Draft: this lesson was written with AI help and has not yet been read by a human editor.
1 What your class asks
This lesson asks you to assess what the way a common product is made does to society and to the environment. The museum offers paper: how its fibres become a sheet, a workshop set up in Baghdad and what the spread of paper meant for records and books. What the process does to the environment, and other products, are for your class to investigate. 1
Curriculum expectations, with their official codes
- C1.1 assess the impacts on society and the environment of various processes used in the manufacture of common products
2 The lesson
What are the steps from raw material to finished product?
Choose a product from your classroom. Write its steps in order and mark each step that uses water, heat or energy. The expectation asks you to assess impacts, so the steps come first.
Who is affected when a product becomes common?
Think of the people who make, sell and use the product, and of what is left over. Which impacts can you support with evidence?
Go deeper
Think about an old rope. While it remains a rope, you cannot write across its threads as a single page 2. Papermaking separates the fibres in water, gathers them into a new surface and dries it, and the fibres may come from plants, rags or old ropes 2. The paper workshop in Baghdad was founded, says the encyclopedia writer Osman Ersoy, at the suggestion of al-Fadl ibn Yahya 3. The craft itself came from China, centuries before Islam 4.
Think about it
Paper can be made from old ropes and rags as well as from plants. Is a product that can use old materials better for a town than one that needs new plants only, and why?
Into the museum
- The paper workshop in Baghdad: how fibres become a sheet, and who is said to have proposed the workshop.
- Al-Fadl ibn Yahya: the administrator to whom the encyclopedia credits the proposal.
Try this
Read about the paper workshop in Baghdad. List the materials the record says the fibres may come from, then the steps of making a sheet in order.
3 Carry it further
Where this lesson leads in the museum.
4 Check yourself
Nothing here is marked or sent anywhere. It is for you.
In your own words: what does Establishing papermaking in Baghdad have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
From fibres to a sheet. Paper is a mat of cellulose fibres: the material is broken down in water, collected on a screen and dried into a sheet, and the fibres may come from plants, rags or old ropes. Osman Ersoy attributes the proposal for a paper workshop in Baghdad, under Harun al-Rashid, to al-Fadl ibn Yahya al-Barmaki. The record calls this the moving of a craft to a city, not the invention of paper. What would a city do with more paper?
In your own words: what does Establishing papermaking in Baghdad have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
Records first, then books. Jonathan Bloom describes Iranian Muslims adopting paper at first for records and only gradually in place of parchment for copying books, Qur'an manuscripts among them. Osman Ersoy connects its abundance and spread with flourishing centres of knowledge and culture, naming Samarkand as an example. What changes for a society when writing material becomes common?
I can now
Notes
- 1. Ontario Ministry of Education, The Ontario Curriculum: Science and Technology, Grades 1–8 (2022)
- 2. Paper before printing — Jonathan Bloom, Iranica, opening definition
- 3. Paper — Osman Ersoy, TDV, Baghdad paragraph
- 4. Paper before printing — Jonathan Bloom, Iranica, early history