hannahssocialstudiesblog

[hannahssocialstudiesblog]

Our Trip to Evergreen Brickworks

     In October, our cohort, JI 262 experienced a field visit to Evergreen Brickworks. I had never been to Brickworks before, and I had decided to bike all the way there from the West end. This made me think about how disconnected I feel in the city with nature. It took an entire hour to get there! The buildings on the property, and the land itself is gorgeous, especially when considering its reclaimed history. I actually found a tiny, baby snapping turtle on this trip!

     The tour guide, although very knowledgeable, did not go into depth about the Indigenous nations that previously lived on the land. I really wished to get a sense of who they were, their hopes and dreams, and their experiences of displacement. I did not get this experience. Instead, the focus seemed to be on settler history. It focused on the mining of the land, the actual Brickworks factory, the poisoning of the water, and the reclamation of the land and buildings. Although I really loved the settler history, I was missing the Indigenous histories. According to Johnson (2013) Indigenous Peoples have occupied Tkaronto (Mohawk word for “The Gathering Place”) for approximately 11 000 years. Therefore, it is both baffling to me and understandable (due to colonization) that I do not have this deeper understanding.

     I wonder, what is the relationship between environmental degradation and colonialism? What does it mean to view the earth as a non-living thing with exploitable resources vs. a living being that sustains us? Lowenstein et al., (2010) highlight that the same language we use to rationalize racism is the language we use in the oppression of nature. Lowenstein et al., (2010) go on to discuss EcoJustice, which includes

recognizing and re-valuing diverse commons-based practices, traditions, and knowledge from cultures and communities world-wide. The environmental commons include our relationships to the land, water, air and all the living creatures with whom we share the planet--while the "cultural commons" includes all those practices, traditions, ways of relating and knowing that offer community members mutual well-being, and generally create more sustainable ways of being on the planet. This aspect of EcoJustice Education asks teachers and students to turn their attention to the local places where they live and to consider which activities, beliefs, and practices in their own communities contribute to the support of living systems, and which do not (p. 4).

     The amazing restoration work is a great example of EcoJustice! They saw an opportunity to restore seemingly unusable industrial land and water. With a lot of hard work, they successfully returned the land of Evergreen Brickworks into a beautiful ecological treasure of our city.

     There are many ways in which I could integrate this field study into a Social studies unit. For example, one major strand in Grade 4 Social studies is “Strand B. People and Environments: Political and Physical Regions of Canada”. In this strand, section B1 is “assess key ways in which industrial development and the natural environment affect each other in two or more political and/or physical regions of Canada” (p.97).  In this unit, students could compare how the Brickworks factory impacted the land with another region in Ontario, such as the Grassy Narrows mercury poisoning. Then students could make their own observations and sketches to assess the current state of the Brickworks land. With all of the amazing restoration work that has been done, students could be asked “Could this kind of restoration be applied to the situation in Grassy Narrows? Why or why not? How? Are there any plants described today that could be useful in restoring the water there?”. This also would make the unit cross-curricular; it could combine geography, social studies, and the science behind it.

References:

Johnson, J. (2013). The Indigenous Environmental History of Toronto, ‘The Meeting Place’in L. A. Sandberg et al, Urban Explorations: Environmental Histories of the Toronto Region (59-71) (Hamilton, ON: L.R. Wilson Institute For Canadian History.)

Lowenstein, E., Martusewicz, R., & Voelker, L. (2010). Developing Teachers' Capacity for EcoJustice Education and Community-Based Learning, Teacher Education Quarterly, 37(4), 99-118. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/23479462