Environmentalism in the creative writing classroom.

Abstract

While the study of environmental topics has broadened over the last fifteen years, the word "environment" has narrowed. Spring 2003, I changed the name and focus of an environmental literature class to "Writing About Place" in order to broaden understanding of what "environment" means. The goal was to facilitate deep learning through students' active engagement in the learning process. Through surveys and anecdotes, I show that most students achieved deep learning. While at the start of the term students seemed ambivalent about environmentalism, in four months, they had achieved a deeper understanding of the issues and a strong emotional, value-based connection to the subject.

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When I inherited a course--Writing About Nature and the Environment--from a retiring colleague, I quickly filed the paperwork necessary to change the title and description. I felt wary of continuing to offer a class perceived by students to be reserved for "tree-huggers and radicals." While the study of environmental topics has broadened over the last fifteen years, the word "environment," as understood by the general population, has narrowed, become bifurcated and freighted with simplistic connotations. A new course title, Writing About People, allowed students to approach the subject without negative preconceptions and to broaden their understanding of what "environment" means. For me, a homeless shelter is connected to a nature trail and to the Boston Freedom Trail and to illegal toxic dumping in Wilmington, MA. We live on one planet. We're all in this together. As the semester progressed, my students began to see these connections, too. More importantly, they began to use this knowledge in reflecting on their experiences, and they began to feel differently about their experiences. In other words, they met the fundamental goal of the class--to achieve deep learning through active engagement.

As I developed the course, I chose to cast a wide net and expose students to many different approaches to "place." We read an eclectic mix of texts: an article from House Beautiful, an essay by naturalist John Muir, newspaper articles on homelessness, an expose on China's industrial pollution, a short story set in the suburbs of Atlanta, etc. I invited two guest speakers to visit our class--an environmental air quality professional and an activist working to stop chemical spraying in Colombia. We attended a screening of a documentary on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. And we visited a local homeless shelter to interview the place-less, homeless "residents" of our city. In addition to these activities, students wrote ten rough drafts (stories, essays, poems, memoir, etc.)--four of which they chose to revise extensively for their final portfolios.

I was exceptionally pleased by the students' final work: in terms of technical mastery but also their "deep learning." According to McLeod, for "deep learning" to occur, students must experience "profound, meaningful, and lasting shifts in cognitions, attitudes, emotions, and values." Students need to be engaged on multiple levels, not just their intellects (cognitive level) but also their whole selves (qtd. in Grauerholtz 44). Miller also describes deep learning as "transformational," that is, affecting students in deeply personal ways (Miller 46). Deep learning is very difficult to measure. To some extent teachers must judge a course's value by students' own assessment of its impact on their attitudes, emotions, and values. Since Writing About Place was a new course for me, I wanted to measure or at least begin to examine students' deep learning. To gather data to help me understand students' attitudes before and after the course, I surveyed the class at the beginning and the end of the semester. In essence, I discovered that at the start of the term, students seemed ambivalent about environmental issues, but by the end, they had achieved a much fuller understanding of the complexity of the issues and a strong emotional, value-based connection to the subject.

The first week of class, I surveyed my eighteen students anonymously to gauge attitudes on environmentalism. The first open-ended question asked students to, "Consider for a moment the big issues you are most concerned about in your life (i.e. what sorts of situations in the world/U.S, do you actually spend the most time worrying or thinking about). Rank the five most important issues to you." Predictably (it being the spring of 2003) most students' number one concern was either war or terrorism. Many students listed the economy or poverty (in the U.S. and abroad), and violence against women or children. A minority of them listed "the environment," or a specifically environmental concern like "global warming" or "elimination of natural resources (oil)," usually as either their fourth or fifth choice. In part two, the free association section of the survey, results showed a disjuncture between perception of the natural world and of those who are advocates for that world. Environmentalists were "tree-buggers," "radicals," "extremists," and "woodsy." When asked about the Green Party, most students left it blank or wrote a question mark, but when they had heard of it, they responded with "poor political planning," "hippies," and "socialism." On the other hand, in response to the word "Nature," students answered "beauty," "salvation," "alive," "peace," and "sublimity." Clearly, most of my students appreciated nature, but environmental issues did not rank high on their list of concerns, and environmentalists did not earn their esteem and admiration.

The final question: "Do you consider yourself an environmentalist? Why or why not?" elicited the most interesting responses. Predictably, only one student identified him/herself as an environmentalist. The negative responses ranged from "too old, lazy, busy to make an appropriate commitment" and "I have other things to worry about" to "I don't think so because even though I am for a cleaner earth and environment, I am not all about going out and cleaning the streets and water" and "I do what I can to not harm the environment, but I've never taken an actual stance on any environmental issue." Students had trouble defining what it means to be an environmentalist, and I left this term undefined in order to discover what sorts of pre-conceptions they had about the term. One student almost visibly wrestled with his or her own values and self-definition: "Yes ... mostly because I virtually grew up in the woods and around animals and plants. I realize how important and fragile they are. I don't consider myself an environmentalist in the political sense of the word, ... but I guess it does carry over into my political views."

The survey results, I think, validated my approach to the class. By changing the name of the course and portraying environmentalism as one way of relating to "place," I provided students with an opportunity to set aside their preconceptions and learn. For me the question is not how to teach environmental literature to those who have an identified interest in the environment but rather how to teach potentially resistant students. If students feel an instructor is giving preferential treatment to a particular political viewpoint--and their responses to this survey show they clearly saw environmentalism as a political stance--then they are more likely to approach the activity with an emotional distance that can block opportunities for deep learning. Worse still, they may simply, and superficially, write what they think the instructor wants to read. When presented as one among many ways of looking at the topic of place, however, many students chose environmentalist approaches voluntarily. When exposed to concepts and values through readings, film, and guest speakers, many students began to feel the issues more keenly; the concerns of the movement seeped into writing assignments not specifically geared toward environmentalism.

The first breakthrough of the semester occurred when our guest speaker Michael arrived in class and shared the story of having his life threatened when serving on a city land use committee. I expected students would be attentive to this speaker--it is a very exciting story. But during discussion after his presentation, students asked many questions I didn't expect. They wanted to know more about his work now and how one goes about getting such training and how to make a living doing environmental work. My students were beginning to see environmentalists in human terms, to see such work as legitimate, admirable, and possibly even desirable.

Our second speaker came to class a few weeks later. She works for a center at the university dedicated to sustainable production, but she is also an activist for Colombian rights. She has seen first-hand the devastation caused by spraying the coca plants as a part of the American "war" on drugs. Showing slides of Colombia, she spoke eloquently of the plight of the peasants, weaving a complex story of the forces at work in our two countries and elucidating the many social and environmental problems all rolled into this one issue. Students were amazed, even dumbfounded. They had never before considered the effects of American drug policy upon an environment thousands of miles away. One student noted the multiple victims of drug abuse: the recovering addict she had interviewed at the local homeless shelter and the Colombian farmer who loses ins banana crop due to herbicide spraying. They began to see that, in today's world, all places are connected.

That night several students attended the campus film festival and watched a documentary on Rachel Carson and the writing of Silent Spring. After the viewing, faculty and student attendees engaged in passionate discussion about the possibility for effective activism in today's world. My students were among the most vocal. While participating in and observing that conversation, I felt heartened by students' concern for environmental issues. I was also saddened by the reign of pessimism I witnessed. Students admired Carson but felt strongly that "these days nobody could do what she did." I could feel the frustration of these students who wanted to change the world but who had little hope or faith that their efforts would be rewarded with success if they chose to try. My colleagues and I assured the students that they need not save the world just yet, that they need not become another Rachel Carson to make a difference in the world, that a solid education was important. And students in my course definitely did embrace the idea of active learning. They dove into their next assignment with gusto: an expose on an environmental issue in their hometowns.

Students began with library research to unearth environmental issues reported locally. Once they had gathered some background, they set up interviews: a city councilman, a leader of a neighborhood association, a reference librarian well schooled in local history, a state EPA official, etc. Though about half of these projects turned up little usable material, the rest of the papers offered fairly compelling cases. Perhaps the best of the bunch was Joe's piece about dumping illegal toxics in his hometown. [1] He interviewed several people about the site. "Everyone in town knows it's going on," one of his interviewees remarked, "but nobody does anything about it. Everyone knows how corrupt city officials are here." Joe himself had seen people unloading material from trucks parked inside the fenced off dump site (with sign: Closed. Keep out!) Further research uncovered disturbing evidence that area politicians (with financial interests in the illegal activity) were not merely turning a blind eye to the goings-on at the site but were actively working to discourage official investigation. Joe--one of the class jokesters--seemed transformed by this research experience, even talking about pursuing a career as an investigative reporter.

Because the class was conducted in workshop format, most of the class eventually knew about Joe's project and began offering suggestions for what he could do to "nail those bastards." Soon the whole class began to engage in lively discussions about the environmental issues they had been researching: wetland protection, asbestos removal, water pollution, etc. One student even quit her job when she found out that the building she worked in was constructed on a former toxic dumpsite. Tiffany's research revealed that basements of contaminated buildings are the most potentially harmful space for occupants and that was exactly where she filed paperwork for a local business.

Only one of the course's ten assignments required students to examine an "environmental issue." I expected students would become engaged in the subject of environmentalism for this assignment--after all, they would be researching negative effects on their hometown. What I found particularly surprising is the way that environmental issues informed and deepened the other assignments, especially visible when comparing first and final drafts. For example, in the nature walk assignment, Kevin wrote about returning to an apple orchard where he and his brothers had played while growing up, only to find "wooden stakes in the earth ... spray painted florescent orange," obvious signs of impending development. Maria wrote about her visit to the beach. Alone and silent, she had created an intricate sand castle and scrawled her name underneath. Resisting the urge to add another's name with a heart, she sat back and admired her creation. But the passage of time brought the tide in "like a giant eraser" that "began pulling apart [her] letters and towers." She "tried in vain to find comfort that [her] masterpiece had gone off to become part of the world, that it is just nature's way of taking back control," but she still recognized her profoundly human desire to leave an indelible mark on the earth.

In another assignment in which students wrote about a place where they grew up, Julie wrote about the magic of fishing in a local pond, describing how she caught an "iridescent sunfish" whose "mouth opened and closed desperately searching for the water" from which she had pulled it. After releasing her catch, she hears the summer curfew whistle and gets ready to return home. The story that unfolds is a tale of magic that disappears along with her childhood as she is chased by a filthy, leering man waiting for his next victim. Though thankfully Julie escaped, the experience changed her. Nature became a dangerous place, a place where predators lurk: "It was the last summer I fished alone," she remarked in closing. Todd, in response to this same assignment, wrote of the comfort offered by a frozen pond, a safe haven for him and his brothers. He wrote of one day when a visitor was coming to the house, and he took his brothers to the pond to keep them safe. As he whispers the secret of his molestation to his reflection in the ice, we feel the child's pain and desperate quest for healing. There is little separation between the boy and his icy reflection; the human and environmental cannot be separated.

And finally, when asked to use an extended metaphor in a story, Lola wrote of saying goodbye to her fiance after he received his orders to ship out for Iraq. In her story she walks in the forest near her parents' home, weeks after he left, trying not to think too much about the dangers he faces. One day as she overturns a rotting log, she spies "a tiny foot peeking out from under" a fallen leaf. It is a long-dead frog.

   I put my face very close to it, this little wood frog, enough that
   I could smell the living dirt beneath it. The frog's skin was taut
   and dry.... I guessed that he had to have been dead for at least a
   year, trapped under this log by mistake and then starved, suffocated,
   or crushed to death.

Her story uses nature to reflect on the nearness of death and its pervasive presence as she waits for letters from the war zone. The desiccated frog links the dry desert of her lover and the moist forest of her home. The foreboding, the palpable fear emerges at every turn.

Upon surveying students anonymously again at the end of the semester, I saw clear evidence of deep learning. Students remarked that the course helped them to appreciate the importance of environmental issues. Many commented on the guest speakers, who were "not too environmental" but who "simply talked/wrote about things that seemed pertinent in a Writing About Place class." Some expressed a desire to change their own behavior: "The issues are out there," one student wrote, "and I have learned to face them. Granted, there are issues and conditions I cannot affect, but that doesn't mean I have the right to be blind to them." And finally, their perspective on the environment changed as well. As one student put it, " Writing about Place is writing about the environment. The environment is everywhere. The woods is an environment. Lowell is an environment. I don't think that you can write about place without wilting about the environment in some way, shape or form."

My students may not have become tree-huggers and radicals, but then that wasn't the point. They have, however become better citizens and caretakers of our planet. As one student remarked, "It is difficult to see where 'nature' stops and civilization begins."

Notes

[1.] Though quotations have been authorized, I'm using pseudonyms to protect student privacy.

Works Consulted

McLeod, A. "Discovering and Facilitating Deep Learning States." The National Teaching and Learning Forum 5 (1996): 1-7. Quoted in Liz Grauerholtz. "Teaching Holistically to Achieve Deep Learning." College Teaching 49.2 (2001): 44-50.

Miller, J.P. "Making Connections Through Holistic Learning." Educational Leadership 56 (1999): 46-8.

Weigel, Van B. Deep Learning for a Digital Age: Technology's Untapped Potential To Enrich Higher Education. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, 2002.

Weiss, Palumbo Ruth. "Emotion and Learning" Training & Development; 54.11 (Nov. 2000): 44-48

Diana C. Archibald, University of Massachusetts Lowell, MA

Archibald is an Assistant Professor of English who teaches creative writing and Victorian literature. She is currently editing her grandmother's memoir.