Maak het abstracte concreter met beeld!
‘Making the Abstract Concrete: How a Comic Can Bring to Life the Central Problems of Environmental Philosophy’. Zo heet een college van Kevin de Laplante, hoogleraar filosofie aan de Iowa State University of Science and Technology, die de ‘Concrete’-strips van tekenaar Paul Chadwick gebruikt om de abstracties in zijn curriculum wat tastbaarder te maken. Met succes!
Laplante is een filosoof die zelf ook tekent. Op zijn website (zie onder) staat een rijtje cartoons van zijn hand die allemaal een filosofische inhoud hebben. Maar belangrijker is dat hij op een dag de strip ‘Concrete’ van Paul Chadwick leerde kennen, die op metaforische wijze de ecologische problematiek behandelt. Laplante begreep dat hij dit beeldverhaal heel goed kon gebruiken om zijn leerstof te verduidelijken. U vindt het complete college op: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~kdelapla/online_papers/concrete.pdf. Zijn verhaal eindigt met de onderstaande conclusie:
“I have used ‘Concrete’ in other environmental philosophy classes I have taught, and it never fails to engage student attention and elicit interesting classroom discussion. More importantly, it elicits discussion that is directly relevant to some key issues in environmental philosophy, most notably the anthropocentrism/nonanthropocentrism debate in environmental ethics, and the deep ecology/ecofeminism debate in radical environmental philosophy.
These are important topics, but environmental philosophy is much broader, and encompasses many more topics and issues, than just these. Other commonly discussed topics in environmental philosophy classes include the role of religion in grounding and justifying attitudes toward the environment; the relationship between economics, ethics and ecology; the issue of First World versus Third World responsibility for global poverty and population growth; “ecoterrorism” and the ethics of environmental activism; and many others. The Concrete story has been a jumping point for discussions on a number of these issues as well. The success I’ve had with using comics in these classes has encouraged me to look for other comic stories that might prove useful in teaching other areas of philosophy.
On a final note, I was embarrassed to discover at the end of fall 1997 that Paul Chadwick had published a series of six comics featuring Concrete’s involvement with the radical environmental activist group known as Earth First!, and that the series had been collected and published by Dark Horse Comics in April 1997. I was using an 8-page black and white comic from 1989, unaware of the existence of a 130-odd page full-color graphic novel on Concrete’s involvement with environmental issues published the very year I was teaching my course!
Bronnen: www.public.iastate.edu/~kdelapla/ en www.weisshahn.de/concrete/think.htm
