____________________________________________________________________________

Celia Eydeland

In “The Results Are In: Americans Love Public Schools,” social worker and writer Nora De La Cour (2022) commented that the midterms elections revealed a strong resistance towards the standardized education model. Voters expressed support for Proposition 28, which facilitated the transfer additional $1 billion towards to developing arts and music education in k-12 public schools. De La Cour posits that parents want schools to focus on “beauty and creativity,” rather than tedious high stake testing preparation. Concurrent with the American midterms election, another power political summit occurred across the ocean, at the United Nationals Climate Change Conference in Egypt. Many intense debates transpired over what it would mean for the world to tackle climate change alongside other afflictions such as endemic poverty and the world’s reliance on fossil fuel economies and lifestyles. However, there was largely consensus on the urgency of the issue, and the need for massive changes to address climate change (Zielinski, 2022).

Education philosopher Joel Spring (2006) suggested that that public schools have historically been used as a tool to approach and solve social, political, and economic issues. He noted that the current emphasis on education is to prepare students, seen as human resources, to be productive laborers for the global economy. As such, I wish to respond to Spring’s call and explore both the active, political resistance to the standardized model as well as theoretical possibilities of creative, environmental education that contemporary educators could create. In this scenario, students would not be seen as human resources for the chaotic global economy, but active contributors to and reflectors on a highly complex global ecosystem that is in dire need of urgent changes amongst its human inhabitants. As a writer and aspiring English educator, I am particularly called to consider the role of the humanities and English education in a truly mindful environmentally conscious pedagogy.

In “Literature and the Living World: Environmental Education in the English classroom,” Jennifer Beigel (1996) asks for educators, policy makers, and community members who are too busy debating whether or not environmental education should even be part of the curriculum, to seriously address the changes that must occur to respond to climatic changes and events. However, she asks us to think beyond the paradigm of simply bloating the curriculum, and instead paying greater attention to the content. She notes that beyond elementary school, students hardly have any engagement with  environmental issues during their classroom days. If there is a discussion, it is largely topical rather than a deep reflection on the values and obligations involved in conservation. Beigel reminds us that Pragmatist Philosopher John Dewey applied Darwinian concepts to make education face the “question of the relation of man to nature” (p. 106). The question of the relation of man to nature is not one that could only be answered in a science classroom, as it implies an inquiry into the philosophical underpinnings of “man” itself. According to Beigel, only 2% of high schools offer an integrated language arts and environmental education curriculum, despite the literature classroom being a potential base for conversations around the human condition as it relates to its role in the biotic community. To that end, she suggests incorporating books that initiate student discourse about environmental ethics and issues.  There are also educators who support incorporating ecocomposition into the curriculum, such as Michael S. Geary (2019), who centered an entire English composition course around writing about wolves to relate to broader social concerns, He does not see our relationships with nonhuman wolves as a separate field solely for ecologists and biologists to study, but rather directly applicable to a deeper, philosophical, and literary understanding ourselves and our relations with other humans and nonhuman agents.

There are even educational scholars for whom developing ecological consciousness is not merely reforming the current system, but ushering a system of thought vastly different from the broadly humanistic and anthropocentric foundation of public education. Posthumanist rhetoric and composition scholars have contributed fascinating research that could upend the writing curriculum as we have known it. Rhetorician Casey Boyle (2016) emphasizes that writing exercises should not merely be practices that reinforce the dominance of the individual, human subject.  He cites scholar Laura R. Micciche (2014), who wrote that writing is a “codependent interaction with a whole host of others—materials, power grids, people, animals, rituals, feelings, stuff, and much else” (p. 501). In “Shadow Living,” Paul Lynch (2018) centers ideas that speak of writing as being connected to the openness of “being in the world rather than writing about the world” as a response to a real struggle he was feeling in his classroom of student disconnect and apathy towards writing (p. 507). He connects posthumanist ideas with Aurelius’s Meditations to emphasize that reflection that does not directly necessitate action is a crucial component of ancient and posthumanist contemporary rhetoric.

As such, despite the fear of educators of allowing any lapse in instruction in the classroom lest it break out into chaos, time for reflection and contemplation is integral to a posthumanist classroom. Furthermore, place-based and nature-based curriculums are no longer buzzwords for pre-schools, but essential for budding writers of all ages. Brent Lucia (2021) challenges the academic paradigm that encourages students to create an assertive, argumentative voice through a thesis statement and argument. He thus creates classroom exercises which emphasize that the writing process emphasizes fluidity, rather than any final product, through concept maps, reverse outlines, and re-writing whenever the student feels called to. Consequently, it is clear that the English language arts curriculum could have a significant role in the new paradigm for education, a role that is potentially fundamental to the creation of a new creative ecological consciousness. Last week, many parents expressed their distaste for an outdated model and world leaders expressed fear at a world that lags stagnantly behind the reality of climate change. It is up to educators to act preemptively to create this consciousness through public education of all ages, before dire circumstance force changes upon the public.

References:

Beigel, J. (1996). Literature and the living world: Environmental education in the English classroom. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2(2), 105–118. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44087352

Boyle, C. (2016). Writing and rhetoric and/as posthuman practice. College English, 78(6), 532-554. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44075143

Cour, N. D. L., (2022, October 11). The results are in. Americans love public schools. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2022/11/public education-ballot-measures-midterms-funding

Geary, M. S. (2019) Writing about wolves: Using ecocomposition pedagogy to teach social justice in a theme-based composition course, The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, 24, Article 9.

Lynch, P. (2018). Shadow living: Toward spiritual exercises for teaching. College English, 80(6), 499–516. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26773398

Lucia, B. (2021). Mapping a network: A posthuman look at rhetorical invention. Composition​ Forum, 47.

Spring, J. H. (2006). American education. McGraw-Hill.

Zielinski, C. (2022). COP27 climate change conference: Urgent action needed for Africa and the world. Natural Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1002/ntls.20221000

_____________________________________________________________________________

Hey Celia!

Thanks for sharing such a provocative essay! You raise a number of interesting points. To them, I added a number of considerations. Hopefully they are somewhat useful for future reflection.

I add probably my thorniest question for last: How do you think we actualize this ecologically conscious vision in K-20? To that end, I would suggest looking into C. P. Snow’s idea of “two cultures” regarding the bifurcation of knowledge into science and the humanities. In short, this division between English education and climate topics has existed within a larger intellectual frame for quite a while. Hopefully you can contribute to this conversation and encourage those who are resistant to these topics to be more open to them before they might be forced to due to climate catastrophes…

Keep fighting the good fight!

Dino