Through Nature to Class in the Classroom: Creating an Environmental Reader To Compose Cultural Identity (original) (raw)

The project of writing and assembling the rhetoric-reader "Reading the Landscape: Writing a World" came from a wish to open for discussion a strong feeling that thinking about the land and a person's relationship to it empowers people as writers. The objective was to develop a composition course related to the environment that will address effectively the question of class. The accepted canon of American nature writing reflects a privileged, educated, mostly male, middle-class viewpoint. Much of the class difference is the invasion of borders, the moving from one world to another. A crucial link with class involves lower socioeconomic class students with the highest dropout rates who fail for a variety of reasons, many of which involve problems of identity and self-esteem. Connecting with each other through the medium of writing is one way of building the bonds necessary to keep each other from failing. Thus, the text works as far as possible with collaborative writing and seeks to let each student find ways to explore his or her home/place/world. The final objective is to see how writing taken from previously unempowered writers who have negotiated the move across borders of class, race, and gender can speak to other people of all classes who are about to cross or are in the process of crossing similar borders. (CR)