Will you be in another state? Country? Continent? What will make you happy? Family? Adventure? Art? Music? What will you be doing? Fighting to end climate change? Teaching children to read? Farming? Working with technology? Running your own business?
Questions like this, from the vast and philosophical to the minute and practical, have overwhelmed the human conscious for centuries. Times have changed, but the basic concern of every human being on this Earth has not—How will you survive in the time you live?
In this course, students will look at North American nonfiction texts and films with a focus on the themes of surviving, sustaining and connecting. Using these texts as a foundation for the course, students will analyze the challenges many authors faced with natural landscapes—mountains, deserts, and arctic landscapes—and how these physical challenges often opened the door for writers to think more philosophically about their own lives, and the experience that each human being goes through as he or she survives in the world in which he/she lives.
From here, students will reflect on their own challenging experiences (past and present)—outdoors in the natural world, with relationships, in local issues, with academics—and explore how skills as a reader, writer, and orator are necessary to surviving as a worker and citizen in the 21st Century. Students will also look at the challenges facing the world they have inherited, focusing on the issue of sustainability, and use the lessons learned from the past, and the skills honed at an individual level, to advocate for their own future.
