Climate Change Labyrinth

The Climate Change Labyrinth was a collaboration with thirty fifth-grade students, Roberta Nelson a teacher at PS99, Kew Gardens, Queens, NY and Camino de Paz Labyrinth artist Ariane Burgess.

The students began by learning about the causes of Climate Change. They studied the four main green house gases and the green house effect. They learned about the melting of the polar ice caps and the gradual warming of the oceans. And designed posters to get the message of what they were discovering out to more people.  Then they researched how these four main gases are created through numerous human activities. Together we identified many day to day human activities that take place to meet our needs for shelter, food, clothing, health, transportation and more. Then we got specific and the students each picked one activity or human made thing to research its contribution to the greenhouse effect and climate change.

                                                           

We found that rather than talking about causes and solutions to Climate Change, we were working with a scale of contribution as almost everything humans can be linked to causing climate change to some degree. Some contributions have a greater impact than others. Each student chose one human contribution to Climate Change, and studied it in depth to find out to what about its impact. Then we made masks to represent our contribution.  Sitting in a circle in the Biome Labyrinth we spoke from the perspective of the contribution so that we embodied what we had learned. This was also a creative way for each student to share what they had researched, with the group.

Once we completed our council it was time to paint the contributions onto the Dymaxion Map Labyrinth in the school playground. The students designed circular images in to represent the Climate Change contribution they had researched. The labyrinth is available to everyone in the school to walk and learn about Climate Change. We produced a laminated key so other classes could walk the labyrinth path and learn more about human contribution to Climate Change. We purposely left some of the contributions off the labyrinth to leave room for other classes to come up with other contributions through class discussion.

      

We found it to be a powerful experience walking the path of the labyrinth. As you walk over all the oceans and continent on Earth every so often you come to a thought provoking circle depicting a Climate Change contribution. We had lots of fun making the labyrinth and the students even made posters and wrote a song "Climate Change Rap".

Thanks and apprection to The Buckminster Fuller Institute for permission to use the image of the Dymaxion Map, and to PS99 Principal Paulette Foglio and the staff of PS99 for their support in creating this labyrinth.