.

• Have students write out concepts on small pieces of paper so that they can readily move concepts about before a final concept map is made.

• Work with the Special Education and ESL/ELD teachers on incorporating concept mapping into other learning areas for more practice. Provide dictionaries and vocabulary lists.

Literacy

Many students have difficulty expressing the relationship between concepts because of scarcity of connective words in their vocabulary. Help students acquire this vocabulary by discussing and naming different kinds of relationships, and linking words that describe these relationships. 

Technology

Smart Ideas software is an electronic concept mapping program that supports the use of brainstorming, planning, organizing, and concept mapping. 

Assessment and Evaluation

Concept maps can be used as diagnostic assessment for examining what students already know about a given topic. Students may compare their initial concept map with one that they complete at the end of a unit of study. This allows both the students and the teacher to see what cognitive changes in learning have taken place. They can also be used in formative assessment or as an evaluation of what students have learned.