Teaching Philosophy and Preparation Statement

I center an environmental justice perspective in every class– this means placing questions of social justice and the uneven distribution of environmental benefits and burdens at the heart of teaching environmental studies and literature. In my own research, I find that these questions need to be understood historically and discursively, and it is my goal as an environmental justice educator to help my students learn the skills and perspectives necessary to unpack the complex historical, ecological, and social forces that create and maintain environmental inequalities.

This means I equip students with the core skills of the humanities— close reading, argumentative and ethical reasoning through communication, and creative exploration of factual and counterfactual scenarios. None of these skills can be absorbed and capably deployed without constant, scaffolded practice. Students begin the first day of my environmental studies courses writing and discussing the categorical definition of an “environmental problem.” While students are quick to list specific, urgent issues of climate change, deforestation, or species extinction as motivating their desire to take ENVS-prefix coursework, beginning students are slower to define what exactly binds these issues together or differentiates “environmental” from “social” issues. Struggling with these definitions is our entry into how social and natural worlds entangle and influence each other, and signals to students that issues of poverty, racism, and war are as much the intellectual responsibility of the environmental student as clear cuts and overfishing.

Literature provides the space for students to study the complex lived experience of environmental and social inequality. Initially, students and I build a theoretical toolkit by discussing key terms such as “ideology”, “race”, and “nationality” alongside empirical case studies from the social sciences such as the United Church of Christ’s historic report, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States.” We then use this toolkit to unpack the meaning of literary texts and test our understanding of the uses and limitations of our toolkit. For example, in one upper level seminar we read and discussed Héctor Tobar’s novel, The Tattooed Soldier, and focused on tracking how intersections of race, class, and gender difference placed characters in toxic environments. In one class, students arranged moments of the text they had previously identified as depicting instances of racial difference into a collectively authored found poem. This activity provoked discussions not only of how race and racism were significant to the novel but how our understandings of the terms were challenged when articulated through different genres and form. Moments such as this demonstrate how my students attend tropes and ideas across different media and contexts— from critical theory and peer-reviewed studies to narrative and poetics.

 

As the University of Oregon’s inaugural Graduate Student Teacher Scholar I have honed my capabilities as an educator while spending three years immersed in the scholarship of teaching and learning. In addition to leading workshops and public talks on teaching fundamentals I also have developed new programming and signature events on issues like “metacognition,” “inclusive teaching,” and teaching through the “difficult dialogues” around race, gender, and environmental injustice. I am most proud of developing and administering the Graduate Teaching Initiative, a university-wide, holistic university teaching professionalization program. Enrolling over [# Students] from [#programs] across the university, I work to mentor graduate student teachers. Beyond these departmental and institutional contributions to a rich teaching culture, I’ve propelled conversations across my field through my own research and scholarly projects. Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities (Routledge 2017), which I co-edited with Stephanie LeMenager and Stephen Siperstein, is the first collection of essays to focus on teaching climate change in the humanities disciplines. The thirty-four chapters draw together the perspectives of scholars from around the globe to consider mentorship, pedagogical method, and course design. It is the editors’ hope that this project will spark further collaborations and initiatives not only in the environmental humanities, but also across climate change education.

 

In addition to this project I have published research on using speculative fiction and creative writing to teach climate change and climate justice in the peer-reviewed journal, Resilience. This work speaks to my commitment of having students practice creative factual and counterfactual reasoning. Thinking and communicating creatively, like close reading, is a skill cultivated through diligent practice. In one environmental justice seminar students undertook a term-long “environmental conflict analysis” that required them to conduct historical research on the context of a conflict described in The Environmental Justice Atlas (ejatlas.org), produce a “power-map” of actors involved in the struggle, and write a letter to one actor in the struggle describing what this figure or group’s implicit “theory of social change” appears to be and provide a suggestion for either a new strategy or a specific tactic furthering the strategic interests of this group. One student cited her final project to evince her factual analytical skills when successfully interviewing for a leadership position in a national social justice organization. In my “Imaging Environmental Futures” course, students artistically presented their personal vision of a utopia alongside a critical essay that explained the ethical and aesthetic choices they made in representing their better world. Students produced short stories, paintings, screenplays, and other artifacts from the future. In order for this assignment to provoke deep, counterfactual thinking, I strategically placed smaller, playful writing assignments that got students “speculating” into our daily practice. These kinds of tasks included leaving “voicemails from the future” via the FutureCoast.org project, and playing Situation Lab’s “The Thing from the Future.” In my experience students in this field want to create positive social change and new futures—to do that they need to practice creative thinking if they will ever come up with new, ethical solutions to complex issues. These activities show students how constructed, and fragile, our taken-for-granted reality is while also giving them a sense of their own power for challenging and reforming dominant conceptions of the world they live in.

I model and teach diverse methods of engaging in dialogue across differences—disciplinary, social, and political. I teach through dialogue, but my students learn that one may contribute to such conversations in many ways, including speaking, writing, sketching, performing, composing, listening, and revising. I enact inclusive teaching by taking a holistic approach to course design and create a supportive and challenging space for learning by evaluating and reevaluating who is in the classroom—my students, but also myself.

This is what I believe my teaching is: helping students use core skills of the humanities within interdisciplinary study to better see the way the world is made up, to communicate their understanding of that world to one another, and to creatively challenge and change their world using the skills we hone in class.