Please see attached. 

An interactive installation by Ava Blitz, Mellon Creative Resident for the 'Eco-Literacy' 360.
Enjoy and interact with the piece, but please respect it and do not remove anything from the site.
Thank you.

The very first Bundt Cake was made back in the 90's on Bryn Mawr's campus, outside of Arnecliffe Studio. Ave dug a hole in the ground, filled it with concrete- dug the piece out, carved it, and set it back into the depression- to be reclaimed by nature. This form has evolved over time. Carved and cast in various sizes and materials, it has occupied various environments, in the earth, on the earth, suspended in the air, and floating on water. Its interpretation is ambiguous-- nature made--human made--natural--unnatural?

The community of Bundt Cakes here is meant to be an interactive piece for the Bryn Mawr community to explore these questions.

      At our first 360 meeting in Camden, the 360 participants and CFET members had an interesting conversation on Eco-Literacy and Environmental & Social Justice. During this discussion, Michael from CFET made a comment that has remained with me through the course of this semester. He mentioned that he did not like the term “justice” as an organizing idea as it implies that there is always an impartial arbiter determining what is “right”. As someone who has felt involved and active in the pursuit of social justice, I had not previously thought there might be something problematic about this concept. Over the course of the semester, in and out of the 360, I have begun to question and challenge the idea of justice. What is justice? Who determines what is “just” and “right”? Must justice be achieved at the expense of something else? Does social justice perpetuate and reproduce existing social inequalities and hierarchies? What about ecological justice? Is there a way for eco-justice and social justice to co-exist or is there tension between them? Is justice inherently human centric? Is there a way to expand this concept to the wider natural world? To assist me in exploring these questions, I will draw on John Humbach’s essay “Towards a Natural Justice of Right Relationships”, J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, and Teju Cole’s “The White Savior Industrial Complex”. 

What are the similarities and differences between the following images?

(Callaway)

(Callaway)

since this features my and sophia's sister's "duck-rabbit,"
i can't resist sharing it w/ you all,
along w/ the question of what, since this 360, can you "not unsee"?
Things You Cannot Unsee (and What That Says About Your Brain)

Intro/rational:

I’ve so enjoyed working with the fifth grade class in Camden this semester, and yet I’ve found our limited connection to be very frustrating. Due to the various time and logistical constraints, as well as the fact that there are so many of us teaching together and we haven’t been working this class continuously, I have not been able to carry out my dream lesson plans. Therefore I decided to design a lesson plan for a week-long unit in their class. In this imaginary scenario, I am the teacher, and have been for the whole year. They will be coming out of a long couple of units on slavery and the civil rights movement, and my hope is that this week and the unit after it will bridge a connection between the two. (I’ll use a book called Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor.) It will likely be around the end of September, or perhaps in the end of April/beginning of May. These are times when it tends to be fairly warm and nice out but the weather is not reliable so we may end up having some interesting conversations about how ‘bad’ weather plays into our concept of nature/environment.

Regardless of socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or ecosysytem, children play in similar ways when they have safe free time in nature.

-Children and Nature Design Principles (Ch.3) Sobel

Knowledge, in my opinion, is perpetual when gained through experience. We learn not to play with fire because our bodies endure pain at first encounter. We know which foods we like best because we eat them and develop a sense of taste. We have the ability to know through our use of senses; sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste. We can only gain true knowledge when we encounter and expose ourselves to an environment.

Instructors, guides, and even teachers can profess and stress the importance of the environment, but ultimately it means nothing if all they do is talk about it. Students will only have an idea, an imagination in their mind, never knowing the impact of the full ability of their senses. The environment will mean nothing if students never have an experience with it. As environmentalists, we can’t force the importance and value nature has for us upon others because we don’t all share the same values. We can’t assume that everyone has the same opportunities as others to experience the environment a certain way because we don’t all have the same access. We can’t teach the importance of environmental education if we can’t allow our students to dance with the universe.

I want to preface this paper by saying a few things about my growing understanding of ecological thought. I have found that this process of thought is really about process of thought itself. Ecological education is a space where I study the process of my thinking, what triggers my thinking, where it pulls me, from what it pushes against, the ravines into which I fall, and the valleys in which I find myself hopelessly spinning (or wondrously dancing, depending on the atmosphere), where I can sit on the stump of a fallen tree or city street curb and embrace the full access I have to my own mind, style, and words. As a 360, we have well discussed the notion of education not needing to be confined in the walls (be they plaster-white or flashy with rainbow alphabet trains and glamourous posters illustrating parts of speech or the quadratic formula) of a classroom. Education and learning happen everywhere else too: watching clouds in the sky, sitting in a city park, smoking in a jazz club, browsing through a yellow-paged bilingual dictionary, and twiddling your thumbs during a Ukrainian Catholic mass drenched with incense and harmonies of perfect fifths. Most fundamentally, though, it occurs within my mind and my body. If that is the fundamental, then I need to begin there. This paper may feel segmented, but then, life occurs in segments and unrelated events and thoughts. The only thing sometimes connecting events is the passage of time within the body experiencing the events, and that fluidity itself is often what causes connections to make sense.

 Climate Change Affecting Earth Through Time

Rationale:

For this curriculum I wanted to see how a classroom of 5th grade students would react to climate change and predict what climate change will do to their neighborhoods. Throughout this semester in the Ecoliteracy 360 I have been very interested in the idea of perception. Specifically I was interested in how others react to the five senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound. Depending on a location of a school or of someone’s home they will perceive their neighborhood in a different way than another.

Curriculum Unit Overview and Objectives: