A series of misunderstandings meant that I only got my computer back today. The last of these amusements was when I dropped by the shop yesterday.
"Dude," the guy said, "I didn't realize your drive was full. I thought you were just swapping out a dead one. The transfer's going to take a while. It'll be done at, like," he looks at the transfer rate, "six." It was four.
That would explain why I was getting a larger hard drive installed. Plus, more RAM. Which I"ve now maxed out for the machine. So it's a lot faster, now, and it's sucking battery juice like a mosquito on a vein. Ah, well, balance must be preserved.
The panel went well. We had good attendance, close to twenty, and some people I'd not thought would attend. It's a rough piece, but I'll post it below. The outline at the end reflects how some people use these ideas in their classroom. You might note that in the body of the presentation at least two of the theorists critique the "walk in the woods" assignment. Which means, look! it's an evolving practice!
James Engelhardt
In an interview in Writing Environments, edited by Sidney Dobrin and Christopher Keller, Cheryl Glotfelty offers a complicated definition of place (not because it’s long): “A place is a relationship of land and stories about land. A place is a dynamic concept. Places are always being made” (269). I’m going to be talking mostly about ecomposition and ecopoetry pedagogy and as I discuss a handful of theorists and practitioners, I hope you’ll see the idea of place is not an easy one that we can take to mean a long, loving, naïve relationship to an untroubled landscape.
One way to get students engaged with place that seems to be gaining popularity, at least in this literature and this department, is mapping. Derek Owens, in Composition and Sustainability: Teaching for a Threatened Generation, writes about starting each semester with student-drawn maps (a practice I’ve started to use in my own poetry classes). He starts the chapter with his own meditation on where he lives, starting with the effects of glaciation. He then uses selections from student work to talk about where his students live in relation to the commuter campus school where he teaches. I like that he gives them space in the chapter, even as he then unpacks each of their observations. He then takes a look at the institution. What can space/place mean to academics? This building, for example, was not designed with an English department in mind. The campus is home to some native species, but the rest all need water and fertilizer to survive. Only advanced students get to have their own offices, which is to say that undergrads are allowed into the building but not allowed to stay. How committed can we be?
Nedra Reynolds asks similar questions in her Geographies of Writing. The complex ways she thinks and writes about place in the academy beyond English studies is quite delightful. She notes that academic institutions are thought of as democratic places of learning (at least, now they are) and research that welcome students from all walks of life. Yet the bureaucracies, structures and even the buildings themselves can be imposing and Byzantine to the point of exclusionary. And seem designed that way. She also has a mapping assignment. Her assignment asking students to map their campus, to choose a chunk of it, explore it, and make a map. I believe that this was a small group undertaking. The students came back with stories of professors and administrative personnel who blew them off, though grad students seemed to be friendly. She recognizes that there’s a Rashomon quality to their reports, but she adds that she got calls from some of the professors who complained about students wandering in to ask questions.
First generation students, minority students at a campus, the ways that financial aid paperwork and professionals don’t help. Learning to trust money people if you come from working class or poverty. The bursar’s office designed, here, to look like bank tellers.
To keep the cartography theme going for a bit longer, Julie Drew, in the Weisser and Dobrin edited Ecomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches, writes about maps and place as crucial to critical consciousness (we are always conscious and engaged in a place). She argues for seeing students as travelers, from classroom to other institutional spaces (dorms, libraries, apartments), all of which are contested outside of the “contact zones” of prof and student (57). The map works to make these places clearer. Working on this kind of project allows students to develop interests and to make themselves more individual for their professors, more human.
Other essays expand on this idea, even if they don’t use the map as an exercise. Christian Weisser emphasizes that we are always in a place that is always connected to the rest of the world (81). Arlene Plevin argues that place puts student concerns first, that place allows students to develop their own interests while simultaneously developing critical consciousness (148). That is, as students begin to think about place in the complicated, fluid way that Kolodny suggested way back at the beginning of this presentation, they find the ways that place is constructed, the discourses that move through and over that place, the issues that are core to that place. Edward Lotto explores the idea nature as constructed and no longer “pure” and suggests that meaningful engagement with nature is possible (nature as a real thing out there in the world), especially if this conflicted, both/and position is taken into account (253). That is, this complex relationship is the very nature of nature, if you will, and working through the issues and ecology is how critical consciousness is shaped.
For a lot of the country, an issue that’s at the core of any place is race, itself a complicated subject. Christopher Keller, still in the same collection of essays, raises questions about race and ecocomp, how place and race have a vexed relationship in the US. The gist of his piece suggests—not explicity—that many of the “take a walk in the woods” assignments and essays are problematic (193). I think that it’s important to interrogate that kind of writing assignment, but more important is an interrogation of racism as place-based. And that’s a whole big subject.
Annette Kolodny, in an interview collected by the ubiquitous Sidney Dobrin (this time working with Christopher Keller) in their book Writing Environments, speaks about the importance of writing as a way to shape thought (9), the importance of environmental work as justice work (19), and trying to make the university habitable and welcoming in her own work as an administrator (28). The last item resonates with the concerns of Derek Owens and Nedra Reynolds as I talked about earlier, while the first two—writing to shape thinking and environmental work as justice work—continue to expand on how ecocompositionists see their work as adding to, even extending, the work of critical pedagogy. And Kolodny is certainly pointing out ways to pick up the issues of race that Keller touches on. Eric Otto, in a different section of the book, writes about ecocomposition as being a furthering of post-process comp theory in that ecocomp extends the interest in “non-codifiable, social dimensions of written discourse” to examine the “relationship between writers and their surroundings” (143).
It’s important, in all of this, to note that this is not a movement that sees looking at place or engaging with nature as a look back. This is not about nostalgia. Maybe for some people. But in the same Dobrin and Keller collection of interviews, both Janisse Ray and Scott Russell Sanders argue for environmental writing (Ray’s term) and nature writing (Sanders’s term) as a template and vision for the future.
It’s in concert with that kind of claim that Dobrin and Weisser in Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition make this big claim by “Ecocomposition posits that environment precedes race, gender and culture” (x). That is, place influences any understanding and interpretation of those categories, even the construction of these categories. They also make this appeal for interdisciplinarity (Derek Owens would also read this as a call for sustainability, but that’s a topic for another day): “[w]e prefer to view the role of ecocompositionists as intellectual travelers who explore new territories in an effort to change themselves, taking nothing but experiences and knowledge […]. Ecocompositionists delve into ecological and environmental studies not to extend our territory in the intellectual landscape, but to improve our understanding of the connections between these related disciplines, discourses and epistemologies” (4). As I read it, it’s a call for cooperation, an invitation to other disciplines to feedback to ours in a way that might, that should, expand our understanding of place.
At a panel at this year’s AWP, there was a lot of talk about
Implications of all this for the workshop.
taking hikes—class period or day-long
(outside strolling breaks teaching hierarchy; students can use their skills and abilities from their own lives, not as scholars; fuels writing by offering details and situations)
individual fieldtrips (focus on solitary)
pick out of a hat, assigned, or chosen from a list
set up and setting of trip with class texts is important
allows for contact with the non-human
students: bring a natural object to class
why is it natural? how can you tell it came from nature? (holds its pattern as it grows)
why is the form interesting?
bring a form that reflects where you are as a writer
from Didion’s “At the Dam” and “Death of a Moth”:
a small thing that affects you largely
a place you visited briefly that keeps coming back to you
creates important of place and makes that importance clear to students
Place based: get pissed off about something
transform the world by how we speak it
writing back to policy
policy is part of how humans craft/relate to land/place
ecopo, etc not only in wilderness
And let me say, as I was pasting this in, just how much faster this laptop is. It will tear the treads off your tires.
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