This week’s sustainable development learning log is derived on interdependence, we acquired knowledge of this topic in a diverse method than what we normally do, firstly by participating in farm visits and secondly, we worked in groups to produce an infographic in relation to maintaining a sustainable ocean.
I found the farm visits to be rather fascinating and insightful. We visited two very divergent farms, both of which were dairy farms. The first farm that we went to was a high tech, this farm had technology for every aspect of cow farming. All of the cows had electronic tagging, that would enable the farmers to check for any problems or illnesses that an individual cow have. The cows could freely milk when they wished due to their electronic tracking how much there are milking. Likewise, the technology would pick and concrete the diet correctly for the cows depending of the time of year. The second farm was a traditional dairy farm, the cows would get milk weekly, but the difference was this farm was organic implying that in the cow’s diet there are no chemicals in the food they eat. I was intrigue by how both farm looked after the baby calves, at the high tech farm the baby calves were separated from their mother and others in an individual pen, whereas at the organic farm the baby calves were in individual pens but beside the adults’ cows, when these calves got to about 5 months they would be moved into a large pen with other calf’s and to allow interacted. This was the first time that I have ever visited a farm, but in fact I enjoyed the visits and think it would be a great idea to take future primary classes on these visits. It would allow a different dynamic of learning, making it engaging and enjoyable, likewise the children would be able to contextual were a lot of the food they eat comes from and the efforts of the farmers to ensure we have access to farm based foods and produced.
Once we can back from the farm visit I engaged with the online lecture that looked more in depth in regards to what we saw at the farms and the term interdependency. Interdependency can be defined as ‘when two or more things depend on each other in order to grow and maintain health’ (Oxford). This term has been circulating for centuries and from early culture individuals understood the importance of counting on their environment for resources, food/ water and other needs, however what they gathered was we should respect our environment in order to maintain our resources for centuries. In today’s society there are three sectors being;
• Economic interdependence
• Social interdependence
• Environmental interdependence
The follow up workshop of interdependency was rather different from usually, we worked in groups, researched sustainable oceans and created an infographic. This was a great activity as we were able to explore a range of academic reading as well as government or well establish websites, this enabled us to extract appropriate information. Initially I found creating the infographic to be challenging and rather complex, but after trailing with infographic I seen realised it was not too hard and is a great way to display information along with images. This could be an application that could be use in the upper primary, perhaps primary 7, this could be used along with ICT and another curricular area. Relating to CFE outcomes and experiences;
“I can create, develop and evaluate computing solutions in response to a design challenge”
TCH 2-15a
Overall, I enjoyed the interdependency inputs, the farm visits where great and allowed me to see how a farm worked and enabled me to consider the fantastic opportunities that farm visits would have for children. I felt I have been able to develop and consolidate my understanding of the term interdependcy and the underpinning factors this can have on the world. Likewise exploring sustainable oceans, I was able to understand the different issues our oceans are encountering, in particularly in regards to climate change.
