The Spectacular Speculative of Outdoor Activities in English Classrooms by Rich Novack

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, Rich Novack! 

The Spectacular Speculative of Outdoor Activities in English Classrooms

For sixteen years teaching in a public high school, I have taken students outdoors as part of our 10th grade English classes. Outside we journal about nature. Inside we share discoveries from nearby places. The student writing often echoes the motifs of famous nature writers from Dillard to Thoreau. I have also seen students remix nature writing with generic elements of fantasy, horror, and mystery. While I’m a pretty open-minded English teacher, it took me time to warm-up to the speculative offerings that some students shared in response to their outdoor rambles. Over the years I have wondered: Why would students turn their representations of the real and natural world into something more than real, something surreal or supernatural?

In time I’ve come to welcome speculative nature writing as much as any traditional nature writing from my students. I began reimagining how speculative reading and writing activities might be used in the classroom. When Nicole Mirra called for a “speculative approach” to civic engagement with a Tweet on election night of 2020, I thought about how the speculative creative thinking that I see in student writing after our outdoor class activities could be useful in generating never-before-seen solutions to new and vexing problems.

Speculative thinking, speculative fiction, and speculative stories allow a person to imagine the what if possibilities of a situation. In a turbulent world that offers pandemic lockdowns, climate disasters, and insurrection, speculative genres allow us both an escape from the present ills of the day and can help us fashion a response that hints at a brighter future. This blog post will discuss how and why I welcome speculative reading and writing activities in my classrooms as a tool for critical and civic pedagogies.

From Speculative Civic Literacies to the Fantastic

Mirra and Garcia suggested the need for “speculative civic literacies” in our classrooms, whereby teachers make room for the “expansive, creative forms of meaning making and communication aimed at radically orienting the nature and purpose of shared democratic life toward equity, empathy and justice.” In a world of ongoing injustice, we need to implement activities that help students negotiate their changing world. We educators can leverage the aesthetic of speculative thinking in ways that foster healthy civic engagement poised toward solutions.

Today, media outlets spread dangerous lies, and neighbors concoct and/or trade fanciful conspiracy theories in response to political discussions as a way to cope with a changing reality. Sure, we sometimes crave imaginative storytelling to help deal with life. That’s why I gravitated toward The Clone Wars and The Mandalorian during the pandemic. Our world is changing, and people will be inclined to invent and share stories in response to those changes. The difference, however, between the speculative tales of literature and the fanciful creations of conspiracy theories is this: literature is art. Art reveals truth, and conspiracy theories promulgate lies.

Speculative literacy not only welcomes changing situations, it can elicit a stance toward civic activism in a changing world. As Mirra and Garcia suggested, “we need to take a fantastic turn in our conceptualizations and enactments of civic education to seek democracy.” We can decenter the status quo by incorporating outdoor activities in our English classrooms and welcoming “fantastic,” spectacular, speculative literacy to emerge in response to changing social and ecological environments.

Seeing the Unseen through Spectacular Speculative Imaginings

A walk in the woods offers teachers and students moments for fictitious speculative creation. For example, one might wonder why a deer roams a suburban park. I often take students outside to compose field journals, wherein they create such speculative representations of the everyday nature that is typically overlooked. Field journals are written responses that invite multimodal representations of nature. During school hours I take students in most classes outside to a 10 acre nook of nature in the suburban open-space adjacent our school’s property to write seasonally, between three and five times in a typical school year.

During the lockdown phase of the pandemic, students composed backyard field journals in and around their homes and in their neighborhoods. They published and shared writing, photographs, sound recordings, and videos to our class website. In uncertain times, I turn to nature for comfort. In the pandemic, backyard field journaling brought students a sense of calm and peace that was shared in their writing, even while distanced by a lockdown.

Students wrote about the unappreciated nature in their everyday realities. One student wrote, “I never really noticed how tall the oak tree in our yard was. Beside the sounds of construction across the street, it was peaceful.”

The peaceful reality of everyday encounters with nature became something students could turn into spectacular texts of nature writing. When students engage in outdoor literacy activities that ask them to be observant and curious and to note discoveries made in the natural world, they acclimate their minds toward a stance of wonder and discovery that invites a vision of what had not been seen before.

In the fall of 2020, one student wrote a piece for his free choice writing assignment that borrowed from the speculative possibilities of both nature writing and horror genres. Speculative fiction stretches across genres, including the following:

• dystopia
• fantasy
• horror
• sci-fi
• mystery

These works evoke a sense of what if possibilities. This student’s work affirmed what I had already known: some students truly gravitate toward such speculative imaginings.

He wrote:

Nature gives off that sense of conundrums leaving the human mind to make up fantastic, almost believable stories about nature and the hair raising mysteries. For an example we can look at The Shining. It is a haunting movie that leaves you questioning everybody around you.

In this essay, I see a 10th grader tentatively stepping out of his comfort zone, and stepping toward a critical stance. When he’s in the woods, separated from his peers in our writing activity, he at first believes that “being put in a forest alone is terrifying.” However, he looks past any fear to discover and embrace how “nature is mysteriously soothing.” By combining elements of the outdoors with an allusion to horror, this writing illustrates how students can remix the real world of nature with the speculative world of fiction.

While some students celebrated the spectacular offerings of birds singing and squierrells frolicing, others observed the litter that looks out-of-place juxtaposed to the non-human natural world. I have seen students who imagine solutions for litter in the woods, leaning toward environmental activism in such speculative endeavors. Mirra and Garcia suggested that “speculative arts movements turn to the fantastic to explode traditional understandings of the past, interrogate dominant ways of knowing in the present, and imagine creative new possibilities for the future.” Combining nature writing with speculative literacies can invite students to take that turn toward “the fantastic.”

In the fall of 2019, one student turned a mesmerizing hum of crickets heard on a class sponsored outing into a spectacular tale of mystery and woodland horror.

The sound of these crickets was remixed into a foreshadowing device of suspense. Two girls go missing in a wood and when one calls out to her missing friend, “the only response I get is the crickets filling the empty air with sound.” Our outdoor field journaling inspired the student to employ a spectacular literary device in a truly disturbing and macabre tale that engages readers as part of our Story of Place assignment.

Later that school year following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests, this same student would write a poem about the struggle against police violence, where peace is symbolized by a bird, a dove, along with what could be an allusion to Prince’s “When Doves Cry.”

He begins the poem, “The Dove follows / while a knee lies on His neck.” In this student’s writing nature is a character in a world of struggle and strife. These writings illustrate a student engaging outdoor experiences and understandings of nature with critical inspections of his world.

The Speculative Turn in my Classroom

I began appreciating students’ speculative imaginings when I read their fantastic inventions in the data collected for my dissertation research. Between 2011-2018 I started to see some students delve into more supernatural speculative wonderings in their field journals. While few students explicitly write about social injustices in their field journals, I do think that class activities that jar students into new perspectives are useful in efforts to inspire civic engagement. The act of seeing everyday aspects of their world that were beforehand unseen exposes students to new possibilities.

Students in my class sometimes blend their previous literary encounters with their wonderings in the woods, melding together an imagined vision from one text into a new remixed version of another text. In her field journal collected for my dissertation, one student writes of how she “saw a tree that forms an arc that reminds [her] of a rainbow and this portal to another dimension in a book [she] read.” 

This student connected her outdoor class experience with speculative fantasy literature. A bent tree hanging in the woods after an ice storm was something she’d “never seen before” and found to be “cool.” Outdoor activities blended with speculative literature, fantasy, and horror, for example, can help push students into speculative thinking, which is necessary today.

When legislators, parents, students, colleagues, administrators, and others pushback against the kinds of decolonizing, anti-racist, critical literacy that’s called for in the twenty-first century, these outdoor speculative literacies allow teachers a more inconspicuous path toward engagement with critical literacies. Broadly speaking, outdoor speculative literacy combines outdoor experiential learning with reading and writing activities that invite students to consider the what if possibilities of their world; a chance to see the spectacular surreal in the everyday ordinary real world. Fecho and others discuss how some students wobble in classrooms between the familiar and the critically unknown. A “wobble” in tenuous moments offers students a chance to “call their own stances into question as rigorously as they might interrogate those of others.” We want students to wobble toward unseen possibilities in their own thinking and their observations of the world. By allowing students a chance to wobble with outdoor speculative literacies, we can move some toward more critical inspections of their world.

In addition to writing instruction that values critical perspectives, I’ve moved toward including more literary works of speculative fiction in my classroom. Dystopian fiction, as a type of speculative fiction, has a tradition of responding to a changing world. While The Handmaid’s Tale has always been part of my 10th grade classroom, I have more recently included Atwood’s Oryx and Crake from the MaddAddam trilogy. In this disturbing novel, scientific malfeasance through artificial genetic mutation leads to environmental apocalypse. Atwood presents a critique of some present day follies, including corporate dominance, consumer culture, and genetic engineering in a way that invites readers to imagine a future world that is both possible and frightening. This May of 2021 as part of my work with the Commission on Climate Change and Environment in English Education, I am conducting a slow book chat about The Water Knife, another speculative title to consider. While in book club activities I’ve offered students Ready Player One and The Ship Breakers to exemplify speculative environmental fiction, I haven’t had the chance to use novels like Dry or The Parable of the Sower in the classroom, but all these works of speculative fiction could engage readers with horrific potential futures if social and environmental folly is not abated.

As English teachers, it’s useful to welcome artistic inventions that embrace an aesthetic of spectacular speculative imaginings. No doubt, the world our students step into each day is fraught with the failures of recent and past generations. A speculative response in reading the word and the world allows students to process any horror in their critical inspection with the possibilities of hopeful futures. In a changing world, we must nurture creative minds that can adapt into new possibilities.