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Articles Conference Reviews |
2008A31McClureEcocomposing in the FYC Classroom: Writing in the Service of Advocacy and Sustainability If this year’s conference program is any indication, the trend toward connecting ecology and composition, toward turning composition’s eye toward the environment and particularly the concept of sustainability, is now shaping much of our work. While some might not first connect environmental advocacy with states in the Midwest, this panel comprised of three graduate students teaching composition at Iowa State University showed how ecocomposing stands to impact the field of composition studies for some time to come. Thinking that some members of the audience might not be familiar with the concept, session chair Joseph Bartolotta provided a general introduction to the topic of ecocomposing. Bartolotta made it clear that ecocomposing is much more than “simply requiring readings on nature in the first-year composition classroom.” Instead of looking only at the discourse of the environment, Bartolotta argued that ecocomposing looks at the relationship between discourse and the environment, draws from multiple disciplines and encourages cross-disciplinary exchange. Citing the work of Cooper and Coe from the 1980s and 90s, Bartolotta suggested that ecologies of writing see writing functioning as other systems in the natural world, and that the development of ecocomposing naturally pulls together as it examines the emphases common to the fields of composition studies, environmental studies and ecocriticism. Bartolotta then added that Owens’s Composition and Sustainability: Teaching for a Threatened Generation (2001), Dobrin and Weisser’s Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition (2002) and recent political emphasis on the future of the environment and “sustainability concerns have fueled the outlining of an ecocomposition agenda.” Bartolotta used this general introduction as a segue to his presentation, “From Logs to Blogs: Inviting Local Ecological Advocacy to the Web.” Bartolotta noted Iowa State’s new emphasis on WOVE (written, oral, visual, electronic) communication has served as a catalyst for his work in marrying Web 2.0 technologies, ecology and the composition classroom. Bartolotta explained that he supports a pedagogy that fosters a classroom environment and balances Web 2.0 technologies, particularly blogs, and ecocomposition. In this environment, Bartolotta asks students to foreground space and place in their writing. While Bartolotta remains committed to this pedagogy, he noted many first-year composition students tend to force rather than realize this emphasis. In other words, students see ecocomposing as schoolwork, and they resist interaction with systems outside of the classroom, according to Bartolotta. Next, Londie Martin shared her ecocomposing story in her presentation, “Visualizing Place: Seeing and (Un)Earthing Perspectives.” Opening with the oft-cited work of Paulo Friere in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Martin called for ecocomposing to be foremost about critical literacy, about teaching ourselves as composition instructors to “understand the various ways students have been taught to think the world.” Therefore, Martin’s pedagogy blends critical literacy and ecocomposition with collaborative learning that culminates in a photo-documentary assignment built on place and paired with narrative analysis and personal reflection. Much like her colleague Bartolotta and in the spirit of Dobrin’s text, Martin believes first-year composition students need to examine environments beyond the classroom. In talking more about the specifics of her assignment, Martin noted that students tended to define place in one of five ways: natural settings, student dwellings, administrative places, public art spaces, and consumer places, and that students tended to analyze place as paradise, authority or history. Whereas Bartolotta and Martin use ecocomposing to extend the classroom out, Callae Frazier in “Personalizing Place: Narrative as a Conduit to Ecocomposing” sees the work moving, at least initially, in the opposite direction, “I am interpreting ecocomposition as taking the metaphor of ecology as a science and bringing in into the [composition] classroom.” Therefore, Frazier uses strategies common to first-year composition, in her case narratives of place, to develop individual research projects that become part one of several class magazines. Frazier then uses ecocomposing as a way to take the concept of place public, as her students present their magazines to members of the Iowa State community. Frazier brings in WOVE concepts as well, as her students work in groups to complete their magazines by designing and developing cover art and including letters from the editors that defend their focus on place. This focus, according to Frazier, allows for groups to emerge as their own communities and have ownership of their work. Through three practical implementations of ecocomposing, audience members were given a glimpse of perhaps composition’s next wave. Paraphrasing Lindemann, Bartolotta noted in the panel’s closing remarks that “the ecological model reminds us of the social context in which all writers work.” In the early twenty-first century, the social context is one in which the voices of environmental advocacy and sustainability are growing much stronger. Wave on. |