Alvey, Elaine

 

Recent Submissions

  • Looking North: Classroom engagements into the relevance and context of a rapidly changing Arctic
    Alvey, Elaine (Taylor & Francis Online, 2024-03-06)
    We need to save the Arctic not because of the polar bears, and not because it is the most beautiful place in the world, but because our very survival depends upon it.—Lewis Gordon Pugh, as quoted in Mead (Citation2022) The Arctic is emerging as an increasingly relevant and rapidly changing region of the world. A changing climate has brought increased attention to the dynamic and strategic nature of the North, but the Arctic has always been a homeland to a variety of distinct cultures and a unique ecosystem. Arctic imaginaries of an untouched and wild North continue to flourish in common discourse perpetuating colonized notions of this place. The way we imagine the North matters as we grapple with complex issues of interdependence, globalization, decolonization, extractive economies, and climate crisis. This article presents resources for an inquiry unit in which students analyze the question, “Why does the Arctic matter?” to construct an argument. Supporting questions, formative performance tasks, and primary source material are included to scaffold student inquiry. This inquiry is designed for secondary students and has been aligned to geography standards from the C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards (Swan Citation2017). An inquiry design model blueprint has been included in Figure 1. Students are invited to challenge common notions of the North and to engage in thinking about the relevance of the Arctic regions while exploring examples of international cooperation and a variety of cultures through primary and secondary source documents. The emerging and accelerating unique challenges of the region make it worthy of our collective attention and exposure for students within and far beyond the Arctic.

  • Limiting possibilities: The imagined futures of social studies teachers
    Alvey, Elaine (Taylor & Francis, 2023-10-05)
    This paper analyzes the imaginings of sustainable futures and possibilities for action toward these imaginings articulated by social studies teachers. Participant stories about a day in the life of an imagined future largely leave intact major systems and discourses including those which have actively contributed to problems they identify including climate change. I argue that weakened imaginations and aspirations of possibility function to increase toleration for the most traumatic ecological tragedies both impending and already unfolding. Importantly for the field of social studies education, this data illustrates that while teacher participants consistently articulated desires to include issues of climate crisis in their social studies classrooms, they lack robust understandings of the possibilities for action in the face of complex environmental or climate justice challenges.

  • Climate futures: Classroom engagements for imagining otherwise
    Alvey, Elaine (Taylor & Francis, 2023-11-07)
    Given the realities currently at hand, it is easy to imagine the worst-case scenario climate futures, to become paralyzed by climate grief or to disengage all together. Inspired by pedagogical engagements with imagination and drawing on foundational geography skills, this three-day mini-unit invites secondary students to first analyze localized impacts of climate change, and then look to examples of positive climate futures before finally imagining for their own community’s resilient climate future.