Student: Morgan Fries
Graduation date: May 2020
Type: Concentration (single major)
Date approved:
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Summary
For as long as I can recall, I have always been enthralled by fantastical worlds. There’s just something about them that makes them so enticing. Perhaps it’s the immersion of it, allowing someone to exist temporarily in an alternate reality that’s either dramatically or subtly different from our own. Whatever world it may be, high fantasy or zombie apocalypse, thralls of people interact with worlds of their choice in their day-to-day lives.
This concentration idea came about from combining the ideas of environmental education, recreation, and place. I use environmental education as a launch point to look into place-based education and what it means to learn about something based on a place. I use place very loosely, and in the theoretical sense to examine what a place is and what a place can be. Later on in the process, I added recreation to tie in the idea of escapism and how people relax/use space for personal non-work related activities.
My interest in environmental education has existed for a long time and I have always had an interest in learning about the natural world, as well as the educational process. My favorite classes before college have always included aspects that were out-of-classroom learning opportunities. These opportunities showed me how important taking actions are, and little did I know that there was a principal in the field of environmental ed that was exactly that: action competence. This principle is central to environmental education and can be defined as someone’s ability to act (Jensen and Schnack 1997). This got me thinking about if it was possible to teach someone action competence related to environmental issues through the use of fictional worlds.
Place is such an interesting topic for me because ever since last spring with the situating minerals assignment, which was place-centric, I’ve thought a lot about places and how they mean different things to different people. This fascination was augmented even more when I visited Mt. Fuji, seeing how it is a place that was different for everyone. Place can mean a fictional place since it exists and people can interact with it. It can also mean that “the concept of place, which explicitly links individual and cultural perceptions, conceptualizations, and actions to physical space”(Cresswell 2004). The same goes for fictional worlds
I am interested in recreation as a topic because it’s fascinating what people do with their time outside of necessities such as work, eating, and sleeping. Some people play games, while others explore the world around them, and some just enjoy long walks on the beach. This time spent says a lot about a person and what their interests are. My particular interest in recreation is gaming and the fact that some people use games to visit some other world completely, escaping reality as we know it. I recently read a book titled Reality is Broken that examines the ways to tie in this form of recreation with the ‘real’ world and potentially fix it.
Fictional and fantastical worlds are often utopias of present-day society, and they provide a glimpse into what people want the real world to look like and how they want it to function. Utopias, in common thought, are strictly a fictional genre, but in actuality, it also has a whole set of ideologies and has a suite of communal movements and the same goes for dystopias(Claeys 2013). There is a suite of novels that present dystopian and utopian societies, which goes to show that we as humans crave these extreme societies (French 2017). Perhaps its so we can improve the world, or maybe its so we can achieve a perfect society(Sava 2016).
As technology improves, the line between fictional worlds and the’ real’ world gets thinner. This could lead to the worlds becoming similar, and with that similarity, a crossover of ideas and problem-solving. In many of these fake worlds, problems are presented in a simple manner, and the solutions are even easier to obtain.
References
Questions
- Descriptive: What types of people engage with these worlds? Is there a demographic who interacts with the non-real world more often than others? How do various demographics engage with the physical world?
- Explanatory: What attracts people to fictional worlds? Why do certain people escape to these worlds? How do aspects of these fictional worlds transfer to the physical world?
- Evaluative: What purpose do these fantastical worlds serve? What are the benefits and liabilities of interacting with these worlds? What are the intersections between the real world and fantasy ones?
- Instrumental: What lessons can be learned from experiencing fictional worlds? How can lessons learned from interacting with fictional worlds be transferred to the ‘real’ world?
Concentration courses
- ENVS 499 (independent study, 4 credits) Fall 2018. One-on-one with Jim Proctor, discussing utopias and dystopias, a central component of this concentration.
- ED 205 (Education in a Complex World, 4 credits) fall 2016. This course provides background for how people learn and what makes a classroom. Part of this course is in-classroom experience, providing me with experience in how to teach people and witness firsthand how various people learn.
- PSY 240 (Social Psychology, 4 credits) Spring 2019. This course provides an understanding of how people interact with one another, as well as how they interact on several levels, including with each other, which can be applied to how people interact within these fictional worlds.
- SOAN 221(Sociology of Work, Leisure, and Consumption, 4 credits) Fall 2018. This class examines how people interact with various aspects of their life, including how they relax, where fictional places are often a key element.
Arts and humanities courses
- HIST 261 (Global Environmental History, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.
- PHIL 215 (Philosophy and the Environment, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.