By: Katie Koenig
Thanks to everyone who participated in the Teach-In on Sustainability this year! Emerson hosted it from November 20th to the 22nd. Thanks to all the faculty, alumni, and guests who presented, we got a glimpse at how the Emerson community is examining sustainability in different ways.
We were lucky to have Boaz Paldi, the Chief Creative Officer at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), join this year’s Teach-In as our keynote speaker. Paldi delivered a fantastic talk about how to reach global audiences with messages about sustainability. One compelling project he highlighted was that of Frankie the Dinosaur and the Don’t Choose Extinction campaign, which uses humor to deliver the urgent message that governments must stop subsidizing fossil fuels.
The Compost Concert on Friday was another great way that students got involved with the Teach-In on campus, with music, tabling, and fun prizes. A new aspect this year were the attendance passports, where attendees could get a stamp at each event they went to, and later turn in their card to compete for prizes. The winning student attended seven events!
The events themselves spanned a variety of topics, particularly surrounding personal well-being and an individual’s participation in sustainable practices in daily life. However, the large diversity of topics, from marketing all the way to creative writing, presented numerous perspectives on how you can center sustainability in your work, no matter your focus.
The Environment & Sustainability Writer’s Panel demonstrated this, considering there were seven speakers spanning the alumni network to faculty, from the publishing industry to travel writing. They provided their experiences in working in a sustainable fashion, from considering the ethics of travel and tourism to centering marginalized stories and community- and hope-based dystopian narratives in their writing.
There are a myriad of ways to consider how your work and your daily practices intersect with sustainability, and this year’s Teach-In has shown that this intersection is always there.
The Teach-In concluded with 24-Hour Plays. Around a half-dozen plays had been designed, written, practiced, then performed within the day preceding the event, where each short play was shown to the audience. The room was packed, to be sure. The Black Box in Little Building was so full that people were standing and sitting by the lights and along the edges of the room, enraptured by the performances on stage.
Emerson students showed their creativity and skills in this event. Each play also demonstrated the vast connections and stories within environmental narratives. From two windmill workers struggling against the dangers of a thunderstorm, to two CEOs wittily debating their new company policies, even to two kids growing up across school districts, these stories spanned considerations of natural disasters, what it means to live and grieve, and comedically approaching incredibly serious subjects.
As creators, it can be hard to navigate our responsibilities to center various human struggles in our work. However, it certainly can be done, as 24-Hour Plays has displayed, and can even work as a source of inspiration that can morph into incredibly diverse stories and themes.
This year’s Teach-In on Sustainability was a resounding success, in the sense that Emerson students could present their own work within the context of this educational space, yet expanding themselves outside of the classroom. By presenting the work that the wider Emerson community is doing as well, we can focus on the successes we have already achieved, and use others’ stories as inspiration to go even further.