Writing Environments by Russ Mayo

The Sunday Post on Ethical ELA is a year-long series featuring weekly contributions written by English language arts educator-scholars from across the country. Explore past posts here. Welcome, Russ Mayo! 

Writing Environments: Reimagining English Education via Eco-Composition

I wish to put forward a different approach to teaching writing than we see in most secondary and post-secondary classrooms today. Building on important scholarship in eco-composition, eco-justice, and sustainability studies, I argue that writers and writing teachers must direct attention to the relationship between writing and place, context, environment. Through writing, we must consider a number of pressing environmental challenges too often overlooked in English classrooms, particularly the growing climate crisis. I close by offering suggestions for writing not just about the environment, but writing in, for, and with our environments.

Photo credit: Joe Brusky

Writing environments

Where are you (writing) today? Take a moment and consider your surroundings, your context and environment. Spend some time thinking and writing about your environments:

• Home context: Where do you live? What does home mean to you? Who is there? What material items represent this place?
• School context: Where is your school? What are the building and the campus grounds like? The neighborhood and other surrounds?
• Political-economic context: How does politics shape the places and spaces where you write? Who is part of your community of relations, kinship, and responsibility? How might your identity, gender, race, or religious affiliation shape your writing in this place?
• Historical context: Who lived on this land before you? How did your community come to be there? How did you and/or your family come to dwell there? How is this place changing today?
• Digital context: Many of us do most of our writing digitally these days, and many of us have been learning online due to the pandemic. How have your digital tools and technological spaces/contexts shape you and your writing?

As you can hopefully understand from these prompts, writing is indeed shaped by environment. But of course writing also shapes environments too, so we can see a certain reciprocity in environment and discourse: discourse affects and is affected by context. Writing and teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic clearly exemplifies the importance of environmental factors. These insights bring us to the field of eco-composition.

Photo credit: Joe Brusky

What is eco-composition?

Eco-composition is a subfield of writing studies that seeks to understand how discourse and environment, nature and writing, are intimately tied together in important and often overlooked ways. For example, humanities teachers often think about literature, film, or other arts from a human perspective, focusing on the characters, the plot, the conflict. Eco-critics note that we often neglect the importance of setting – place, context, the built and natural environment, the more-than-human world. Eco-composition offers the same critique of writing studies: namely, that we often focus too much on the writer and their writing as things without context, rather than parts of a web of relationships. In their 2002 book, Natural Discourse, Dobrin and Weisser—two scholars who helped establish this subfield of writing studies two decades ago—define eco-composition as

plac[ing] ecological thinking and composition in dialogue with one another in order to both consider the ecological properties of written discourse and the ways in which ecologies, environments, locations, places, and natures are discursively affected. That is to say, ecocomposition is about relationships; … it is about the production of written discourse and the relationship of that discourse to the places it encounters. (2, emphasis added)

While eco-composition is not exactly a new idea, its focus on contexts and relationships is certainly rare in most writing classrooms today, in both secondary and post-secondary settings. Such a pedagogy offers a radical shift in how and why we teach writing, but it requires English teachers to rethink traditional writing pedagogy as well the purposes and contexts of writing.

Photo credit: Joe Brusky

According to Dobrin and Weisser, eco-composition tends to takes on two distinctive approaches in the classroom: “ecological literacy” and “discursive ecologies” (115-117). David Grant, in his work on sustainability and literacy, refers to these as “environment as subject” and “environment as metaphor,” respectively (202-210). Below, I sketch out these two approaches:

ECOLOGICAL LITERACY (Environment as Subject)

• Teaches literacy through environmental awareness.
• Studies nature writing and other environmental texts and contexts.
• Critically examines culture, language, and media to engage with environmental debates.
• Emphasizes subjects of nature and environment for students to think, talk, and write about.

DISCURSIVE ECOLOGIES (Environment as Metaphor)

• Teaches writing/rhetorical as complex, dynamic, ecological process(es).
• Studies the contexts of specific acts and forms of discourse.
• Critically examines language and meaning as embedded, relational, interconnected.
• Emphasizes the study and production of situated student writing.

Clearly, there are distinctions between the two approach, as each focuses on a different sort of subject matter, content, and approach to writing/discourse. Though for many eco-compositionist, the best approach involves a blending of these two approaches throughout the course of study. Before offering suggestions for how writing instructors can and do go about this work, I will first acknowledge some of challenges we face as writers and educators today.

Photo credit: Joe Brusky

Eco-Composition and the Climate Crisis

As environmentally-informed teacher educators Rick Beach, Jeff Share, and Allen Webb point out in their acclaimed 2017 book Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents, English teachers must acknowledge that we and our students are living in the context of global ecological emergency. Climate change is happening: the science is overwhelming and frightening, marked by increased droughts and wildfires, floods, rising seas, stronger storms, melting glaciers and permafrost. Climate change is already one of the major factors in conflict and migration around the world, and it will continue to do as large coastal populations in mega-cities face rising food and water insecurity coupled with displacement due to rising ocean levels.

Experts suggest that even if all carbon emissions were to stop today, enough warming is already baked into the system that we can expect significant disruptions to human and animal life on this planet by the end of the century (Wallace-Wells). The “slow violence” of climate change, as Rob Nixon calls it, most significantly impacts poor and marginalized communities, and it will continue to reshape the contexts and possibilities for social justice. Our currently climate path is indeed bleak, and so we have no time to waste: we must act to ensure a future for our children and their healthy, livable environments by both mitigating climate change and by preparing for life on an increasingly damaged planet.

Photo credit: Joe Brusky

What does climate change have to do with teaching writing? As discussed above, writing takes place, and our places are and will continue to be impacted by “global weirding” as the environment response to human-caused climate change coupled with overdevelopment, deforestation, pollution, resource extraction, industrial agriculture, overfishing, and other unsustainable practices. Our current environmental predicament offers what rhetoricians call an exigence, or “an imperfection marked by urgency” (Bitzer 6). English educators must consider our classrooms as essential spaces to think about and respond to this exigence. To quote NCTE’s 2019 resolution in favor of “Literacy Teaching on Climate Change”:

Understanding climate change challenges the imagination; addressing climate change demands all the tools of language and communication, including the ability to tell compelling stories about the people and conflicts at the heart of this global discussion.

I would argue that no topic could be more important to consider with our students than the future of our planet and our collective survival on it. Furthermore, we must look to making the future not just about survival but about justice and equity for humans and the restoration and resilience of the natural world simultaneously.

Photo credit: Joe Brusky

Writing in, with, and for our environments

To close, I want to offer a number of suggestions for how English teachers might reimagine their pedagogies with an eco-composition approach. Below are five specific areas for secondary and post-secondary writing teachers to integrate environmental literacy, discursive ecologies, and climate exigence into their classrooms

1. Place-based writing: Perhaps the best place to start is by having your students write about their place (Beach, Share, and Webb). They can use reflective writing to explore the homes they know, love, and/or lost (Owens). They can then start connecting place to family, history, identity, language (Turner). A great book of examples of such personal essay writing for and by young writers is Coming of Age at the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet (edited by Dunlap and Cohen). Rich Novack also offers excellent ideas for outdoor literacy pedagogy.
2. Rhetorical discourse mapping: Have students trace how certain discourse is used by different groups of people. For example, Killingsworth and Palmer note how “Nature” is often thought of as a “Resource,” “Object,” or “Spirit” in American environmental thinking. Students can read about and compare how local waterways, forests, or mountains are described, discussed, and imagined by various stakeholders or groups. Beach, Share, and Webb also suggest students studying indigenous and postcolonial perspectives.
3. Critical analysis of language, media, ideology: English teachers often teach students to pay close attention to language, and focusing on “conceptual metaphors” and “mutual oppressions” (Turner) can help students interrogate environmental rhetorics. Beach, Share, and Webb also discuss how using image, news, and digital media such as documentary films (Rodesiler and Mayo) can help students critically engage with narratives and arguments made about environmental issues.
4. Exploring (un)sustainable systems: Owens and Turner each offer myriad examples for organizing units or courses thematically around topics such as food, water, waste, consumerism to center environmental and social justice issues for student research and writing. A combination of news articles, documentary films, interviews, and surveys can helps students report on problems of these systems in our communities and everyday lives and argue for changes through public genres and writing for community audiences.
5. Writing for survival, resilience, restoration: Students need to be aware of the frightening projections of climate change, but to avoid despair or cynicism, they should imagine and write about possible futures students: Beach, Webb, and Share suggest writing eco-poetry, flash fiction, and cli-fi short stories to creatively consider climate impacts today and in the future; Owens discusses students’ “Eu-topia” projects to image not a perfect world, but a better one; Turner has students explore “Just Transitions” movements; Rethinking Schools suggests that students read about and explore the “Green New Deal” proposals; and Jem Bendell suggests that we consider a “Deep Adaptation Agenda” in the face of a post-sustainable reality.

Teaching writing should begin with an exploration of the ways in which writing involves relationships: social, discursive, and environmental. Rather than focusing on writing products, writers and writing teachers should focus more on writing as “a way of being in the world together” (Yagelski 8). That means making place, context, and environment more central to our writing assignments and our class discussions. The work of eco-composition could not be more relevant to our lives and classrooms today and to our collective future on this planet.

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Works Cited

Beach, Richard, Jeff Share, and Allen Webb. Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents: Reading, Writing, and Making a Difference. Routledge/NCTE, 2017.

Bendell, Jem. “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” Institute of Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS). University of Cumbria. Occasional Paper, vol. 2. 27 Jan. 2020. insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/4166/.

Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 1, no. 1, 1968, pp. 1-14. www.jstor.org/stable/40236733.

Brusky, Joe. “People’s Climate March.” 28 Sept. 2014. Flickr. www.flickr.com/photos/40969298@N05/albums/72157647481551918/

Dobrin, Sidney I. “Writing Takes Place.” Ecocomposition, edited by Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I. Dobrin. SUNY Press, 2001, pp. 11-25.

Dobrin, Sidney I., and Christian R. Weisser. Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition. SUNY Press, 2002.

Dunlap, Julie, and Susan A. Cohen, editors. Coming of Age at the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet. Trinity UP, 2016.

Grant, David M. “Toward Sustainable Literacies: From Representational to Recreational Rhetorics.” Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of Sustainability, edited by Peter N. Goggin. Routledge, 2009, pp. 202-216.

“The Green New Deal and Our Schools.” Rethinking Schools (Summer 2019). Retrieved from rethinkingschools.org/articles/the-green-new-deal-and-our-schools/.

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and environmental politics in America. SIU Press, 2012.

National Council of Teachers of English (2019 March 1). Resolution on literacy teaching on climate change. NCTE Position Statements. Retrieved from www2.ncte.org/statement/resolution-literacy-teaching-climate-change/.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.

Novack, Richard. “Reading In and Through Nature: An Outdoor Pedagogy for Reading Literature,” Language Arts Journal of Michigan, vol. 29, no 2 (2014): 62-69. doi.org/10.9707/2168-149X.2015 

Owens, Derek. Composition and Sustainability: Teaching for a Threatened Generation. NCTE Press, 2001. files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED458601.pdf 

Rodesiler, Luke, and Russell Mayo. “The Future is Now: A 2040 Study Guide.” Screen Education, vol. 96 (2019): 78-83. issuu.com/atompublications/docs/rodesiler___mayo_2040/2?e=3998991/77920200

Turner, Rita J. Teaching for Ecojustice: Curriculum and Lessons for Secondary and College Classrooms. Routledge, 2015. 

Wallace-Wells, David. “The Uninhabitable Earth.” New York Magazine, vol. 14 (2017). nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

Yagelski, Robert. Writing as a Way of Being: Writing Instruction, Nonduality, and the Crisis of Sustainability. Hampton Press, 2011.