Teaching Kincentric Ecology in an Urban Environment
Item
- Title
- Teaching Kincentric Ecology in an Urban Environment
- Abstract/Description
- The author has written extensively about American Indian relationships to the natural world with a focus on his published concepts of kincentricity and kincentric ecology (Salmon, 2000). Both are explanatory models of how American Indian cultures feel a sense of direct relationship and responsibility toward their surroundings. Traditional American Indians understand that they are directly related to everyone and everything in their natural surroundings. Everything in one’s environment is animated with a life force. How then does one teach kincentric ecology in an urban environment? A suggestion is to assign projects that will help students recognize the relationships happening all around them and to recognize that we humans exist in a relationship with everything around us. The author devised a project asking students to make periodic observations of the sun and/or moon. In the process of their observations students were asked to become aware of and to journal about their surroundings during their observations. The result was that students became periodically immersed in their natural surroundings and were, therefore, exposed to a facet of kincentricity.
- Author/creator
- Salmon, Enrique
- Date
- In publication
- Journal of Sustainability Education
- Volume
- 10
- Pages
- 1-10
- Resource type
- en Research/Scholarly Media
- Medium
- en Print
- Background/context type
- en Conceptual
- Keywords
- American Indian studies
- culture of place
- curriculum
- direct observation
- human/nature relationships
- indigenous worldviews
- kincentric ecology
- language of the land
- metaphor
- pedagogy
- story
- Open access/free-text available
- en Yes
- Peer reviewed
- en Yes
- ISSN
- 2151-7452
- URL
- Open Access Journal Webpage (The Journal of Sustainability Education)
- Full-text PDF Shared by Author (ResearchGate)
- Citation
- Salmon, E. (2015). Teaching Kincentric Ecology in an Urban Environment. Journal of Sustainability Education, 10, 1–10.
- Resource status/form
- en Published Text
- Scholarship genre
- en Empirical
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