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- Convenors:
-
Ramya Swayamprakash
(Grand Valley State University)
Melanie Kiechle (Virginia Tech)
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- Formats:
- Roundtable
- Streams:
- Expanding the Practice of Environmental History
- Location:
- Room 20
- Sessions:
- Monday 19 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
How do we teach about place and materiality when many of us are teaching non-majors? How do we approach the pedagogy of materiality? Our aim is to foster a discussion on the materiality and centrality of place in environmental history research.
Long Abstract:
This roundtable will analyze how environmental historians might teach about place and materiality, at a time when so many of us are teaching non-majors. Using our collective research and teaching as a starting point, we aim to understand how historians have investigated and been involved in places as well as the pedagogical lessons these hold for us as educators. At a time when environmental historians and the disciplines they represent are constantly under fire, and so many of us–at least in North America–teach non-majors, how do we teach attention to place, materiality, and the long durée? How do we approach the pedagogy of materiality?
In doing so, we hope to enrich the conversation about materiality and place in environmental history. The goal of this roundtable is to explore the ways a range of historians–with their particular vantage points–conceive of, use, and use place centered narratives.
Our aim is to foster a discussion on the materiality and centrality of place in environmental history research and practice by exploring questions such as:
Forty years after seminal environmental history works like Changes in the Land etc., how do we think about place?
Has the way we, as environmental historians, think of materiality changed? If so, how has that change altered our teaching?
How do we teach environmental history today?
What sorts of new skills can we develop to teach place centered environmental histories?
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Monday 19 August, 2024, -Contribution short abstract:
This paper explores the ways public history can serve as a tool to teach and share environmental history with students and the general public. Public history courses require students to research, design, and build an exhibit while considering the importance and impact of public-facing work.
Contribution long abstract:
Public and environmental historian Martin Melosi implores public historians to more openly explore local environmental histories. In his oft-cited article, “Public History and the Environment,” Melosi argues that environmental history can be a tool for public audiences to understand and contextualize modern environmental issues. In an era of unprecedented environmental change, public historians must be equipped to communicate the pressing issues that humanity faces by contextualizing the present in the past. “Let environmental history be a means to make the value of history better understood to the public,” he notes. “Let the richness of our profession offer leadership in understanding the essential relationship of humans to their physical world.” This call guides the public history curriculum at Eastern Illinois University where students recently undertook an environmental history project that explored the long history of the tall-grass prairie. Over the course of the two-semester sequence, students worked closely with a community partner, the Grand Prairie Friends—a nature conservancy based in East-Central Illinois—in order to explore the historic and contemporary conceptions of the Illinois prairie landscape. There are several intended goals to the project:
1) Provide students with hands-on research and public history experience.
2) Provide students with opportunities to work with digital tools.
3) Encourage students to become aware of, and engage with, Illinois prairie environmental history.
4) Connect students with environmental history and study how public history relates to a sense of place and connectedness to the region.
Contribution short abstract:
The materiality inherent in environmental history’s attention to place is well-suited to teaching historical thinking skills, such as change over time. A skills-based approach to history instruction and course design offers a useful response to current pressures in higher education.
Contribution long abstract:
As higher education focuses increasingly on learning outcomes, societal pressures call on us to justify the practical aspects of our academic programs. A skills-focused approach to teaching and designing history courses and programs of study is one response to those exigencies.
Being explicit about teaching skills clarifies the transferable and practical aspects of humanities education, including: critical thinking and analytic reasoning, complex problem solving, ethical judgment, social perceptiveness, and written communication. History education imparts those proficiencies through discipline-specific historical thinking skills including causation, contingency, perspective-taking, and change over time.
My proposed contribution to this roundtable discussion centers on my current work on historical thinking pedagogy, specifically a co-authored book, Modern Latin American History: A Skills-Based Approach, under contract with Oxford University Press. A capstone chapter centers environmental history, turning attention to a place, the Amazon, to teach the fundamental historical thinking skill, change over time. The chapter includes material on changing understandings of pre-Columbian Amazonia, the region's history as a refuge from the state and a site of rebellion, shifting visions from “green hell” to “green cathedral,” and contemporary issues of conflict and environmental degradation.
Environmental history’s attention to physical place makes the field well-suited to teaching change over time. That concept is not only fundamental to the discipline of history, but valuable to students, better equipping them to understand how change happens and what change causes. That knowledge helps prepare them to navigate a changing world in whatever path they choose after graduation.
Contribution short abstract:
In my paper I describe my pedagogical choices, intents, and results of introducing a place-based, historical approach premised in frameworks and practices of anti-colonialism and decolonialization alongside routinely taught Western ecological concepts and ideas to teaching environmental studies.
Contribution long abstract:
Responding to a growing interest in moving away from exclusionary and extractive environmental education, I taught a river-based environmental policy analysis and practices undergraduate course that was premised in frameworks and practices of anti-colonialism and decolonialization alongside routinely taught Western ecological concepts and ideas. This mandatory course in the Environmental Studies Program at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, MI offers an overview of extant sustainability problems, policies, and practices. In my paper I describe my journey in curating readings, assignments, and learning objectives in teaching this class at a predominantly white institution. I focused on exposing students to traditional Indigenous ways of knowing the more-than-human world, creating daily and weekly practices as part of the course assignments that brought students to the river, and structuring their interactions with the river through the course of the semester. Outcomes and indicators of success were driven by weekly and end-of-semester reflections by individual students as well as their evaluations on their growth that were expressed through a final project that tried to bridge knowledge gaps and expand their view of possible sustainability policy interventions when driven by innate respect and reciprocity. This case could offer an example with potential applications in other environmental studies contexts where educators are trying to move beyond the traditional Western paradigm.
Contribution long abstract:
Hello! I would be keen to contribute to this roundtable based on my experience of teaching a fieldwork unit in environmental humanities, in which we take a small group of students to a small town called Denmark, 420km away from their home University, and immerse them in a program of talks, workshops and exercises. We use a framework of noticing-knowing-caring, starting with the proposition that understanding and empathy starts with noticing, then moving to reflections on the forms of knowledge we might use to understand what we have noticed, and how this engagement might translate into care. By taking the students out of their usual environment, and exposing them to local people's stories (in, it must be said, a strikingly beautiful part of the world), they experience both a range of ways of engaging with the materiality of place, and the utility of history in coming to understand a place. I can speak to both the challenges and rewards of fieldwork, as well as the relationship between environmental humanities and environmental history.
Contribution short abstract:
The talk will show how the local field is a place to experiment with multidisciplinary work, and will promote a teaching environmental history that goes beyond the classroom, e.g. through field trips which show the materiality of the daily environment, and encourage reflection on its history.
Contribution long abstract:
This communication aims to report on my years of research and teaching since 2017 and the start of a collective research experience on the “environmental transition” of the Lyon metropolitan area since the Second World War (Lyon is a French agglomeration of approximately 1 million inhabitants aroung 1970). During the research, it also appeared that the "transition" was not only a movement of ideas towards ecological awareness, but was also a landscape transition, marked by urban sprawl and decline of peri-urban nature. These concrete changes have obviously provoked protests or environmental reflections among different categories of actors.
The talk will show how the local field is a place to experiment with multidisciplinary work, then to create a framework of promotion for society and students. I will advocate for teaching an environmental history that also goes beyond the classroom, through the website created to promote research, and through field trips which show the materiality of the daily environment, and encourage reflection on its history. This material perception (visual pollution, noise, smell, etc.) can be highlighted by artists, press coverage, and groups of residents, but is much less fostered by academic researchers.
Contribution short abstract:
Climate Stories Project collects and shares personal climate change stories on our website and teaches climate storytelling and oral history workshops. Place-based climate storytelling enriches the conversation, fosters new climate communication skills, and creates a more just environmental future.
Contribution long abstract:
Climate change is happening everywhere and affects everyone. Started in 2014, Climate Stories Project (CSP) is an artistic and educational climate change communications forum that collects and publicly shares personal climate change stories on our website, https://www.climatestoriesproject.org/. Additionally, we teach climate storytelling and climate oral history workshops to schools, universities, local government organizations, libraries, and community groups both in-person and online. Oral history and storytelling are uniquely situated to reckon with the challenges of climate change by making the abstract concepts of the crisis more concrete and personal.
CSP’s workshops compliment environmental science by rooting conversations about the climate crisis in the personal - specifically in ideas of place - in order to construct personal climate stories and climate story interviews. Participants are invited to consider how climate change is affecting the people and things they care about in their home-place or community, along with additional considerations for emotional responses to the crisis. Climate storytelling and interviewing enriches climate change communication, fosters new skills for talking about the crisis, and gives people the opportunity and space to consider how climate change is affecting them now, while also allowing them to imagine routes to a more just environmental future.
This paper will examine how using climate change oral history and storytelling methods can help people think about climate change from a less familiar personal perspective, create a deeper, richer connection with their local community and environment, and support various responses to the climate crisis.