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What Is An English 100 Class Doing in The Woods
What Is An English 100 Class Doing in The Woods
What Is An English 100 Class Doing in The Woods
“What is an English 100 Class Doing in the Woods”: The Troubling Leap of Faith in
Ecocompostion
When I take my first-year composition students out to the Arcata Community Forest to
learn a little about the place most of them will inhabit for the next four years I anticipate this
potential question from friends, colleagues, and students with a modicum of dread. For one thing,
this is a perfectly reasonable question; after all, what does spending time in a site such as the
rhetoric, the writing process, and so on? Well, the simplest and most honest answer is “not a lot.”
believe that if one looks deeply enough, it becomes clear that such activities have a profoundly
positive—if indirect—impact on student writing. There is, however, one part of that last
statement I made which continues to bother me—one word, really, and that word is “believe.”
Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with the word. Believing in things can be
wonderful—believing in one’s dreams, for instance. But belief has a darker side as well. Just
think of the number of atrocities committed over the course of human history that were
rationalized, justified, and perhaps even generated by rigid adherence to beliefs (the genocide of
Native Americans in North America in the name of manifest destiny comes to mind as a ready
example of beliefs gone bad). While genocide is an almost absurdly extreme example in the
context of teaching practices, I think such an example is useful in that it makes the point that, for
anecdotal evidence. First, I only want to employ teaching practices that will serve my students by
improving their writing skills. Without concrete evidence of a method’s efficacy, adopting that
method constitutes nothing short of a leap of faith. Second, if teachers work in areas they feel
strongly about then they run the risk of turning their courses into nothing more than efforts to
My purpose here is not to deconstruct ecocomposition with the aim of discrediting what I
see as an exciting and revolutionary area of composition studies. Rather, I want to be honest
place-based, experiential ecocomposition—and try to suggest some strategies that might help us
overcome (or at least be aware of) the shortcomings of such practices. I must also confess a more
selfish purpose here: I want to arrive at a satisfactory answer to the question with which I began
this essay so that I might more confidently continue my own teaching practices that take students
Before I delve into what I perceive as the shortcomings of ecocomposition, it’s worth
mentioning that my own work in ecocomposition, along with similar work by fellow
course can reap many benefits for student writers. Paul Lindhodt, for instance, in “Restoring
Bioregions through Applied Composition” contends that direct experience of place, coupled with
assignments that have direct, real world consequences, lend a sense of consequence to student
writing. Similarly, Derek Owens, in his book Composition and Sustainability: Teaching for a
Threatened Generation, argues that sustainable education, by definition, connects the classroom
to the rest of the world and in doing so encourages students to become more engaged with the
writing they produce for class. While supported largely by anecdotal evidence, the argument for
compelling. However, to lift the clichéd ending of practically every scientific or pseudo scientific
specific professional area: college composition. When I say the research is deficient, I’m really
talking about what I perceive as a lack of empirical evidence to substantiate the benefits of place-
based experiential education in the writing classroom. To be more precise, there seems to be a
lack of evidence particularly when it comes to tracing the connection between these forms of
ecocomposition practices and improving student writing skills. Empirical evidence is difficult to
generate when one is dealing with a subject that is prone, by its very nature, to be extremely
variable and unpredictable. So many factors affect all classroom practices—the personalities of
teachers and students, class size, and institutional environment, just to name a few. The kind of
complex list of factors a whole new set of variables. Perhaps the variability and complexity of
place-based education accounts to some extent for the lack of “hard evidence” about the efficacy
I do not mean to suggest that there is a complete lack of evidence to support experiential,
Master of Arts degree in the fall of 2009, several books and collections of essays on
Approaches, edited by Christian Weisser and Sidney I. Dobrin; Teaching About Place: Learning
from the Land, edited by Laird Christensen and Hal Crimmel, and Composition and
Sustainability, by Derek Owens all offer suggestions for experiential, place-based approaches to
writing instruction. Each of these books is filled with stories of personal success employing such
techniques in the classroom. Other similar books on the subject have been published since that
time—ecocomposition is clearly a burgeoning field, and, for good or for ill, many writing
teachers across the country (and across the globe) are already applying the principles of
ecocomposition in their classrooms. But the point I’m making here is that that not a single essay
or book on the subject does an adequate job of linking ecocomposition to improving student
writing skills. While it would be absurd for anyone to claim complete knowledge of an entire
experience and knowledge in this area, and from what I have seen, ecocompositionists have a lot
Part of that work involves continued critical reflection on our own practice. The
becoming nothing more than an elaborate excuse for teachers to convert students into mini-
activists, working in accordance with instructors’ own beliefs. Another part of that work is more
complex and probably more difficult—we need to amass a body of research that supports the
The way I see it, the reasons for practicing ecocomposition are both compelling and
supported by ample evidence from the sciences: global climate change, desertification, and mass
species extinction are realities of the modern world, realities that educators would do well to
activity founded on relationships deeply imbricate with place—equips teachers with the tools to
teach ecological literacy alongside other forms of literacy more commonly taught in the
composition classroom, cultural literacy, technological literacy, and traditional literacy, to name
a few. But the benefits of ecocomposition in a more traditional and subject specific sense
demand further investigation and inquiry. The seeds for effective ecocomposition practice have
been planted, and I believe (there’s that word again) that its ends are among the most noble
imaginable, but to insure that this new pedagogy grows in the right direction, it practitioners