Our Reading Preparation
The course reading for our integrated curriculum class has
left me feeling more aware, alarmed and critical. Our first reading, a
scholarly article about Global Citizenship got me excited as it approached a
scientific model to try to explain the importance and benefits of traveling
abroad and having an integrated sustainability/environmental curriculum while
abroad. It tried to express our ability to be conscious of our global
environment depending on whether or not you were participating in those things
or not. I enjoyed the technicality of the paper as they used statistics well to
explain their outcomes and properly lying down their limitations. I really
began to understand the difficulty with doing an experiment such as the one described
in the paper and why it might be hard to achieve an outcome that leads to a
change in traveling aboard for our students and their pursuit of Global
Citizenship. However, the paper has inspired me to be thinking about my Global
Citizenship and how it really applies to my travel here. To fully enrich this
travel abroad experience for myself I will need to immerse myself in the
culture around me as well as start conversations about environment and
sustainability with the locals and my classmates.
Fevered by Linda Marsa, was described by my fellow teammates
as very alarmist but also very informational in general, I would certainly
agree. This book might be good at motivating people to act on climate change,
but it kind of puts you down in the dumps. It very often describes the worse
case scenario’s as climate will increase disease spread all around the world,
increase severe weather events, biodiversity loss, rising sea levels, heat
waves and etc. A lot of claims are far from the information that is truly at
hand and I wish the approach was more accurate.
The book also really brings my tunnel vision from my college
life in Laramie to a much broader sense. I more often come to think about how
my actions can affect people everywhere around the globe. It also puts our
daily problems in perspective. At the same time a larger focus on the class
work, especially of this nature pulls away from some of the amazing natural
beauty that Slovakia has to offer and divides my focus between enjoying the
experience and being critical of my surroundings. Another worry I have is climate change and
its affect on our beloved sport. It seems like every year nordic ski venues are
getting less and less snow which in turn requires more man made snow and money.
Skiing is becoming less and less sustainable as we know it and it digs away at
part of my Norwegian skiing heart. I hope to get a sense for how people here
feel about climate change and if I think that the right amount of attention is
devoted to emissions and the possible disastrous effects.
All in all I feel think the course readings provided me with
a new symbolic pair of glasses, ones that will allow me to see and think about
the environment and the culture in a more broad context instead of some of the
narrow-ness that comes from the mindset just inside the ski tracks ;) and
whether that contributed to maximizing my utility on this trip is still up for
debate in my mind.
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