2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

As teachers working across the humanities and the sciences on a range of environmental topics, we are often faced with the impenetrability of the border that divides the classroom from the world. In the classroom, arguments about climate change, environmental policies, and animal suffering might sound logical to our students, but does this mean that they are applying them in their daily lives? Do class discussions translate into students asking questions about how their habits impact the world around them? And should the teacher’s task include expanding students’ circle of concern beyond the classroom? If so, how can classroom practices best help students to understand that rocks, vegetables, animals, water, all have an intrinsic value not necessarily associated with us—with the human? This panel will address the classroom-world border by discussing specific readings and assignments from our courses that aim to expand our students’ circle of concern beyond the classroom. But in our discussion we aim to address the question of whether or not we should penetrate the classroom-world border in the first place: should our focus be on theory or the cultivation of intellectual habits that inform our actions in the world?  We seek papers that discuss pedagogical strategies (specific assignments, group work, field work, lecture etc.) and/or course readings (single, pairings or groupings) and address the human-environment border alongside the classroom-world border. Papers and presentations should be no more than fifteen minutes long in order to allow for vivid discussion.

Sergia Hay (Philosophy)

Pacific Lutheran University

A Defense of Classrooms

The virtues of blurring of the boundary between the world and the classroom are celebrated and valued in contemporary pedagogy. There is increasing pressure to involve students in direct and hands-on practice through service learning and to emphasize specific and measurable skills that lead to job readiness. Although this approach brings some clear advantages, it is also worth investigating what this approach excludes and unfairly underestimates. In this presentation, I will argue that the boundary between the world and the classroom needs to be preserved in order to maintain the classroom as a unique space set apart from the world in which a different set of values prevail and a space from which the culturally dominant values may be scrutinized. I will make these claims by referencing how one may teach about the concept of nature in a philosophy course.  

Adela Ramos (English)

Pacific Lutheran University

Writing and Reading Animals: Care and Critical Inquiry in the Composition and Literature Classroom

As a teacher, I embrace my home institution’s mission “to educate students for lives of thoughtful inquiry, service, leadership, and care—for other people, for their communities and for the Earth.” But in the classroom, the challenges of yoking together care and critical inquiry daily prompt me to consider the extent to which critical reading and writing can or should lead students to care for other animal beings. This, in turn, leads me to question the implications of my pedagogical practices: should care and service be the means for my students’ development as critical thinkers? In this paper, I explore the oftentimes contentious relationship between care and critical thinking by examining two borders: the textual border—which can, and often does, detach the literary animal from the real animal—and the institutional border—which can separate the classroom from the environment.

To address these borders, I consider creative writing assignments from upper-level courses designed to introduce English literature majors to the discipline alongside critical writing assignments from first-year composition courses which prompt students to examine a work of literature by way of their service at the local soup kitchen and community garden. In addition, I share conversations with my students about caring and not caring for other animal beings and my own ruminations about their right not to care and their obligation to do so. Through these materials and classroom experiences, I argue for porous textual and institutional borders, but not for their demolition. Instead, I adopt ecofeminist Marti Kheel’s conception of care as an epistemological practice that begins with “many small acts of attention.” By conceiving of care as attentiveness, I advocate for a direct relationship between the text and the environment, learning and service, but one that also acknowledges the crucial differences between these spaces and practices.

Matthew Vitz (History)

University of California, San Diego

Beyond Borders: Approaches to Fusing Environmental Politics and Environmental History

In this paper I will explore how the methods and approaches of environmental history can blur the boundary between world and classroom, or put differently, environmental politics and scholarship. I argue that the key lies in breaking down other boundaries—one might venture to call them binaries—such as the deeply rooted divide between nature and culture, along with its cousin nature/city, and the less rigid, though still apparent, border between past and present. Students have a tendency to view nature and culture as separate entities that act on each other. For example, in the crudest form of this perspective society either destroys or preserves nature, and nature, in turn, either strikes back or becomes a place to admire and enjoy. I assign readings that illustrate the co-constitution of nature and culture over time, making students see landscapes as hybrid and environments (whether urban, rural, land, or water) as lively and dynamic socio-natural entanglements. The implications of this dialectical understanding are more than just academic; students, I believe, become more critically engaged with environmentalism. They more effectively comprehend the roles of social power and human labor in environmental change and the ways material environments alter, reinforce, or create social relations. History is an excellent window into the formation and evolution of hybrid environments. More than just a relic or a bunch of stories with little contemporary relevance, history can spur action on pressing environmental problems. Besides readings, assignments such as commodity projects and contemporary environmental theme papers can bridge the gaps between past and present and scholarship and politics. There is still another border to transcend, however: the physical border separating the U.S. and Mexico. For future classes I hope to organize field trips to places of bi-national environmental concern and invite speakers working on transnational environmental justice.