“Understanding Place”

RDT has created a unique Arts/Environmental Education Residency Program that will engage students and teachers in the mapping of their neighborhoods to take inventory of sustainability practices.

Through “place-based” education, inter-disciplinary activities and the arts, RDT will utilize the Green Map ® System tools to actively engage young people in the life of their communities.

The three-day inter-disciplinary curriculum based workshops will integrate
MATH, SCIENCE, SOCIAL STUDIES, ART AND DANCE and offer information on mapmaking process, the icons for sustainable living, assessment procedure, goals, methods, curriculum content and lesson plans to achieve success integrating and implementing the material.

These workshops will prepare teachers for a RDT Green Map Residency that will create a portrait of our community.

Dates:
June 21,22,23, 2010: Teacher Workshop
Next workshop coming up in August.
Time: 9:00 AM-3:00 PM

Where: Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, 138 West Broadway, Salt Lake City, UT

Credit choice: State Office In-Service re-certification credits or University of Utah (for a fee of $40)

Registration: Contact Lynne Larson, (801) 534-1000 or Email: lynne@rdtutah.org

Cost: Free: Sponsored by POPS, “Professional Outreach Program to Schools” funded through the Public Education Appropriation Committee and the Utah State Office of Education.

Activities: Mapping, investigating, analyzing, creating, exploring, moving.

What to Wear? Please wear casual, comfortable clothes and soft soled shoes.

What to Bring: Please bring a sack lunch, notebook, and writing utensils.

Goals of RDT’s Green Map Project

• Develop skills necessary to inventory and map a community leading to the creation of a digital and hard copy map of Salt Lake County.
• Encourage sustainability by educating students to make choices that produce energy efficiency, conservation and renewable energy.
• Promote an appreciation for history while stimulating an appetite for discovery and exploration.
• Encourage students to become contributing, productive citizens in their community.
• Develop greater awareness of the relationship we have with each other, with nature and with the world community.
• Increase knowledge about the complex inter-relation of land, plants, animals and humans, the web of life.
• Develop skills necessary to achieve the state and national standards for science education and dance education.
• Celebrate environmental progress and encourage environmental responsibility.
• Create an RDT arts-in-education residency that will integrate dance performances, Green Map icon© patterns, movement vocabulary, music, and other arts based on a community inventory.

Mapmaking: A New Paradigm for Environmental Education, Learning and Curriculum— Placed-based education asks simple questions: Where am I? What is the nature of this place? What sustains this community?

“If students are asked to respond creatively to their home-ground, they are able to position themselves with the continuum of nature and culture in that place. They become part of the community rather than a passive observer of it. Place-based education emphasizes creative exploration and the joyful realization of the ties that connect a person with nature and culture in her place. It does so out of the realization that love-love of nature, love of one’s neighbors and community-is a prime motivating factor in personal transformation and the transformation of culture.”
(David Sobel, Educator)

“The Green Map Project absorbs students in the realities of their surroundings, triggers curiosity about how these realities affect them, and causes them to wonder about what it means for their future health and happiness. Most wonderful of all, the Green Project gives students a powerfully authentic voice by teaching them how to express their response through dance. This communicative gift deeply imbeds understanding and memory and encourages their participation in making their corner of the world a better place.” (Carol Ann Goodson, Ph.D., State Fine Arts Specialist, Utah State Office of Education)