From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to today's Anthropocene
The project “Ecological Alphabets”is a bottom-up action organised by a group of teachers, school leaders and scholars who believe that the Italian school system is in urgent need of an ecological reform. This is the invitation letter to ask Italian teachers to participate with an ecological lesson. I participated with 4 classes of the Aldini-Valeriani institute, in co-presence with their curricular teachers Prof. Maria Cristina Paolini (English teacher), Emanuele Cassarino (Italian and history teacher), Nicolò Zanotti (Math teacher) and Miriam Pistillo (Math teacher).
The lesson I gave started with the analysis of the first two pages of "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson, then focussed on the changes provoked by the introduction of DDT and, to conclude, ended with a discussion on what we can do to stop, or at least contain, the destructive effects of the Anthropocene.
Students are introduced to Rachel Carson and receive a handout with the first two pages of "Silent Spring" (1962). They read it silently and underline what they don't understand.
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Text analysis
Students are helped understand the text through a dialogic, interactive text analysis. Pragmatic, semantic, morphological and lexical aspects of the text are discussed, adapting the focus according to the students' questions and observations.
