Teaching Environments: Ecocritical Encounters

The essays in this collection seek to bring together current developments in ecocriticism and the pedagogical practice of teaching English at all levels, from primary schools to Higher Education. They cover theoretical and practical discussions of the nexus between the sciences and the humanities and maintain that the notion of the two cultures be refused for good, they argue for the inclusion of particular texts or theoretical perspectives, and they suggest ways to teaching environments on different levels of language competence and in the context of historical and transdisciplinary encounters with ecology, nature, and animals. Despite this variety, they share some common threads and engage with questions that are highly relevant for teaching in general and have acquired even more relevance in our rapidly changing and posthumanist teaching environments: How do we raise consciousness without preaching? What kind of critical attitude is required for the empowerment of our pupils and students? How do we actually imagine encounters between the sciences and the (post)humanities, and which texts, what kind of texts, and which approaches will prove most fruitful?

Table of Contents:
Contents: Roman Bartosch/Sieglinde Grimm: Teaching Environments: How «Green» Can – and Should – A Classroom Be? – Uwe Küchler: Where Foreign Language Education Meets, Clashes and Grapples with the Environment – Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer: Ants, Bees, Bugs, and Spiders: Insects in Children’s Literature – Roman Bartosch: Teaching a Poetics of Failure? The Benefit of Not-Understanding the Other, Posthumanism, and the Works of Shaun Tan and Wolf Erlbruch – Janice Bland: Ecocritical Sensitivity with Multimodal Texts in the EFL/ESL Literature Classroom – Kylie Crane: When Pigs Cry – Teaching the Gaze, Materialities, and Environmental Ethics with Babe – Adrian Rainbow: Pedagogy and the Power of the Ecoliterary Text – Celestine Caruso: Scientific Encounters in Literature – How the «Two Cultures» Can Profit from Each Other In and Outside the Classroom – Haiko Wandhoff: The Fall of Man and the Corruption of Nature: A Medievalist Perspective – Dominik Ohrem: «A Deathless Love for the Natural and the Free»: Nature, Masculinity and Whiteness in 19th-Century America – Sieglinde Grimm: Teaching Cultural Ecology from German Romanticism to the Present: E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gottfried Keller, and W.G. Sebald – Roman Bartosch/Greg Garrard: The Function of Criticism. A Response to William Major and Andrew McMurry’s Editorial – William Major/Andrew McMurry: Response of William Major and Andrew McMurry – Pamela Swanigan: The Case Against Agenda – Sieglinde Grimm: Ecodidactics? A German Perspective.

About the Author :
Roman Bartosch teaches English literatures at the University of Cologne. He has published on postcolonial and posthumanist theory and in his research focuses on literary theories, especially new formalism, reception aesthetics and hermeneutics. His book on ecocriticism and postcolonial fiction was released in 2013. Sieglinde Grimm has taught at the University of Cologne (1992 to 2001), the University of Prague (1996), at Cambridge University (1998) and at the University of Frankfurt (2002 to 2003). From 2006 to 2009, she has taught at a Gymnasium in Bonn. She is now Professor of German at the University of Cologne and works on German literature of the 18th century (Hölderlin), and on literary Modernism (Kafka and Rilke) as well as on pedagogy, intercultural learning and cultural ecology from a didactical perspective.