A topsy-turvy world
Using various images, we will reflect upon the importance of caring for the environment, which is vital for achieving sustainable development, and upon the consequences of failing to do so.
- Setting the scene within the area
Water is a limited resource, and the use people make of it, together with factors such as too little or too much rain, the rise in temperatures, etc., make it more difficult to have water that is accessible, safe and affordable for all human beings.
Caring for the environment is essential for achieving sustainable development.
Therefore, based on the topics studied in this course, such as the description and production of images, we are going to think about how water is used both well and badly.
Through the observation and analysis of a degraded landscape, pupils are to reflect upon the importance of caring for it and possible ways of doing so. This will require the pupils to create a new image through which to express ways of caring for the environment and using water responsibly.
- Goals
- Appreciating the importance of caring for the environment and the consequence of failing to do so
- Analysing images to detect one or more environmental problems
- Reconstructing those images, “eliminating” the environmental problems
- Content
- The expressiveness of images
- Environmental problems
- Planning study processes
- Knowing how to look at and analyse images
- Artistic expression
- Interest in understanding the environmental problems caused by the misuse of water
- Respect and consideration for other people’s opinions
- Basic competences studied
Competence in the culture of humanism and art
This unit contributes to the development of this competence by using an array of photographs to study natural landscapes that have been contaminated or eroded by human activity.By exploring and discussing what has happened through these pictures, pupils will recreate a “new” landscape, which will lead to greater understanding and a more respectful interaction by establishing a direct link with the impact their actions have on the natural environment.
Furthermore, pupils can relate these pictures and, therefore, the environmental issues they reflect, to the more immediate surroundings of their neighbourhood and/or the town where they live.
Processing information and honing digital skills
Using digital images, pupils will analyse shapes, colours, physical spaces, the social context, etc.What’s more, pupils are given the opportunity to create new images and messages based on 2.0 teaching resources, such as, for example, a digital poster.
Learning to learn
Based on a number of images featuring environmental disasters with a huge visual and emotional impact, the aim is to encourage an analysis and discussion of the causes behind them, as well as the suggestion of solutions, thereby helping pupils to become aware of how human beings have influenced the natural environment, in terms of both its destruction and its care and conservation.Competence for personal initiative and independence
Each pupil will create a new image, and given that this is an individual task, it will differ from the interpretation made by the other classmates, favouring the acceptance of other opinions when “mending” the environment.In order to create this new image, each pupil is to take into account what they have seen in the picture of the degraded environment and will investigate and plan how to adopt a perspective that presents the natural environment in a more positive light.
The unit develops pupils’ creativity, autonomy and initiative by encouraging them to find solutions through the production of a new image.
Social competence and citizenship
This unit favours the building and reinforcement of a collective identity of environmental responsibility, care and conservation.This unit brings pupils closer to the art of photography in the format of photojournalism. The language of photography is a vehicle for universal communication and, what’s more, thanks to new technologies this language today now reaches out to a very large number of people anywhere in the world quickly, easily and very economically.
Photojournalism has a very important social role to play, as it allows reporting on, disseminating and denouncing situations currently being witnessed throughout the world.
Competence in language communication
Pupils will answer a number of questions both orally and in writing, firstly about their interests and tastes in the art of photography in general.They will then choose one of the pictures of different natural disasters, answering a series of questions linked to that image.
In exercise 2, pupils are asked to re-imagine the contaminated or degraded landscape, so the task can be used to describe the scene, placing particular emphasis on the shapes, colours, textures, etc.
Competence in mathematics
Pupils will draw the landscape they have chosen in a positive way, arranging the features in the same positions, distances, sizes, orientations, etc. they had in the original picture, which will help them to learn about spatial depiction.Competence in the culture of science, technology and health
Pupils will observe a series of natural settings and landscapes that have been degraded by human activity, noting the changes that have occurred in terms of colours, shapes, and the natural environment as a whole, noting the absence of plant and animal life.Through a scientific approach: observation, analysis, reflection…pupils will recreate the landscape in question, but this time in a way that restores life to it.
- Values studied: