“What is an English 100 Class Doing in the Woods”: The Troubling Leap of Faith in

Ecocompostion

“What is an English 100 class doing in the woods?”

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

Arcata Community Forest have to do with learning the fundamentals of writing—grammar,

rhetoric, the writing process, and so on? Well, the simplest and most honest answer is “not a lot.”

Nevertheless I will continue to include a field component in my composition classes because I

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

good reason, I’m leery of practices founded on belief.

I see two main problems with pedagogical techniques predicated primarily on belief and

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

proselytize students to their own way of thinking.

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

about some things that bother me in the existent scholarship on ecocomposition—especially

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

beyond the boundaries of the conventional classroom.

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

ecocompositionists, does suggest that including a practical, experiential element in a writing

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

ecocomposition—and for place-based, experiential methods in particular—is nevertheless

compelling. However, to lift the clichéd ending of practically every scientific or pseudo scientific

paper on a new research area, “more research needs to be done.”

The research on ecocomposition is surprisingly deficient, especially when it comes to my

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

place-based ecocomposition practices I employ in my own classroom add to this already

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

(or inefficacy) of such an approach.

I do not mean to suggest that there is a complete lack of evidence to support experiential,

place-based expressions of ecocomposition. Indeed, anecdotal evidence on the subject of place-

based experiential education abounds. When I wrote my project on ecocomposition for my

Master of Arts degree in the fall of 2009, several books and collections of essays on

ecocomposition were already in existence. Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical

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

field—even a relatively emergent field such as ecocomposition—I do have some significant

experience and knowledge in this area, and from what I have seen, ecocompositionists have a lot

of work ahead of us.

Part of that work involves continued critical reflection on our own practice. The

importance of such self-assessment is that it will, ideally, prevent ecocomposition from

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

effectiveness of ecocomposition in improving student writing skills.

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

address. As a theoretical stance, ecocomposition—which generally conceive of writing as an

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

must engage in further research and honest reflection.