Lets Discuss! Creating a Visual

To culminate the work that I have been doing over the past semester on my theoretical framework we spent the last week putting together a scholarly poster to present our progress. It was interesting creating the poster because it does not feel as if my work is a finished product, but it definitely felt like...

New Sources and Theories; Annotated Bibliography Updates

Over the past few weeks I have been working on rethinking my framework and the scholarly sources that I am going to be drawing from the construct it. After turning in my annotated bibliography I spent some time reflecting on the work that I had done, and after lots of thought realized that many of...

Thinking Big Between One and Two

The past week in environmental theory we began by thinking big, discussing theoretical notions of counting beyond and between two. Understanding these concepts was difficult, and we all struggled together to unpack them. From my basic understanding, the differences in counting between one and two come from the ideas of dualism versus monism. The concept...

Contemplating the Usefulness of Utopias and Dystopias in Education

This past week in our theory class we talked about the ideas of utopias and dystopias and their prevalence in society. Understanding these ideologies can be useful in analyzing others perceptions of reality using this to potentially enact change. The paper that we read for class by Proctor and Berry wrote about why ideologies utopias...

Brainstorming Potential Framework to Focus Pathways

The past week has been a wild ride, working on putting together my annotated bibliography for my thesis framework. I felt that I really began to understand the many sources of literature that fell under my framework. Finding all of these scholarly sources was challenging, and I kept second guessing myself as to which ones would...

Symposium Inspiration: Applications of Uneven Development

This past week we had the annual Environmental Affairs Symposium. The speaker Sunita Narain, the Director General for Science and Environment in India gave an inspirational talk about uneven development in regard to climate change, specifically focusing on air pollution, transportation and waste disposal in India. Sunita began by discussing broad concepts and addressing the...

Breaking Down Big Words

In the past week in preparation for putting together an annotated bibliography, I have been working on breaking down my framing question and pulling apart the big words. As of now my framing question is, how can elementary education play a role in changing our food systems? The two big words that I have been...

Is it Inclusive? How Broad Can Theory Be?

In the past week my theories class has been diving into, what I see as some more concrete examples of environmental theory. Leading up to this week we had been discussing broad ideas of how we can define environmental theory and the non concrete nature of the field. We thought about where our own values...

Fussing Over Framing Questions

In the past week I have been able to make some great progress towards my thesis by starting to put together a framing question and some topic summaries. The framing question is supposed to be a broad guiding question for research. Framing questions are often unanswerable and can occasionally use big words in a general...

Ecotypes, Theory and Direct Action – What Matters?

Thinking back to the previous week and the panel of speakers that we had from different scholarly disciplines, I have been reflecting on the idea of how hard it is to define environmental theory. As Jessica Kleiss a professor of the natural sciences and Bruce Suttmeier a professor of humanities describe theories in their disciplines...