Call it Nature, Call it Instinct, Call it Education; A Curriculum for Urban Eco-Poetics

Otto Vock, Oberlin CollegeFollow

Location

King Building 101

Document Type

Presentation

Start Date

4-27-2019 1:00 PM

End Date

4-27-2019 2:20 PM

Abstract

With more than 80% of the US population living in urban environments and rising it's important to face the reality that a growing number of young people will be raised where the city is all they know. The urban age presents a conflicting problem with our growing issues of climate degradation as we consider ourselves further dissociated from the very environment we overdraw from. When the city is presented as the antithesis of nature, it subliminally alienates student’s personal experience to be at all relevant to their learning of the natural world and conserving the environment. Through teaching poetry written about the ecology of the urban environment, and writing poems based on one’s own reading of their ecological experience, students can have the freedom explore and appreciate not only where they’re from, but what else lives with them bound into their experience. Call it nature, call it instinct, call it education, but when we invite students to name something they know deep inside to be real, whether it be natural laws, or systematic violence, their discovery urges them to name more, and seek more, through experiences they intimately know from everyday life. I’ve designed a poetry curriculum that locates hard to describe feelings and understandings of one’s urban environment, using them as mentor texts for students to go through their own process of naming, their own turn of taking an object of knowledge from their environment and holding it up to the light.

Keywords:

Poetry Workshop, Eco Poetics, Environmental Humanities, Pedagogy

Notes

FEATURED PRESENTATION
Session III, Panel 4 - Environmental | Education

Moderator: Nicollette Mitchell, Director of the Center for Learning Education and Research in the Sciences

Major

Environmental Studies

Advisor(s)

T.S. McMillin, Environmental Studies
Cindy Frantz, Environmental Studies

Project Mentor(s)

T.S. McMillin, Environmental Studies

April 2019

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Apr 27th, 1:00 PM Apr 27th, 2:20 PM

Call it Nature, Call it Instinct, Call it Education; A Curriculum for Urban Eco-Poetics

King Building 101

With more than 80% of the US population living in urban environments and rising it's important to face the reality that a growing number of young people will be raised where the city is all they know. The urban age presents a conflicting problem with our growing issues of climate degradation as we consider ourselves further dissociated from the very environment we overdraw from. When the city is presented as the antithesis of nature, it subliminally alienates student’s personal experience to be at all relevant to their learning of the natural world and conserving the environment. Through teaching poetry written about the ecology of the urban environment, and writing poems based on one’s own reading of their ecological experience, students can have the freedom explore and appreciate not only where they’re from, but what else lives with them bound into their experience. Call it nature, call it instinct, call it education, but when we invite students to name something they know deep inside to be real, whether it be natural laws, or systematic violence, their discovery urges them to name more, and seek more, through experiences they intimately know from everyday life. I’ve designed a poetry curriculum that locates hard to describe feelings and understandings of one’s urban environment, using them as mentor texts for students to go through their own process of naming, their own turn of taking an object of knowledge from their environment and holding it up to the light.