Teach Earth Action’s job is to place a lot of ingredients in your Practices Kitchen. How about a buffet of ingredients: you select the ingredients--a pinch of this, a palm of that--and make a meal out of it--let’s call this a unit, call that a class. Let’s lift the students off the page, get them out of the text, and later place them back on the page—well fed from carbon friendly, local and nutritious food. 

Some Conceptual Recipes and Ruminations for curriculum design

• What are the realities and politics of teaching students to become political and active around climate justice? What are the politics of creating a moral being?

• If we believe our students have the right to nutritious carbon friendly food, how do we bring such food into our campuses, into our classrooms, into the communities in which our students live and shop? 

• Given that food waste is one of the top ten contributors to global warming, how can we increase consciousness of food waste in our students’ lives and decrease food waste on our campuses? 

• Prototyping transformation is extremely imperfect, thankfully. These things always grow, just like sourdough starter, thankfully.

• How do we build out a climate justice initiative in our History class, our Communications class, our English class that we want to pitch to the city council?

• Your classroom is a climate crisis solution, how can you meet the SLOs and subsume the expectations of the course outline? 

• Student initiatives don’t have to end when the semester ends--they can be handed off from semester to semester, from student to student. 

• How can our teaching match the meaningfulness of life, the weight on these students’ shoulders, the bludgeoning of our beloved critical thinking to a bloody pulp, the liminal wild, death-life of Mother Earth?

• What is the difference between: a test and Action Learning? Between: eating while surfing the internet and an ant-invaded picnic?

• What is the special value of Action Learning  for our educationally traumatized students?