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A pile of books featured in the Eco-Criticism class showing their spines and titles.

A new English elective this year, “Eco-Criticism: Literature of the Environment”, asks students to investigate the relationship between people and nature as they work with texts across genre and form, often alongside excursions into the natural world. 

“It's my dream class,” says English Instructor Shawna Norton. “I've been wanting and waiting to teach this. During my undergrad I fell into being really interested in the outdoors and people's relationship with the environment, and in high school I took a class that involved hiking and a backpacking trip–part of it was to get out of gym class–but it changed my life a little bit.” 

Originally, Shawna conceived of “Eco-Criticism: Literature of the Environment” as a course that would focus on parsing through more critical, theoretical work. As the semester has begun the topic has shifted slightly, and while students still work with critical texts, the course name will change to “EcoLit” to more accurately reflect the scope of work covered. This shift also allows Shawna to expand the to a survey of different authors and time periods with more flexibility. 

The course structure takes inspiration from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Each unit reflects a section of the book, beginning with planting and followed by picking, tending, breeding, burning. During this first unit the class read The Bear, by William Faulkner, and discussion looked at how stories shape relationships in the environment, and institutional knowledge vs. experiential knowledge within a text.  

“Then we're moving into more about the ideas of the relationships between people and nature,” Shawna details. “Sectioning out themes with the next two sections of Braiding Sweetgrass, we're talking about reciprocity, but also conceptions of conservation preservation.”

This week’s assignment involves reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walking (“we will be walking, dress for it!” reads the assignment notes for this week’s class) before moving on to Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists by Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm (a local “Afro-Indigenous centered community farm and training center dedicated to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system”). Discussion will center on the essays compiled in the book and how they detail what we learn from the earth, and what are the types of relationships people develop in that context, before talking about concepts of home. 

“Place is often-times a big center of environmental literature.”

In that vein, the students in the course will be exploring memoir writing, detailing their own relationship with place and their own homes. A recurring assignment involves choosing an outdoor spot on campus and returning it to sit throughout the semester for fifteen minutes, sometimes with a specific prompt. During a Monday class everyone shares about their visits.

“I had a student say, ‘it was really hard for me to focus, I just wanted to be doing other things,’ and I was like thank you for sharing that! That failure, you can go there and not learn. It is fine. It's all part of that experience!”

Prompts may involve an exercise where students are asked to orient themselves by using objects and landmarks on campus, using a compass (app or otherwise) to identify the direction of their chosen ‘sit spot.’ Ideally, as the weather becomes warmer, the class will take trips into the surrounding area to experience the local natural world. 

The final unit, coinciding with the ‘burning’ section of Braiding Sweetgrass, asks the students to think about next steps. They will look at The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh, and The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Ursula K. Le Guin to bring in some more critical and theoretical texts in the ecocriticism discipline alongside essays, memoirs, poetry, and novels. 

Looking towards the end of the semester, the students will work on a final project that centers on writing a scholarly personal narrative using not just texts from the courses but personal experiences to make their arguments. 

“We’re starting out like a more classic English class, using argumentative and analytical writing,” Shawna says. “We’re talking about the language being used, but we’re going to be moving into more writing about the self. I think I will have to redefine the idea of ‘essay,’ because it’s going to look so different from the five-paragraph, here’s my thesis, here are my quotes and let me unpack them. I’m going to be doing a lot of scaffolding earlier in the class to prepare!”

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