Place: Politics, Environmental Issues, and Composition

Texts

Reynolds, Nedra “Composition's Imagined Geographies: The Politics of Space in the Frontier, City, and Cyberspace.” CCC 50.1 (1998): 12–35. Print.

Reynolds uses “concepts from postmodern geography to explore how spaces and places are socially produced through discourse and how these constructed spaces can then deny their connections to material reality or mask material conditions” (13).

Roorda, Randall. “Great Divides: Rhetorics of Literacy and Orality.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 97–116. Print.

Traces the history of the divide between literacy and orality in literacy studies critiquing both the divide and constructivist opposition to the divide.

Brown, Stephen G. “The Wilderness Strikes Back: Decolonizing the Imperial Sign in the Borderlands.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 117–130. Print.

Approaches place from a post-colonial perspective using “the Alaskan environment as a master trope not only for indigenous identity, but for native resistance as well” (117).

Long, Mark C. “Education and Environmental Literacy: Reflections on Teaching Ecocomposition in Keen State College’s Environmental House.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 131–146. Print.

Discusses how a student centered approach to teaching place fosters the critical thinking skills needed for both environmental literacy and education.

Plevin, Arlene. “The Liberatory Positioning of Place in Ecocomposition: Reconsidering Paulo Freire.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 147–162. Print.

Argues for teaching place as a means of accomplishing Freire’s objective of helping students to recognize “discourse hegemonies” (149).

Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Ecocomposition: Pedagogies, Perspectives, and Intersections.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 163–178. Print.

Argues for ecocomposition as a means to discuss social issues while maintaining a focus on teaching writing.

Colleen Connolly, “Ecology and Composition Studies: A Feminist Perspective on Living Relationships.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 179–192. Print.

Offers “an ecofeminist pedagogy that aims to examine and thin about the discursive and cultural practices that define the relations among individuals, society, and nature” (181).

Christopher J. Keller, “The Ecology of Writerly Voice: Authorship, Ethos, and Persona.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I Dobrin eds. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 193–208. Print.

Offers an ecological perspective of voice based on the experience of a class assignment to write either a nature retreat essay or a position paper on an environmental issue. He grounds voice/self (identity) in the politics of space.

While these articles are quite different, one factor that ties them together—besides mostly being in the same book—is that they all, in one way or another, present an idea of what ecocomposition is that revolves around a sense of place. This is also true of our readings from last week. All of the ecocomposition articles that we have read so far, however, indicate some diversity about the proper focus of an ecocomposition class when it comes to the place of politics, environmental issues, and composition.

For the purpose of this presentation, I am operationally defining politics as "competition between competing interest groups or individuals for power and leadership" (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary), environmental issues as introducing texts, discussions, assignments that center on issues of ecological crisis, and composition as the teaching of writing with a focus on helping students learn to write more successfully. While politics is always operating in any social situation, and especially a classroom, and while some may argue that any class that includes a certain amount of writing and reading might qualify as a composition class, these articles reveal very different ideas about how central these and reading and writing about environmental issues are for how these individual authors understand ecocomposition.

The following chart places each ecocompositiong theorist we have read so far in the columns of politics, environmental issues, and composition according to how much their articles seems to focus on each one. While Dobrin discusses each of these three aspects as part of ecocomposition, every other author focuses their attention on one or two, indicating that the other category or categories are less if not "ir" relevant.

This is, of course, an entirely subjective chart meant to elicit discussion and disagreement. Some

questionable placements, however, will be explained shortly.

Some of these placements are based in actual statements by the authors: Owens and Long in respect to politics and Owens, Drew, and Keller in respect to environmental issues.

Owens

“Not only am I conscientious about making my students feel that they have been misled into taking a course in ecological economics more than composition, but I also have little interest in lecturing about anything, sustainability included” (30)

Long

"calls for transformation risk limiting the potential of environmental literacy by demanding that students assume and act upon a set of values that may not be their own” (142)

Owens (environmental issues)

IBID

Drew

“I had no desire to stake out a position regarding whether or not compositionists ought to work to conserve and protect natural environments by teaching students to produce and analyze texts about nature and environmentalism” (57)

Keller

“At first glance, ecocomposition may look like an attempt by composition teachers and scholars to incorporate studies of the natural world into the writing classroom…I agree completely with Drew that we must divest ourselves of the notion that ecocomposition necessarily deals with nature” (193–4)

Other choices were made based on apparent neglect of one or more of these aspects in the articles. Neglect was a primary factor for most decisions not to place an author under composition. By the time I finished reading several of these articles, Brown's and Plevin's most notably, I wondered whether they bothered to teach writing at all beyond the fact that students in their classes would do a lot of reading and writing. Roorda's article has no real pedagogical focus at all, and from last weeks readings Killingsworth and Krajicek's contribution seems to be about a literature rather than a composition class. These and other factors give fairly strong indications about what these authors consider essential for ecocomposition.

From last weeks articles, neither Cooper nor Bawarshi give us indications that they see either political awareness or environmental issues as essential to ecocomposition, though they both address place and ecology in respect to teaching writing. Plevin and Connolly, while they do mention environmental issues and writing instruction, seem to give much less importance to them per se than to ecocomposition as a means to carryout a political agenda in the classroom. Gaard, while similarly focused on political possibilities, is careful to forward composition in her article and downplay her political agenda for the sake of "[allowing] for a much greater range of perspectives, both philosophical and religious, to flourish among the students" (172). She similarly points out that her teaching "allowed [her] to 'teach' environmental ethics as an adjunct to teaching writing" (170). In Gaard's article, it seemed that while politics were certainly addressed, and students read about environmental issues, both of these were less important than composition. Environmental issues, in fact, seemed to be a topic that could easily have been replaced with another politically charged issue without dramatically changing the pedagogy of the class, which is why I chose not to list Gaard under environmental issues; I don't get the sense that it is essential.

As for the issue of composition, authors, Killingsworth & Krajicek, Weisser, Roorda, Brown, Plevin, Connolly, indicated that composition might be less than truly relevant to their conceptions of ecocomposition simply through neglect. Their articles give little indication that they think explicit writing instruction is a necessary part of ecocomposition.

In her article, Nedra Reynolds argues that power often hides in the realm of space or place through "time-space compression," the conception that as modern technology has allowed us to travel faster (physically or online) space matters less or seems to grow smaller, giving us the impression that because it takes less time to travel around the world we must have more time (19–21). My question concerning ecocomposition (as an imagined space within rhetoric and composition) is whether time-space compression is not operating to suggest that teachers can and must construct ecocomp classes that give full treatment to politics (race, gender, sexuality, place), environmental issues, and composition all within the scope of a single class. Most of the authors in this collection seem to choose from these those they feel are essential, but can a class be called an ecocomposition class if it lacks one or two of these factors? Reynolds also introduces us to the concept of "transparent space," the danger that time-space compression might result in "believing that space does not matter" (18–19). Transparent space is the disappearance of real physical space and the things that inhabit it because it is taken for granted or assumed. Does ecocomposition participate in transparent space in this manner? Do conceptions of ecocomposition as presented in these articles ignore the realities of local spaces? What conceptions of ecocomposition are applicable to what places, classrooms, students, and so forth?

If anything is clear about ecocomposition, it is that it yet lacks clarity and form. It appears that its place in composition may require much more discussion about what is or isn't essential for composition.