Eco-Literacy 2014

I’ve finally gotten around to the last of the tasks I’d set myself during the ENVS Faculty Workshop in May—reading a couple of social psychology books that Benjamin Le recommended to me re: changing people’s attitudes. Neither one taught me too much, but here (for the record) is a brief summary of each--

Haddock, Geoffrey and Gregory Maio, Eds, Contemporary Perspectives on the Psychology of Attitudes. Psychology Press, 2004: (pretty useless, from my p.o.v) collection of essays by different authors, concluding with Haddock and Maio’s overview of the research: that there are “three witches” in this brew—attitude content, structure, and function--that need to be better integrated.

Finding the Path in Praxis (Jody Cohen and Anne Dalke)
Session II @ the 2014 Tri-Co Environmental Studies Workshop

This is a reflection on my third English paper for Anne, which took the form of a comic book and was never fully completed. I will be attaching scans of the pieces that had been completed SOON and using this space to outline where the comic will continue to go.

I chose to write a comic book for several reasons. The first reason was that I am interested in experimenting with forms of academic work that diverge from conventional assignments, such as essays and exams. In doing so, I hope to challenge the notion that these conventional assignments are the most adequate methods of measuring student growth and learning inside the classroom. By expanding our understanding of what a “paper” looks like, we can better serve the needs and strengths of diverse learning styles.

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

-Nelson Mandela

There are two definitions to language, one is for lenguaje and the other is for idioma. One is the branch of communication, whether it is verbal, visual, or gestural. The other branch stretches out to dialect, tongue, accents, and our way of oral speech. Regardless of each definition, we ultimately use it all for the same objective, to communicate. We use language as means of connection, to convey and diffuse our experiences as close as we can get to sharing and describing without the other person actually being there. We give language the power of translating our experiences into words.

           The first time our Ecoliteracy 360 met was in December, in the English House lecture hall, where we talked about ourselves and our homes and where we were going to go throughout the next semester.  The second time we met, we piled into two blue Bryn Mawr vans and drove 30 minutes and what might have seemed a world to Camden, where we spent the first half of the day gardening and the second half touring Camden’s water treatment facility and some of Camden’s streets and ending in one of Camden’s parks, where our guide, Michael, pointed out the environmental threats and innovations that surrounded us.  This was our first 360 field trip, designed to help us learn about ecoliteracy, but even now I am hard pressed to say exactly what I learned that day.  I came in from the outside and began to reevaluate my assumptions about a city I’d only ever heard talked about as poor and crime-ridden but, even though I did learn some things about Camden that I hadn’t known before, I think that day really started my semester-long process of changing the way I see the world.  Perhaps the poet Rilke was describing something like this when he wrote:

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

looking at everything and never from!

It floods us. We arrange it.  It decays.

We arrange it again, and we decay.

I have often wondered why I gravitate toward science, why this way of interpreting the world speaks to me. And yet, I have often wondered why despite being given the tools to dive right into the nucleus of science—research—I instead prefer to circumnavigate the nucleus in a quick-paced orbit like an electron, buzzing around but never quite finding home in the heart of scientific investigation.

Reading The Hungry Tide, I immediately connected with Piya’s character. A scientist, and marine biologist at that—a field I have explored many a day and night during my Sea Semester as I collected phytoplankton data aboard a rocking ship in the middle of the Pacific. New data was exciting, especially with the thrill of acquiring it in such dynamic and challenging conditions. The excitement Piya felt when seeing her first dolphin aboard Fokir’s boat resonated with me deeply—I have felt so similarly. But in this excitement lies tension too: when does science cross into the realm of self, community, and place? When does it grow from the act of forming a hypothesis to an act of building a home?

      At our first 360 meeting in Camden, the 360 participants and CFET members had an interesting conversation on Eco-Literacy and Environmental & Social Justice. During this discussion, Michael from CFET made a comment that has remained with me through the course of this semester. He mentioned that he did not like the term “justice” as an organizing idea as it implies that there is always an impartial arbiter determining what is “right”. As someone who has felt involved and active in the pursuit of social justice, I had not previously thought there might be something problematic about this concept. Over the course of the semester, in and out of the 360, I have begun to question and challenge the idea of justice. What is justice? Who determines what is “just” and “right”? Must justice be achieved at the expense of something else? Does social justice perpetuate and reproduce existing social inequalities and hierarchies? What about ecological justice? Is there a way for eco-justice and social justice to co-exist or is there tension between them? Is justice inherently human centric? Is there a way to expand this concept to the wider natural world? To assist me in exploring these questions, I will draw on John Humbach’s essay “Towards a Natural Justice of Right Relationships”, J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, and Teju Cole’s “The White Savior Industrial Complex”. 

since this features my and sophia's sister's "duck-rabbit,"
i can't resist sharing it w/ you all,
along w/ the question of what, since this 360, can you "not unsee"?
Things You Cannot Unsee (and What That Says About Your Brain)

Regardless of socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or ecosysytem, children play in similar ways when they have safe free time in nature.

-Children and Nature Design Principles (Ch.3) Sobel

Knowledge, in my opinion, is perpetual when gained through experience. We learn not to play with fire because our bodies endure pain at first encounter. We know which foods we like best because we eat them and develop a sense of taste. We have the ability to know through our use of senses; sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste. We can only gain true knowledge when we encounter and expose ourselves to an environment.

Instructors, guides, and even teachers can profess and stress the importance of the environment, but ultimately it means nothing if all they do is talk about it. Students will only have an idea, an imagination in their mind, never knowing the impact of the full ability of their senses. The environment will mean nothing if students never have an experience with it. As environmentalists, we can’t force the importance and value nature has for us upon others because we don’t all share the same values. We can’t assume that everyone has the same opportunities as others to experience the environment a certain way because we don’t all have the same access. We can’t teach the importance of environmental education if we can’t allow our students to dance with the universe.