What is Biodiversity?

Discuss as a class what biodiversity is to you and how it impacts your life.

1. Arrange the class into a circle of chairs so that you are all facing each other.
2. Your teacher will stay out of the conversation, they are just there to observe. Do not direct any questions to them.
3. It’s not necessary to raise your hand during the discussion, just have a conversation with your peers. Let it flow naturally.
4. When someone asks a question, or provides an observation, build your discussion around that comment first before starting a new idea.
5. At the end of the conversation, summarize what you discussed.
6. Make sure everyone has an opportunity to speak.

Questions to get you started:

• These are a guideline just if you are stuck, you do not need to use any of these!

1. What does biodiversity look like to you?
2. How do you tell if your community has healthy biodiversity?
3. How does your community impact nature & biodiversity? How does that impact you? Do you want to see change?
4. Is biodiversity important to us?
5. Why is balancing the needs of people and nature hard, but necessary if we’re to be good stewards?
6. Are there people working to create a better balance between people and nature out there? Who are they? What exactly are they doing? How big is their impact?

Questions to keep in mind throughout these lessons:

1. What is the one issue you’d like to address in your community, province or country?
2. What is one roadblock that prevents this issue from being resolved?
3. What could you do to overcome this roadblock and create the change you envision?

What’s Your Idea?

By the end of these lessons, you will develop an idea that helps to create a better balance between people and nature.

Let’s start to think about what issues involving biodiversity you are interested in, are affecting you and your community or want to know more about. What makes you upset? What do you want the future to look like? What ideas can you get behind?

?? So here you go: What would you do to better balance people and nature? This is the starting point to help you develop your idea.

Make a list of as many things as you can think of. You will be exploring some of these ideas in more detail and eventually selecting one to focus on for your project at the end of these lessons.

Start jotting down your thoughts and ideas. Again – think about the theme media you are exploring, it can help provide you with ideas and context. Stuck? Browse the Curated Library! (start with these: Biodiversity, Current Debates, Your Project)

Once ideas have been exhausted, spend 10-20 minutes researching the topics, then add to the existing list and note how many more terms and concepts were added from researching the idea.

Discuss how doing research helped you learn more about the topic. What keywords did you use in your research?