Composition and Sustainability: Teaching for a Threatened Generation

by Derek Owens

While sustainability--meeting today's needs without jeopardizing the interests of future generations--has become a dominating force in a range of disciplines, it has yet to play a substantive role in English studies. Derek Owens argues that, in light of worsening environmental crises and accelerating social injustices, we need to use sustainability as a way to structure courses and curricula, and that composition studies, with its inherent cross-disciplinarity and its unique function in students' academic lives, can play a key role in giving sustainability a central place in students' thinking and in the curriculum as a whole.

Owens draws on student writing to articulate a pedagogy that gives students opportunities to think and write in three zones of place, work, and future. This approach allows for the creation of a variegated course wherein students write neighborhood portraits, critique their work experiences, reflect on their majors, investigate alternative theories of education, compose oral histories, construct narratives about their futures, and design their own assignments--all from the perspective of sustainability. These writings are juxtaposed with observations from writers in architecture, ecological economics, future studies, planning, sociology, sustainable business, and urban studies.

The appendixes include a wealth of environmental statistics, as well as a detailed description of Owens's composition course, with assignments ready to use or adapt.

Genres: Environment

259 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 3 out of 5]

“For me the challenge becomes how to create a classroom environment where students have the freedom to pursue writing projects that matter to them, and yet where, as an instructor, I not only remain energized by their questions and pursuits but also consider the ongoing conversations to be of paramount importance to my students’ short-and long-term survival.” (7)

“If the writing teacher has the power to make students write and read about practically anything, what then are the most important things for them to write and read?” (7).

This is a book that got me excited about teaching composition. The book advocates composition as a realm of flexibility, where you have the opportunity to engage freshmen in a wide variety of topics. This book proposes ways of integrating sustainability more clearly into composition courses. It defines sustainability and then offers 6 tenets for a pedagogy of sustainability. The book offers suggestions for engaging students and examples from the writing done by his students. Reading what the students produce is motivating to encourage such reflection in my own students.

Although the book wasn’t quite what I was looking for it was useful to read a piece of writing by someone so obviously committed to a sustainable (both ecologically and economically) future and to respecting the ideas and contributions of his students.

By far, my favorite part of the book was Appendix B: Sustainability in a Composition Course. This appendix included a full listing of his syllabus and assignments for a composition course.

[Sean Murray · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the message may seem obvious in our post Inconvenient Truth age, Owens' book reminds me how important and possible it is to make sustainability the primary lens/focus of a college comp course. His argument is compelling, and the appendix contains a facts section and assignments from his own course.

[Cathie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book, but it depressed me so much. I was so discouraged after I read this book, I just thought sustainability was hopeless. I know it's not true, but Owens was rather bleak in this book.