IMPACT PLAN:
In this section please describe your plans for sharing the Toyota International Teacher Program with your students, school, and community. Excellent plans will be feasible, innovative, and linked to Toyota objectives. Plans should also address why travel to the program country is necessary. I feel that the most important way I can make an impact on my school and on my community is by creating a greater awareness of the impact of an unsustainable materials economy, the true price of the things we own, and the fact that saving money doesn't always mean living better. After creating awareness, the next progression of my impact will be to help students make plans for how to be more responsible stewards to the earth.
For the first phase of this impact, it will be necessary to show students their role in the global environmental community. Most often, when talking about conservation, my students are exasperated and feel helpless, asking "What can I do that will really make a difference?" The first step in making a difference is education, showing that everyone plays a role in the materials economy of extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. As a highly sought-after demographic, my students primarily fill the roles of consumers and disposers. They grasp that money is one of the most important things in our culture, and they need an illustration that their money and their buying power has an influence on all of the other parts of the economy, that their money and their voice and their choices shape the system we are all embedded in.
To implement this plan to educate, I plan to introduce students to the idea of a materials economy by coordinating a cross-curricular program that will begin with students watching the Annie Leonard video "The Story of Stuff," a video that gives a brief overview of the materials economy as an unsustainable paradigm upon which western culture is based. To synthesize the information in the video, the curriculum would involve Language Arts classes and computer/technology classes working together to sponsor a "YouTube"-style film-festival with prizes awarded to videos that meet certain criteria, including but not limited to: a focus on extraction, production, distribution, consumption, or disposal; tracing the life cycle of a specific product through the stages of the materials economy; exploring the impacts of this system on our own community; or proposing ideas for how to shift from a linear economy to a closed-loop economy.
If possible and feasible, I would like to coordinate with science teachers to arrange a field trip to our local waste management service to learn about how our community deals with disposal. Currently, all of the waste in Sevier county is composted or placed in the landfill, but incineration is being considered for the future.
It is my hope that through these education efforts the students will begin to take ownership of their role in the system. As it stands now, "saving the earth" is an abstract concept with no concrete connection to their lives. Once informed, I would like
to guide students into taking ownership in a way that they see fit, whether by starting a recycling program, reducing our school's carbon footprint, leading community outreach, orchestrating community recycling or clean-up events, or anything else they
may conceive that I can help with.
To fulfill these plans, I believe that travel to the Galapagos is a necessary component for me to be able to implement the education plan. Our community has many similarities to the Galapagos. We are both small communities in ecologically
diverse areas that draw many tourists. To that end, visiting and speaking with naturalists, advocates, farmers, local citizens, and educators would help to give me ideas for ways I can connect our rural East Tennessee experiences to the experiences
of the Galapagos. It would also serve as a standard to use as an example of how programs can be successful at increasing sustainability. Additionally, it creates a global connection, emphasizing how the actions of 800 students in Sevierville,
Tennessee, can have either an adverse or positive effect on people, animals, ecosystems, and communities thousands of miles away. Additionally, it would also be beneficial because the Galapagos are experiencing some of the same difficulties we
experience in our community. Once a rural area, tourism has caused the population of Sevier County to increase drastically over the past several decades, similar to the Galapagos, which has seen a 2000% increase in population in the past 50 years. Like
the Galapagos, we also experience environmental problems due to habitat encroachment and destruction, as ecosystems are disturbed, disrupted, and displaced. Like the Galapagos, there are also threats to native species from exotic
species of plants, animals, and insects. In short, both areas have to contend with the difficulties of maintaining diversity in the face of external factors, and I believe this experience in common would be a beneficial part of the program for myself, my
school, and other program participants.
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