EL6055 - Writing and Environment

Learning and teaching will be through weekly interactive lectures (1.5 hours) followed by seminars (1.5 hours) which will encourage debate and discussion. The aims of the module will be consolidated by a combination of formative and summative modes of assessment facilitating awareness of the relevant issues in environmental writing, while also encouraging self-assessment and reflexive learning. As well as a traditional essay, you will develop your skills of environmental awareness and your ability to express environmental themes by producing a creative field journal. In this, you will record your engagement with an environment or location of your choice, discussing both its natural and its cultural significance. Examples of creative field journals will be made available on Blackboard, and there will also be a field trip to a local nature reserve to help you understand first-hand some of the key themes in environmental writing and to help develop your field journal skills.

Seminars are supported by a dedicated Blackboard site, by a detailed module guide that clearly sets out the structure of formal teaching, by bibliographies that draw upon the latest scholarship in the field of environmental literature and ecocriticism, by discussion with the module tutor and in the development of speaking, listening, and critical skills gained through participation in classroom activities, and through a field trip that gives practical guidance on the creative field journal.

All modules at Northumbria include a range of reading materials that students are expected to engage with. Online reading lists (provided after enrolment) give you access to your reading material for your modules. The Library works in partnership with your module tutors to ensure you have access to the material that you need.

Knowledge & Understanding:
• 1. advanced knowledge and understanding of literary texts concerned with the natural environment.

Intellectual / Professional skills & abilities:
• 2. advanced intellectual skills in employing critical material in relation to literature and emulating that material through close textual analysis.
3. advanced abilities in observing and recording the environment and communicating its personal, cultural, and environmental significance.

Personal Values Attributes (Global / Cultural awareness, Ethics, Curiosity) (PVA):
• 4. understanding of debates around natural history and environmental change and literature’s intervention in those debates
5. skills conforming to relevant standards of good academic conduct in the expression of an informed argument in written forms through completing the various activities prescribed.

Formative: an oral presentation on a critical or theoretical text relevant to one of the texts on the module, delivered during a seminar. (MLO 1, 4, 5)

Summative:

1.
2000-word critical essay referring to at least two texts on the module
(MLO 1, 2, 4, 5)

2.
2000-word ‘creative field journal’. A piece of written work recording an engagement with an environment of the student’s choice. The piece must show awareness of both nature and literature, and it must include a completed risk-assessment form. It may be text only, or may include maps, photos, or other images. (MLO 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)


Feedback on formative presentations will be delivered with comments on feedback sheets designed specifically for presentation work. Feedback on summative work will be delivered according to the existing protocols of the Humanities Department on feedback sheets. Feedback on the first summative assignment will help students prepare for the assignment at the end of the module. In addition, students will be encouraged to reflect critically on their own work by completing a self-evaluation sheet to accompany submitted work asking them to identify strengths and weaknesses and to request specific feedback in key areas.

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We currently face an environmental crisis, but writers have long been at the forefront of raising awareness of the complexity of nature and the threats it faces. This module looks at two hundred years of literary engagements with the natural world, including natural histories and popular science, pastoral and environmental poems, environmental protest literature, apocalyptic novels, and the ‘new nature writing’. As well as reading some of the most important environmental literature produced in English, by writers as diverse as Gilbert White, William Wordsworth, Charles Darwin, Rachel Carson, and Robert Macfarlane, you will produce your own ‘creative field journal’, blending your skills as a literary critic with your observational skills, developed on a field trip to a local nature reserve. By the end of the module, you will have a sophisticated understanding not only of the ways that writers can change the world, but also how they can save it!