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
Date
In publication
Volume
10
Pages
1-10
Resource type
Research/Scholarly Media
Medium
Print
Background/context type
Conceptual
Keywords
Open access/free-text available
Yes
Peer reviewed
Yes
ISSN
2151-7452
URL
Citation
Salmon, E. (2015). Teaching Kincentric Ecology in an Urban Environment. Journal of Sustainability Education, 10, 1–10.
Resource status/form
Published Text
Scholarship genre
Empirical
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