Introduction and Overview

The activity will be imbedded in the second quarter of a six-quarter Master in Teaching program at The Evergreen State College. Students will have addressed issues of sustainability during fall quarter. The anticipated time frame for the lesson is a three-hour workshop on three successive weeks. The big idea of this activity is for students to use mathematical ideas to view the classroom as a component of a closed and sustainable system.

Key words –spatial reasoning, concept map, proportional reasoning, systems thinking

This activity is applicable to any discipline that includes topics of sociocultural structures and systems, such as criminal justice, sociology, business systems, political science, etc.