Tyler Sirovy
Ecological Approaches to Teaching Writing and Rhetoric
Overview:
So, the task for me here is to transition from these sources on ecocomposition toward a pedagogy of ecological Rhetoric. For the sake of parity, I’m going to deal with ‘ecological’ simply as ‘nature writing” (don’t get your heads in a tizzy--I know this is trivial and reductive). The sources below offer perspectives on introducing nature writing as a distilled practice of composition that simultaneously allows for a specified, located knowledge and an intensified understanding of how their (students!) writing is working and shaping while also being worked and shaped: the Genre focalizes composition in that it is not concerned with writing as such (detached, etc.) but rather with a tethered and real-world-identity kind of writing. Uh oh.... Time for ‘Transfer of Knowledge!’ How might I apply this Genre focalization to studies of Rhetoric? I think it lies in that axis of focus: instead of teaching ‘Rhetoric per se’ I would explore generic qualities of Rhetoric as it is practiced in environmental debate/argumentation/issue between the various actors who are operating in a contextualizable space. A couple sources offer their views: first, I could approach environmental issues and controversies as exigencies for analysis to which I might encourage my students respond (Moekle). For a sample project, I could have my students research rhetorical responses to environmental disasters or issues and choose a singular text/production to analyze for project 2. Another possibility lies in Project 3, wherein I would have students choose an environmental exigency (policy, injustice, practice, etc) and produce their own text/multimodal intervention in the issues. Emphasis on locality, of course.
Annotated Bibliography
Cooper, Marilyn M. “The Ecology of Writing.” College English 48, no. 4 (1986): 364–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/377264.
Dobrin, Sidney I., and Christian R. Weisser. “Breaking Ground in Ecocomposition: Exploring Relationships between Discourse and Environment.” College English 64, no. 5 (2002): 566–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/3250754.
This article offers a survey on the genesis, development, and potential futures of the field of ecocomposition (in juxtaposition with ecocriticism), or the recognition that, in addition to race, gender, class, and culture, composition is also tethered to space, place, environment, geography, habitat, etc. A fundamental development to the field lies in the move toward a 'post-process' model of writing, which contends that language and text are social activities in social systems rather than the means by which atomized writers discover and communicate information. Basically, writing is interactive and equally depends on and emerges from the writer, the system of language and the systems of the social. In establishing a working conceptual framework for 'ecocomposition,' the Dobrin and Weisser write, "[it] is the study of the relationships between environments....and discourse...." (572) Or, "the investigation of the total relations of discourse both to its organic and inorganic environment" (573). For myself, this inclusion of 'non-natural' environments (a distinction I think we should discontinue) is the interesting bit. There is a beautiful book by Gaston Bachelard titled Poetics of Space, which is an extended meta-reflection on the effects lived space (the Home) produces on the psychological, spiritual, and emotional state of the individual (read: the writer!). Or, rather, how the individual is subsumed by his/her environs, how they become it. Expanding the nexus of 'environment' to these modes of space might make for a fun 101 topics course. Anyway... I disagree with the authors on their point that our only access to our environment(s) is through discourse (which they favor in the stead of social construction--I'm not sure this move works and I think the two terms are pretty interchangeable) (573). Perhaps discourse is the only access point that writing and communication (therefore public policy, etc) have to environment, but to construct an epistemology whereby this relationship metastasizes to include "us" seems dubious.
Hada, Ken. “Hada, Ken. ‘Thinking Ecology in First-Year Composition.’ CEA Forum 37.2 (2008): 1-5. ProQuest. Web. 5 Oct. 2022.” CEA Forum 37.2 (2008): 1–5.
Hada introduces his intervention in the world of first-year composition: environmental and ecological writing. The intervention here seems to be that, as students become better writers when engaged in a particular body of knowledge or approach than when they don’t, one way to foment facility in composition is to approach writing ecologically or environmentally (two here are relatively interchangeable, with Ecology denoting a “scienc-y” and environment denoting a “politic-y” bend). Hada notes the developmental curve of his students’ reception and production of writing in relation to ecology, with a subtle emphasis on the fact that his course focus did not detract from the mission of FY composition. Rather, his course topic produced student outcomes that were self-admissedly positive: his students felt they had a better (more identifiable) grasp of writing technique and skills because of the particular lens of course, which encouraged impassioned reflection on the students’ own feelings of place, space, home, and environment to the extent that they those locations are sites and targets of Rhetoric. I think the focus on the individual experience and its relation to place as a rhetorical location is an important way to “scale out” writing and composition: it allows the students to apprehend the stakes. My curiosity, constrained as it is to Rhetoric for the time being, resides in how Hada’s approach might be recyclable in a first-year Rhetoric course. That is, how might a focus on local/regional ecological and environmental rhetoric allow my students a way into the larger study of Rhetoric, particularly the situatedness of environmental rhetoric within larger spheres of social and political rhetoric. I find my pedagogy remains ungrounded, and this seems a ripe opportunity. I may continue with this as an opportunity to teach a topics 101 course next fall.
Moekle, Kimberly. “Rhetoric, Environmental Pragmatism, and the Ecology of Writing.” Transformations (Wayne, N.J.) 21, no. 1 (2010): 112–22.
Moekle takes environmental issues seriously as exigencies for Rhetorical production and response. She points to the contradictory (though, only really if our epistemology is structural) phenomena of an oil spill off of Cape Cod and continued opposition to an offshore wind project--slated to be constructed in the same site as the oil spill--as a space of Rhetorical negotiation to the extent that it implies a set of audiences, plot, evidence, facts, persuasion, anecdote, credibility, and character. Her focus is, similarly to others, set on composition, and she offers approaches as to how composition studies can engage students in the ‘real-ish’ world, but I am for now more interested in how my students might discover an intensification of Rhetorical strategy in the particularly heated realm of environmental discourse.
Rivers, Nathaniel A. “Geocomposition in Public Rhetoric and Writing Pedagogy.” College Composition and Communication 67, no. 4 (2016): 576–606.
Roorda, Randall. “Nature/Writing: Literature, Ecology, and Composition.” JAC 17, no. 3 (1997): 401–14.
“How does your dissertation relate to composition?” This is Roorda’s intervention at the intersection of literature/composition and ecology, particularly within/beside the compositional emphasis on ‘literary nonfiction.’ Roorda situates himself at the contestable boundary of ‘literary nonfiction’ and ‘nonfiction as literature,’ and he offers ecological composition (nature writing) as an opportunity to blend those two subtly contradictory conceptions of nonfiction and points to how ecological/environmental writing offers students of composition an understanding as to how their writing is tied to the world (not in the positivism-ridden objectivity crucible sense): Basically, this allows students to write in the now and from a place, rather than on some hyper-realized, reified (and therefore ossified) vision of the world. He has various quarrels with the apparent status of fiction as something ‘untethered to the world.’ I found his approach to environmental/ecological composition as Genre writing particularly compelling to the extent that “Genre is generative; generic identity is not determined by but determines and defines aspects of the text under production” (404). As for applications to Rhetoric, I think the way is open here to approach nature writing as a literary genre which dis/allows certain textual and multimodal rhetorical forms, or at the very least constrains/guides the production as such.
Description of Assignment: Project 3—Rhetorical Production!
Collaborative and contemporary — This project will at the outset understand KU as a specific, localized place/space, while also operating within the understanding of longer cultural histories of imperialism/violence. It will also encourage collaboration between/among students and individuals/groups they choose to speak with in their research phase.
The purpose of the assignment is to engage a variety of research methods to explore topics
As an exigency, this project will look to recent discourse/news (“discovery” of indigenous remains) as an environmental justice issue — students will explore how different actors in that scenario situated themselves around this subject and how they tried to present themselves (IE Rhetorical Negotiations and Presentations!).
I will present students with sources (What Was Ours documentary, KU email and poster) and have them collaborate to find more information (university daily kansan, etc.) via multiple research methods (interviews of various stakeholders in the area). This works to connect the general to the local, exploring various modalities of sources and their placement in discourse.
The project will put emphasis on the specific choices a speaker takes to present themselves in a certain way in their context, and it will apply to a real situation — how to do research on the rhetorical situation/context of a real issue.
Project 3 Distillation: Collaboration and Synthesizing Multidisciplinary Conversations
In this project, students will read, annotate, and evaluate a variety of provided sources in multiple modalities (e.g., the documentary What Was Ours, the email and flier from the KU provost’s office), then collaboratively conduct their own research via multiple methods to find more information on the issue of the repatriation of indigenous remains. Students will be required to consider general and local sources in various modalities in order to answer the question: How do stakeholders in this situation present their own interest and values around the conversation of repatriation?
After we have worked as a class to find, annotate, and appropriately cite a variety of sources engaging these questions, students will work in small teams (4-5) to propose, do additional research for, and create research-based presentations that could be presented to a specific administrative office on campus. They will use an appropriate presentation medium (e.g., PowerPoint, Canva, Slides) and original, popular, and scholarly research to make an argument to administration about a needed change, based on their research, for the KU community.
ENGL 101 Course Goals and Stated Project
2. Use writing and reading for inquiry, thinking, learning, and communicating
a. Work with demanding readings and learn to interpret and evaluate these readings
b. Use writing as a problem-solving process that fosters the discovery, analysis, and synthesis of new ideas
c. Analyze and synthesize multiple points of view so as to understand that multiple perspectives on an idea are in operation at the same time
3. Write in ways appropriate to multiple rhetorical contexts (academic or disciplinary, professional, public)
b. Engage in collaborative work at a variety of levels (research, inventions, writing, presentations, etc.) to prepare students for team/group situations, communication in the workplace, and lifelong learning
4. Engage in a variety of research methods to study and explore topics
a. Propose, plan and complete research projects using methods appropriate to the writing task
b. Effectively integrate a variety of appropriate sources into their writings
c. Learn and use at least one system of documentation responsibly
Overview:
So, the task for me here is to transition from these sources on ecocomposition toward a pedagogy of ecological Rhetoric. For the sake of parity, I’m going to deal with ‘ecological’ simply as ‘nature writing” (don’t get your heads in a tizzy--I know this is trivial and reductive). The sources below offer perspectives on introducing nature writing as a distilled practice of composition that simultaneously allows for a specified, located knowledge and an intensified understanding of how their (students!) writing is working and shaping while also being worked and shaped: the Genre focalizes composition in that it is not concerned with writing as such (detached, etc.) but rather with a tethered and real-world-identity kind of writing. Uh oh.... Time for ‘Transfer of Knowledge!’ How might I apply this Genre focalization to studies of Rhetoric? I think it lies in that axis of focus: instead of teaching ‘Rhetoric per se’ I would explore generic qualities of Rhetoric as it is practiced in environmental debate/argumentation/issue between the various actors who are operating in a contextualizable space. A couple sources offer their views: first, I could approach environmental issues and controversies as exigencies for analysis to which I might encourage my students respond (Moekle). For a sample project, I could have my students research rhetorical responses to environmental disasters or issues and choose a singular text/production to analyze for project 2. Another possibility lies in Project 3, wherein I would have students choose an environmental exigency (policy, injustice, practice, etc) and produce their own text/multimodal intervention in the issues. Emphasis on locality, of course.
Annotated Bibliography
Cooper, Marilyn M. “The Ecology of Writing.” College English 48, no. 4 (1986): 364–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/377264.
Dobrin, Sidney I., and Christian R. Weisser. “Breaking Ground in Ecocomposition: Exploring Relationships between Discourse and Environment.” College English 64, no. 5 (2002): 566–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/3250754.
This article offers a survey on the genesis, development, and potential futures of the field of ecocomposition (in juxtaposition with ecocriticism), or the recognition that, in addition to race, gender, class, and culture, composition is also tethered to space, place, environment, geography, habitat, etc. A fundamental development to the field lies in the move toward a 'post-process' model of writing, which contends that language and text are social activities in social systems rather than the means by which atomized writers discover and communicate information. Basically, writing is interactive and equally depends on and emerges from the writer, the system of language and the systems of the social. In establishing a working conceptual framework for 'ecocomposition,' the Dobrin and Weisser write, "[it] is the study of the relationships between environments....and discourse...." (572) Or, "the investigation of the total relations of discourse both to its organic and inorganic environment" (573). For myself, this inclusion of 'non-natural' environments (a distinction I think we should discontinue) is the interesting bit. There is a beautiful book by Gaston Bachelard titled Poetics of Space, which is an extended meta-reflection on the effects lived space (the Home) produces on the psychological, spiritual, and emotional state of the individual (read: the writer!). Or, rather, how the individual is subsumed by his/her environs, how they become it. Expanding the nexus of 'environment' to these modes of space might make for a fun 101 topics course. Anyway... I disagree with the authors on their point that our only access to our environment(s) is through discourse (which they favor in the stead of social construction--I'm not sure this move works and I think the two terms are pretty interchangeable) (573). Perhaps discourse is the only access point that writing and communication (therefore public policy, etc) have to environment, but to construct an epistemology whereby this relationship metastasizes to include "us" seems dubious.
Hada, Ken. “Hada, Ken. ‘Thinking Ecology in First-Year Composition.’ CEA Forum 37.2 (2008): 1-5. ProQuest. Web. 5 Oct. 2022.” CEA Forum 37.2 (2008): 1–5.
Hada introduces his intervention in the world of first-year composition: environmental and ecological writing. The intervention here seems to be that, as students become better writers when engaged in a particular body of knowledge or approach than when they don’t, one way to foment facility in composition is to approach writing ecologically or environmentally (two here are relatively interchangeable, with Ecology denoting a “scienc-y” and environment denoting a “politic-y” bend). Hada notes the developmental curve of his students’ reception and production of writing in relation to ecology, with a subtle emphasis on the fact that his course focus did not detract from the mission of FY composition. Rather, his course topic produced student outcomes that were self-admissedly positive: his students felt they had a better (more identifiable) grasp of writing technique and skills because of the particular lens of course, which encouraged impassioned reflection on the students’ own feelings of place, space, home, and environment to the extent that they those locations are sites and targets of Rhetoric. I think the focus on the individual experience and its relation to place as a rhetorical location is an important way to “scale out” writing and composition: it allows the students to apprehend the stakes. My curiosity, constrained as it is to Rhetoric for the time being, resides in how Hada’s approach might be recyclable in a first-year Rhetoric course. That is, how might a focus on local/regional ecological and environmental rhetoric allow my students a way into the larger study of Rhetoric, particularly the situatedness of environmental rhetoric within larger spheres of social and political rhetoric. I find my pedagogy remains ungrounded, and this seems a ripe opportunity. I may continue with this as an opportunity to teach a topics 101 course next fall.
- Important sidenote: nowhere does Hada dogmatically assert what counts as ecological/environmental. This is concurrent with more recent ecocritical perspectives.
Moekle, Kimberly. “Rhetoric, Environmental Pragmatism, and the Ecology of Writing.” Transformations (Wayne, N.J.) 21, no. 1 (2010): 112–22.
Moekle takes environmental issues seriously as exigencies for Rhetorical production and response. She points to the contradictory (though, only really if our epistemology is structural) phenomena of an oil spill off of Cape Cod and continued opposition to an offshore wind project--slated to be constructed in the same site as the oil spill--as a space of Rhetorical negotiation to the extent that it implies a set of audiences, plot, evidence, facts, persuasion, anecdote, credibility, and character. Her focus is, similarly to others, set on composition, and she offers approaches as to how composition studies can engage students in the ‘real-ish’ world, but I am for now more interested in how my students might discover an intensification of Rhetorical strategy in the particularly heated realm of environmental discourse.
Rivers, Nathaniel A. “Geocomposition in Public Rhetoric and Writing Pedagogy.” College Composition and Communication 67, no. 4 (2016): 576–606.
Roorda, Randall. “Nature/Writing: Literature, Ecology, and Composition.” JAC 17, no. 3 (1997): 401–14.
“How does your dissertation relate to composition?” This is Roorda’s intervention at the intersection of literature/composition and ecology, particularly within/beside the compositional emphasis on ‘literary nonfiction.’ Roorda situates himself at the contestable boundary of ‘literary nonfiction’ and ‘nonfiction as literature,’ and he offers ecological composition (nature writing) as an opportunity to blend those two subtly contradictory conceptions of nonfiction and points to how ecological/environmental writing offers students of composition an understanding as to how their writing is tied to the world (not in the positivism-ridden objectivity crucible sense): Basically, this allows students to write in the now and from a place, rather than on some hyper-realized, reified (and therefore ossified) vision of the world. He has various quarrels with the apparent status of fiction as something ‘untethered to the world.’ I found his approach to environmental/ecological composition as Genre writing particularly compelling to the extent that “Genre is generative; generic identity is not determined by but determines and defines aspects of the text under production” (404). As for applications to Rhetoric, I think the way is open here to approach nature writing as a literary genre which dis/allows certain textual and multimodal rhetorical forms, or at the very least constrains/guides the production as such.
Description of Assignment: Project 3—Rhetorical Production!
Collaborative and contemporary — This project will at the outset understand KU as a specific, localized place/space, while also operating within the understanding of longer cultural histories of imperialism/violence. It will also encourage collaboration between/among students and individuals/groups they choose to speak with in their research phase.
The purpose of the assignment is to engage a variety of research methods to explore topics
As an exigency, this project will look to recent discourse/news (“discovery” of indigenous remains) as an environmental justice issue — students will explore how different actors in that scenario situated themselves around this subject and how they tried to present themselves (IE Rhetorical Negotiations and Presentations!).
I will present students with sources (What Was Ours documentary, KU email and poster) and have them collaborate to find more information (university daily kansan, etc.) via multiple research methods (interviews of various stakeholders in the area). This works to connect the general to the local, exploring various modalities of sources and their placement in discourse.
The project will put emphasis on the specific choices a speaker takes to present themselves in a certain way in their context, and it will apply to a real situation — how to do research on the rhetorical situation/context of a real issue.
Project 3 Distillation: Collaboration and Synthesizing Multidisciplinary Conversations
In this project, students will read, annotate, and evaluate a variety of provided sources in multiple modalities (e.g., the documentary What Was Ours, the email and flier from the KU provost’s office), then collaboratively conduct their own research via multiple methods to find more information on the issue of the repatriation of indigenous remains. Students will be required to consider general and local sources in various modalities in order to answer the question: How do stakeholders in this situation present their own interest and values around the conversation of repatriation?
After we have worked as a class to find, annotate, and appropriately cite a variety of sources engaging these questions, students will work in small teams (4-5) to propose, do additional research for, and create research-based presentations that could be presented to a specific administrative office on campus. They will use an appropriate presentation medium (e.g., PowerPoint, Canva, Slides) and original, popular, and scholarly research to make an argument to administration about a needed change, based on their research, for the KU community.
ENGL 101 Course Goals and Stated Project
2. Use writing and reading for inquiry, thinking, learning, and communicating
a. Work with demanding readings and learn to interpret and evaluate these readings
b. Use writing as a problem-solving process that fosters the discovery, analysis, and synthesis of new ideas
c. Analyze and synthesize multiple points of view so as to understand that multiple perspectives on an idea are in operation at the same time
3. Write in ways appropriate to multiple rhetorical contexts (academic or disciplinary, professional, public)
b. Engage in collaborative work at a variety of levels (research, inventions, writing, presentations, etc.) to prepare students for team/group situations, communication in the workplace, and lifelong learning
4. Engage in a variety of research methods to study and explore topics
a. Propose, plan and complete research projects using methods appropriate to the writing task
b. Effectively integrate a variety of appropriate sources into their writings
c. Learn and use at least one system of documentation responsibly