Speaking in Place: High School Environmental Literature

In my past life, I taught environmental literature to college students.  In my current job as a teaching assistant the opportunity has once again surfaced for me to work with older students, teaching a bi-weekly course on American environmental writers.  It's a work in progress but I'm very excited about the students, the readings, the course, and the content

From (our still in progress) Syllabus: 

Grade Level: 10/11

Speaking in Place:

The Environmental Language of the Here and Now

A lake, not far from where we live and learn

The American landscape has long played a role in American literature. This course will explore how writers both reflect and construct “place” in their texts. Students will encounter readings by a diverse group of writers including Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Annie Dillard.  “Classic” readings will often be paired with more contemporary pieces and students will be encouraged to grapple with questions raised by both wilderness and urban environments and the problems of class, privilege, and race that transpire in the canon of American environmental literature.

This course will not only require analysis of American environmental literature—it will also push students to use those same analytic skills to examine their own ideas about environment, landscape, and home.

Unit 1: American Wanderers

“I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.”-Rebecca Solnit (in an interview with “The Believer”)

Wander (from http://www.merriam-webster.com)

verb: to move around or go to different places usually without having a particular purpose or direction: to follow a path with many turns : to go away from a path, course, etc.

Week 1:

-Edward Abbey, “Industrial Tourism and National Parks” (excerpt from Desert Solitaire)

Week 2:

-Tuesday-From “Manhood for Amateurs” by Michael Chabon

-Thursday-From Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau, “The Thoreau Problem” by Rebecca Solnit

Week 3:

-Tuesday- From “A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf,” and From “My First Summer in the Sierras” by John Muir

-Thursday-“This Compost” by Walt Whitman, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry, “This Land is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie

Week 4:

-Tuesday- “Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless lost his way in the wilds” (Outside Magazine, 1993) and excerpts from Into the Wild by John Krakauer

-Thursday-“Yosemite Climbing: Daring. Defiant. Free. A new generation of superclimbers is pushing the limits in Yosemite.” by Mark Jenkins (National Geographic, 2011)

Week 5:

-Tuesday-From My Wilderness: The Pacific West by William O. Douglas

-Thursday-From The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Week 6:

-Tuesday-From “The Wilderness Act of 1964” by Howard Zahniser