I saved this cartoon from The Economist that predicted the impact of the Anthropocene for the year 2022. Yesterday, as I introduced our last threshold in Big History, the Future, I decided to use this cartoon as a resource for an opening activity. I divided the class in groups of five students each and asked them to observe the cartoon and analyze its content. Each group had to work on a Google doc. to investigate the events predicted by the cartoonist and find evidence or not to support his predictions. When the groups concluded, we debriefed the activity answering this question: "To what extent was this artist correct about his prediction of human interaction on our planet?" Do you have any suggestion to improve and/or extend this activity?
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Laura Massa I feel like the universe sent this my way at the perfect time, thank you! For the 1750 Course this seems to be a great introduction/hook for the World in 2050 Lesson, to get the conversation started about CCOT 1750-2022, and then making predictions from there to 2050.
To extend the use of this illustration a bit, one idea is to first host a full class discussion about all the claims being made by this illustrator, and then give the illustration to small groups, and get a quick research competition going - "How many claims can you find some evidence for?"
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Julianne Horowitz I love the ideas you suggested! It not only frames the activity much better but also aligns it with the practice of claim tester: Evidence. Excellent! I took note for next year. Thank you so much!
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Jim Jaeger that is a great suggestion!
