Unit One

We’ll be investigating place-based environmental issues. You will be

• reading from the book The Future of Nature edited by Barry Lopez
• writing six informal response papers
• reading each other’s response papers at the beginning of each class
• discussing place-based environmental issues
• writing a memo to pitch an idea for a formal essay
• doing some research for your formal essay
• writing about some of your own experiences
• writing a draft of a formal essay
• doing peer review of each other’s formal essay
• revising your formal essay
• handing in a Unit One portfolio that will be graded according to this rubric.

During this first five weeks, we will also experiment with twitter, Google Docs, Storify, and other digital tools that we’ll be using during for the rest of the course. Our task is to figure out how to use the internet to enlarge the conversation beyond just our classroom.