“Plato says (Phaedrus, Letter VIII) that no sensible man will commit his thought to words and that a man’s thoughts are likely to be better than his writings. Without raising philosophical problems about what a man’s thoughts are, one may reply that the discipline of committing oneself to clarified public form is proper and rewarding: the final and best discoveries are often made in the actual formulation of the statement. The careful responsible skilful use of words is our highest instrument of thought and one of our highest modes of being: an idea which might seem obvious but is not now by any means universally accepted. There may in theoretical studies, as in art, be so-called ultra-verbal insights at any level; but to call ultimate truth
ineffable is to utter a quasi-religious principle which should not be turned round against the careful verbalisation of humbler truths.”

from Iris Murdoch, “The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists.” In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Ed. Peter Conradi. New York: Penguin, 1997. 386.

Wall mural in Cincinnati by Rosalind Tallmadge, et alia

On Sunday I returned from a week in Bloomington, Indiana, at the biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). The week began along the Ohio River, in Cincinnati, with my friend, colleague and collaborator, John Tallmadge, whose book The Cincinnati Arch had prepared me for this look-and-see tour of the city.

Author and Mentor, Collaborator and Friend, John Tallmadge, on a tour of Cincinnati

When we arrived in Bloomington I made may way to the ASLE Executive Council meeting. No longer a member of the Council, I do try to attend these meetings as a program coordinator. Sitting in reminded me of the ongoing collaborative efforts that have built and sustain  this organization. Our organization has grown in size, to 1400 members, and in breadth, with members from 41 countries and with 24 affiliations with scholarly groups both in and outside of the United States. The close to 800 participants seemed a natural fit with the Brobdingnagian scale of the Bloomington campus. The  buildings are enormous, and the campus spreads far and wide. The grey-white Indiana limestone buildings, some of which date back to the late nineteenth century, loom over the Dunn Woods, the Arboretum, and the rather Lilliputian Jordan River. The wooded areas on campus are littered with downed trunks and limbs from a storm on May 25th that took down over 300 trees across this nearly 2,000 acre campus.

Art Museum at Indiana University

I kicked off the week co-facilitating (with John Tallmadge, Rochelle Johnson, Tom Hillard and Sarah Jaquette Ray) a pre-conference workshop “Staying Alive: A Workshop for Academic Professionals.” ASLE’s tradition of mentoring graduate students and building community has evolved to include the Staying Alive Project, a vision that includes building mentoring relationships with one another across all phases and dimensions of academic life. The workshop that John and I offered at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina in 2007 and in Victoria, British Columia in 2009 seeks to initiative honest conversations about the challenges and rewards of academic life. During the conference, as the coordinator of the ASLE Mentoring Program, I also organized mentoring meetings between graduate students and faculty members outside their home departments; and talked with other members of the organization about ways to promote international scholarly exchanges in the field of literature and environment.

Academic Building at Indiana University

My conference days revolved around attending concurrent sessions, sharing meals with friends and collaborators, and attending plenary talks. The people who make ASLE their professional home, and with whom I enjoy spending  time when we gather every two years, include John Tallmadge, Mike Branch, Rochelle Johnson, Ian Marshall, Megan Simpson, Randall Roorda, Nicole Merola, Anne Raine, Arlene Plevin,  Annie Ingram, Scott Slovic, John Lane, Jim Warren, Dan Payne and Tom Hillard.  The people who find themselves gathering in this biennial eddy in the intellectual stream share a love for thinking, talking, eating, making music and drinking beer.

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall. . . ." near the Wells Library on the campus of Indiana University

During my week in Bloomington I found myself preoccupied with getting right the argument I had been trying to pin down in the presentation I would give on Saturday, “Frames of Rejection: Frames of Acceptance: Environmentalism in the Classroom” on the panel “Green Without Guilt: Pedagogy and Scholarship for Teaching Environmentalism in the Disciplines.” But most of the week had me moving from session to session, absorbing and discussing ideas, as well as attending plenary sessions by Una Chaudhuri (professor of English, Drama and Environmental Studies at New York University), Helen Tiffin (recently retired professor of English at the University of Tasmania), Zakes Mda (poet, novelist and critic from South Africa), Robert L. Fischman (professor of Law at Indiana University), Marc Bekoff (professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado) and Rubén Martínez (professor of Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles). I also attended an evening reading and performance, Wilderness Plots, that began as a book, by Soctt Russell Sanders, of brief tales of the settlement of the Ohio Valley between the American Revolution and the Civil War. The spirited evening performance by Sanders, and musicians Timm Grimm, Krista Detor, Carrie Newcomer, Tom Roznowski and Michael White, was recorded for Indiana Public Television. There were also two receptions honoring senior colleagues in our field: for Lawrence Buell, who is retiring from the English department at Harvard University, and for John Felstiner, from the department of English at Stanford. I list these names and performances to suggest the tributaries that feed into the mainstream intellectual work of the organization. At the same time, I am suggesting the ways that an intensive week of intellectual exchange with students and colleagues  feeds my teaching, scholarship and service at Keene State College.

"Truth is the Daughter of Time," aphorism and and relief, west wall of Ballantine Hall, Indiana University

Our panel on Saturday afternoon was well attended. I talked about my upper-level undergraduate elective designed to help students understand the social movement we call environmentalism, as well as explore the ways environmental concern shapes the development of a genre of writing. Using Kenneth Burke’s writings from the 1930s to reflect on my course, I offered an overview of the kick-ass books we read: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island, Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming, Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild, Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge and T. C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain. I argued essentially that environmentalism needs environmental literature. But not to affirm the environmentalist agenda. Nor to pursue its agenda by other means. Rather my conviction is that environmental literature, like most literature worth reading, should remind us that genuine thinking is  less dogmatic and more provisional, less universal and more situated, less earnest and more alive. Environmental literature should encourage us to re-imagine how we think the environment—even as, in some cases, those books are working with the inherently reductive language and discourse of environmentalism.

American Literature Association, Boston, Massachusetts

In late May I spent a day at the annual American Literature Association Conference in Boston. In addition to attending discussions of the work of the nineteenth century American authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, I chaired a session I organized called “American Literature and the Ecological Thought” framed around recent theoretical work by Timothy Morton, professor of English at the University of California Davis, and author of Ecology without Nature (2007) and The Ecological Thought (2010). Cathleen Rowley, from Stony Brook University, presented “An Ecological Reading of Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables,”  Amy Campion, University of Minnesota, presented “John Cheever and the Ecological Thought,” and Heather Houser, University of Texas at Austin, presented “Visualize or Describe? The Contemporary Novel, Visualization and Environmentality.”

Emerson was right. . . . books are for a Scholar's idle times

Modern Language Association Convention, Los Angeles, California

In January I traveled to the Modern Language Association convention in Los Angeles, California, where I presided at the session I have been organizing for a number of years, “Teaching in the Small College Department,” an annual event sponsored by the Association of the Departments of English. I centered the 2011 small college session on the small college department and the curriculum. The central question I asked the panelists to address was how small college departments are (re)configuring the English major, designing courses and doing collaborative work around courses in the major or in the general studies curriculum, especially in light of the mission of smaller institutions—as well as in relation to the profession-wide conversation about the English major, for instance, in the 2008 Report of the Teagle Foundation on the Undergraduate Major in Language and Literature.

In smaller institutions and departments, faculty and students routinely work together in collaborative and cooperative endeavors. And the session suggested that much of this work is devoted to rethinking the English major. It is not surprising that faculty in smaller settings have been generating innovative ways of thinking about English, as the 2003 special issue of the ADE Bulletin on “The English Major” demonstrated. The faculty in small college departments, focused primarily on their mission of undergraduate education, tend to be more broadly involved in teaching at levels of the curriculum, and hence are more able to create opportunities to rethink and refashion the undergraduate major in English. The 2011 session features faculty from institutions that are part of the Council on Public Liberal Arts Colleges, COPLAC, a consortium of colleges seeking to offer high-quality, public liberal arts educations.

Lunch at the Runcible Spoon, Bloomington, Indiana

Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland

In the fall of 2010 I spent two days at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, where I was invited to present the annual Sophie Kerr Lecture and to lead a college conversation for faculty on writing and the curriculum. My Kerr Lecture and slide presentation, co-sponsored by the Center for Environment and Society, was entitled “John Muir and the Mountains of California: Prospects for Environmental Thinking and Writing.”

My first talk on writing was a standing-room-only workshop for faculty in the Global Research and Writing Seminar Program called “Thinking, Writing and Research in the Undergraduate Writing Classroom: A Case for Sustained Writing Projects.” I also presented a college-wide workshop for faculty and students, “Thinking about the Values of Writing.”

One of many opportunities for cultural exegesis in the scholarly stream

The Natural History of Reading, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

The 2010-11 academic year began for me in June of 2010 when I traveled to the University of Washington to speak at an undergraduate honors conference at the University of Washington.  Seattle entitled “The Natural History of Reading.” The conference, organized by Leroy Searle under the auspices of the Simpson Humanities Center, was the culminating event in a course designed to examine the activity of reading as an essential component of learning and inquiry. The course and conference began with the historical tropes pertaining to ‘The Book’—or, as Leroy framed it, “the Book of God, the Book of Nature, and the productions of Man”—in literature, philosophy, and science, art, photography, and architecture. Students read The Bible  (King James version), The Qu’ran  (Abdullah Jusuf Ali translation), Gerald Holton: Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, James Gleick: Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Lee Smollin: The Trouble with Physics, Charles Sanders Peirce: The Essential Peirce, vol 1, William Blake: Complete Poetry and Prose and William Faulkner: Light in August. They also discussed Plato, the Phaedrus, Johannes Kepler, The Six-Sided Snowflake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, selections from Biographia Literaria and The Friend, Louis Sullivan,  Selections from Autobiography of an Idea and Kindergarten Chats and Nathan Lyons, Selections from Photographers on Photography.

I was one of three invited speakers whose work on the activity of reading would contribute to this course of inquiry. Each of the undergraduate students presented a talk at the conference and there were social events to continue the conversations that emerged in the academic session. My talk, “The Problem of Reading, the Practice of Writing,” began with a theoretical question: what is the relationship between reading and writing? As I reminded the audience of undergraduates, graduate students and professors, the problem with asking this question is that most responses immediately call on a set of commonplaces about the practice of teaching writing in school. For students in primary and secondary grades are to be introduced to the practice of writing mostly through routine tasks that promote mastery of a discrete skill set; college undergraduates are asked to produce essays, for the most part, that demonstrate whether or not they have a working understanding of course content; graduate students produce readings of books that apply ready-made protocols to generate arguments as a quantitative measure for professional advancement; and professors, having internalized the imperative to publish, produce reams of writing that very few people have reason to read. (The situation, as I explained, is a perfect case of what the critic Kenneth Burke once called the beauracratization of the imaginative—a phrase, as he put it, as bungling as the situation it seeks to describe.) I then when on to talk about how at most colleges and universities our first-year students therefore find themselves writing essays with little to no intellectual investment; how their teachers find themselves reading essays that no one should ever be asked to read; and how most tenure-stream faculty have abandoned the first-year course while quietly ignoring the working conditions of the contingent faculty they hire to teach it. Is there a better way? My essay drew on my own study of theories of reading and writing as well as the pedagogical  experiment underway at Keene State College with the first year course. My argument was that when students are actually thinking and writing, the activity of reading becomes, quite naturally, a central intellectual activity in the course. My essay was later published in the fall in the conference proceedings, The Natural History of Reading.

My work on the journal includes writing book reviews, an essay and since 2005 serving an associate editor of the journal. As associate editor, I am responsible for the book review section in our three issues published each year. I serve as a liaison with book publishers, recruit reviewers, edit individual and roundtable reviews, and work with the authors of longer “Forum” essays by senior teachers.

The Spring 2010 special issue of Pedagogy

My most recent contribution to Pedagogy, and to the profession-wide conversation about teaching, is a special issue dedicated to the small college department. As guest editor for the spring 2010 issue I asked ten contributors to foreground the ways the small college departments generate conditions for innovative pedagogy, curriculum development, and the integration of the professional activities of reading, writing and teaching. In my Guest Editor’s Introduction, “Centers and Peripheries,” I introduce the two goals of the special issue: to investigate what might be possible in the small college department as well as to suggest how these possibilities might inspire comparable intellectual work in other professional and institutional contexts. Because the current traditional conception of the discipline has rendered a great deal of the intellectual work of the profession invisible, I contend, we need to talk more about what our colleagues are actually doing outside the doctorate-granting institution. My claim is that representing more fully what we do will help us to move beyond general claims for teaching as a form of scholarship and away from de-contextualized arguments about the value of teaching.

Since graduate school I have been surprised by the parochial discourse of the profession that situates the so-called research institution at the center of intellectual production, value and prestige. Over the years, I have tried to bring people together to talk about the ways we devalue significant intellectual work and to make visible the a more complex system of postsecondary education made up of four-year liberal arts colleges, comprehensive universities, two-year colleges, community colleges, and public and private colleges and universities.  As an assistant professor I was fortunate  to find at the annual Modern Language Association (MLA) convention colleagues interested in making visible forms of intellectual work in small college departments. After presenting on issues in small college departments for a couple of years, I began organizing and chairing the annual session sponsored by the Association of Departments of English (ADE). At the 2005 convention in Washington, D.C., the session “Graduate Education and the Small College Department” I invited graduate directors from research institutions (U of Wisconsin, Rutgers U, U of Pittsburgh) and small-college faculty (Marywood U, U of the Pacific, and Cornell College). And in 2006, in Philadelphia, I focused the session on the procedures and criteria for tenure and promotion in the small college department. And in 2009 we considered criteria and requirements for earning tenure—specifically how these criteria may have changed or be changing, whether changes (and what changes) would seem more productive and more counter-productive, and how institutional conditions and complexities determine the work of promotion and tenure committees. Have the requirements for publication for tenure and promotion changed in institutions over the past ten years? How do small-college departments define productivity and growth in scholarship and related professional activity? How do small-college departments value scholarship beyond the standard peer-reviewed journals or monograph? How does the apparently necessary specialization in graduate school prepare graduate students for positions where the publication of a monograph is not the requirement for tenure?

My inquiry into the conditions for teaching and learning in small college departments led to an invitation  to write a featured “Commentary,” “Where Do You Teach?”, for the fall 2005 issue of Pedagogy and an essay, “Reading, Writing and Teaching in Context” in the book Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life (MLA 2008). In both of these essays I consider the debilitating representation of faculty work in terms of research and teaching as separate activities. My argument is that this pervasive subplot in the narrative of the profession is rooted in a representation of faculty work that transcends the local institution and the ways that departments and institutions define intellectual work.

The special issue of Pedagogy dedicated to the small college department is a culmination of many years of work. My hope is that the professional conversation about our intellectual work will continue and that our special issue will inspire others to explore what  it means to be primarily a teacher in a community of writing and scholarly exchange.

Charles Darwin, from Notebook B (1837)

The grant proposal, approved last month, will support development of an upper-level humanities course in the Integrative Studies Program (ISP). My course will survey changing concepts of nature from the ancient world to the age of Darwin. Students will read a sequence of major texts from the Western tradition alongside religious and scientific documents to understand the broad contours of thinking about the natural world in the Western cultures of Europe, as well as in the Eastern cultures of China and India, and the Arab-World and Africa. Thinking across intellectual traditions will empower students to think comparatively and to understand the dynamics of intertextual and intercultural exchange.

As it is currently envisioned,“What is Nature” will be organized around a sequence of primary texts with supplemental excerpts from treatises, letters, and books of poetry. Students will consider multiple genres of writing, including myth, scientific treatises, and narrative, poetry, in which the question of nature arises, as well as discuss illustrations and diagrams that represent human understandings of the natural world. Readings will include creation stories, including the Maidu Myths, a cycle of tribal creation stories in Western North America; the Hebrew Bible, with emphasis on Genesis and the Psalms; selected  hymns from the Indian Brahmanical or Vedic scripture, the Rig Veda, and selections from the Sanskrit verses of Kālidāsa and Dharmakīrti; relevant selections from the Chinese Huai-nan Tzu; Hesiod’s Theogony, and the dialogues of Plato. Students will be introduced to Aristotle’s thinking about the world of nature and read his writing in conjunction with selected dialogues of Plato,specifically the Timaeus and Laws; students will then trace the reception and development of ideas about nature in two narrative poems that influenced thinking about nature through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The first, Lucretius’ De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), an epic poem written in the middle of the first century BC, contrasts the Epicurian view of nature (and man) with the three major Aritstotelian classifications of the physical world; the second, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, describes the creation and history of the world, and its elaborate mythologies express ideas about nature that inspired imaginative writing by such authors as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton.

Carl Von Linne, Titelseite von Linnés Manuskript Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum (1729)

The Roman astronomer Claudius Ptolemy’s argument in the Almagest—that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the sun, planets, and stars revolved around it—will offer students an intellectual context in which to situate the key treatises—and illustrations—that make visible the Copernican system that would replace the Ptolemaic world view. Students will consider sixteenth and seventeenth century views of nature in the writings of Newton, Bacon’s Novum Organum (The New Organon; or, True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature) and Descartes, whose Discourse on Method will help students understand the mechanistic view of nature and method of scientific inquiry. The Enlightenment’s vision of science and the mid-eighteenth century will be represented by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, whose Systema Naturae introduced a classification system that divided living things into two kingdoms (plants and animals), classes, orders, genera, and species, and that led to subsequent ambitions to create a comprehensive taxonomy that would include everything known about the natural world; and the debate about natural degeneracy in the New World in the writings of the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and Thomas Jefferson.

Americae sive qvartae orbis partis nova et exactissima description, by Diego Gvtiero Philippi (1554-1569), from the Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress

The final unit in the course will be organized around Darwin’s seminal nineteenth century writings. Students will read passages from the narratives in The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), study the argument of his most well-known book On the Origin of Species (1859), and examine his illustrations and journal notes. This segment of the course will introduce students to scientific ideas about nature (and the human) in a broad humanistic framework that will include selections from the German and Romantic poets Frederich Schiller, Frederich Hölderlin, William Blake, William Wordsworth; the natural history writers Gilbert White, William Bartram, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; and the naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and George Perkins Marsh.

William Blake, "Newton" (1795)

The opportunity to develop and teach a pre-disciplinary course with a broad historical scope will extend my ongoing inquiry into experiences and concepts of nature from the perspective of the humanities. It will allow me to return to my doctoral dissertation on theories of inquiry, focused on American intellectual history, that was informed by readings in European literary traditions, philosophy, and the history of science, especially the nineteenth-century writings of the logician and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce, who offers insights into how normal science is practiced, how scientific discoveries come about, and the process that produces paradigm shifts in communities of inquiry that will inform my ways of teaching students how concepts of nature have evolved and changed.

I’m deeply grateful to the National Endowment for supporting this work—work that will begin this summer and continue through the 2011-12 academic year when I will be teaching the course.

-Gary Snyder, “Four Changes,” Turtle Island (1974)

Refuse bin, Mahabalipuram, India, February 2008

How do we address the social needs and demands of an economy, the natural constraints of ecology and the political imperatives of democracy? How do we think about the environment in historical, political, historical, sociological, economic, technological, and moral terms? And how do we reconcile the democratic freedoms at home with the imperialism abroad that feeds the greed for resources to feed our insatiable consumer economy? These complicated questions—at the center of the social movement (and discourse) we have come to call environmentalism—have motivated a range of writers whose cultural work begins with the paradox that the scientific, industrial and technological advances of the modern world have inexorably created an ecological catastrophe of massive proportions.

This semester I’m teaching a course in American and Environmental Studies that takes up these questions. Our focus is

US Forest Service campaign to prevent fire

environmental writing and its relationship to the discourse of environmentalism. I’m interested in the ethical claims of environmentalism as a framework for considering how writers (and writer-activists) seek to foster reflection and transformation of personal assumptions and attitudes, beliefs and behavior. My course, “Writing in an Endangered World,” is an interdisciplinary course and therefore designed to address program outcomes in Environmental Studies (critical thinking and problem solving skills, communication skills, skills associated with moral and character development, an understanding of the ethical implications of environmental issues) as well as in American Studies (understanding historical and contemporary American cultures, responding resourcefully to texts, integrating forms of scholarship from more than one discipline, and the ability to write an effective documented essay that includes a thesis that integrates interdisciplinary approaches). To these ends, the course makes visible the assumptions, frameworks, and methods of the disciplines that study natural and human history, the relationship between ecological and human systems, and the history and values of environmental engagement in North America during the 20^th century. In addition to reading Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History, students are reading Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Gary Snyder, Turtle Island, Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang, Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Linda Hogan, Solar Storms, Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild: Essays, Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge and T. C. Boyle The Tortilla Curtain. The course has also have considered the cultural presence of environmental concern in visual images, advertising campaigns, popular music, as well as other forms of cultural discourse.

The politics of environmental concern

I’m primarily interested in students thinking about how environmental writers use language as a primary vehicle for exploring the human prospect in an age of environmental crisis. Wendell Berry’s essays in The Unsettling of America, for example, ask students to consider the commonplaces that make possible our thinking about environmental questions. Berry enumerates the faults and contradictions of a system—call it what you will, capitalist, exploitative, free-market or global economy. Indeed Carson, Snyder, and Abbey all work from these commonplace ways of thinking. What makes this writing worth reading is that it moves beyond the limits of the language we make available to ourselves to address the problems we are being asked to think about. Imaginative writing takes many forms—including the writing we include in the genres of nonfiction, fiction, poetry. The language of this writing—its arguments, demonstrations, anecdotes and stories—serve as a counterpoint to what Wendell Berry calls our failure to reason about moral questions. “Public discourse of all kinds,” he insists in The Unsettling of America, “now tends to pattern itself either upon the arts of advertisement and propaganda (that is, the arts of persuasion without argument, which leads to reasonless and even unconscious acquiescence) or upon the allegedly objective or value-free demonstrations of science” (230). Berry’s claim about moral ignorance in The Unsettling of America is a provocation: a reminder that we are at once inheritors of a culture as well as stewards of that culture, and that the current state of the world is ultimately our responsibility. What do the current practices of agriculture, he asks, say about us? My case in the course is that Berry is not interested in the thinking that reinforces the opposition between saints and sinners (we are all both, he points out) or righteously pointing to the shortcomings or faults of someone else or some system or another. He is interested in the ways that we might move beyond thinking that begins “with a set of predetermining ideas” toward thinking that begins with “particular places, people, needs and desires” (233). He elaborates on this idea in chapter two, where he points to the problems of more ambitious institutional solutions that narrow and simplify as they propose particular actions or objectives.

Our focus on writing about particular places, people, needs and desires was enriched by a class visit by the writer Mark

Mark Kurlansky

Kurlansky. Mark was on campus for one of the spring Keene is Reading program events. (We had selected his book Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and he was in town to give a talk at the Colonial Theater on the long and complex history of the cod fishing and the depleted fishing stocks and the people’s lives who are linked to the great fisheries of the North Atlantic.) He talked with the students about the work of a writer; and, given the focus of the course,  he addressed what it might mean to be a writer in an age of environmental concern. At one point he asked the students whether any of them had read Darwin. When he saw that none of the students had, he suggested that anyone interested in understanding contemporary environmental  problems could do no better than to read and consider what Darwin makes visible in his work. The teacher of the course (me!) could not have asked for a more timely and apposite recommendation.

I began keeping a blog during my sabbatical last year in India. The occasional work of writing about what we were doing and seeing as temporary residents–where we were traveling, what we were seeing, and what I was reading and thinking, in conjunction with images I was gathering–proved to be productive for me in a number of ways. The inspiration for the blog I set up in India, The Far Field, was inspired by my friend and colleague L., whose ongoing practice as a writer has made extraordinary use of the place blog.

As it turned out, a blog designed to give friends and family members a better feel for what we were doing helped me experience the reflective practice of place blogging I had long admired by L., whose Hoarded Ordinaries led me Tim Lindgren’s dissertation and related research material on place blogging completed at Boston College in April 2009. Lindgren’s study examines the emergence of place blogging as a genre of writing that can be used to deepen a sense of place and to share local knowledge.

I’m interested in how we use language and symbols to mediate our relationship with the world around us. I am also interested in how these necessary mediations offer forms of attention that are potentially instructive, even transformative. My practice writing a place blog (now unfolding in a subscription-only blog for my extended family) led me to new questions about how blogs are facilitating new forms of writing and the uses to which this writing might be put.

First I transformed my professional web site into a blog. The intent of what I am doing right now (or more precisely what you are doing right now in reading what I did) is to make visible the intellectual work I do as a college professor. The occasional writing I do here offers me a space to consider more fully my professional activities. What is more, it provides a potentially useful space for colleagues and friends, as well as current and prospective students, to glimpse some of the work I am doing.

Another experiment with blogging is unfolding as part of a collaborative project I began with the independent scholar John Tallmadge. The Staying Alive project began in the spring of 2006 with a series of extended conversations about the promises and perils of academic life. Our conversations led to a workshop for academic professionals at the Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in the summer of 2007, and in Victoria, British Columbia, in the summer of 2009. Our subsequent conversations about the challenges of academic life with colleagues at colleges and universities across the country have suggested the need for a blog devoted to the difficult work of sustaining an emotionally, ethically, and spiritually healthy life in academia—no matter what happens.

Last but not least I am thinking pedagogically. How might the blog be used to help develop student writers? While I have yet to use the blog as a medium for student writing in a class, I am working independently with two students who are using blogs. The first student is working on an independently designed major, Biology and Writing. This student is seeking to grow as a biologist and as a writer with the post-graduate goal of conducting research and writing for a scientific journal and writing creative non-fiction biology. Her blog “Creative Biology“  is a remarkable example of the ways a blog mighthelp a student writer with academic study. The second student and I designed an internship in American Studies, “The Ecology of the New England Garden,” that would offer her the opportunity to reflect on a summer and fall experience working for a local professional horticulture and landscape design firm.  Her blog Regional Roots has been integral to the internship experience and will culminate, if all goes as planned, in a published piece of writing in a local environmental journal.

These two examples have me looking farther ahead to the possible applications of blogs in the teaching of college writing. Colleagues at other institutions are actively involved in this work and I will surely have more to say about the use of blogs in forthcoming posts.

Soon after the train pulled into the 30^th Street Station I hopped a cab to the hotel, printed out introductory remarks that I had revised on the train, and walked to the Marriot Hotel where I chaired a special session sponsored by the Association of the Departments of English on the small college department. I focused this year’s session on the criteria and requirements currently active in departments and institutions for earning tenure—specifically how these criteria may have changed or be changing, whether changes (and what changes) would seem more productive and more counter-productive, and how institutional conditions and complexities determine the work of promotion and tenure committees. A number of questions were addressed by the three panelists. Have the requirements for publication for tenure and promotion changed in institutions over the past ten years? How do small-college departments define productivity and growth in scholarship and related professional activity? How do small-college departments value scholarship beyond the standard peer-reviewed journals or monograph? How does the apparently necessary specialization in graduate school prepare graduate students for positions where the publication of a monograph is not the requirement for tenure?

My brief introductory remarks suggested that small departments have something important to add to the profession-wide conversation about scholarly activities and modes of publication (including digital). For many of our institutions have aligned standards for faculty evaluation with the mission, values and practices of our institution; abandoned the reductive conflation of scholarship with publication; revised our standards for promotion and tenure to reflect the intellectual work our faculty do; published standards for promotion and tenure are published and visible to junior faculty;  conduct faculty evaluation without depending upon the judgment of presses or outside evaluators; value teaching and service in both promotion and tenure reviews; and value collaborative intellectual work as a contribution to the profession as well as the to the public that supports our work. I argued that representing more fully what we do will require us to move beyond general claims for teaching as a form of scholarship and decontextualized arguments about the value of teaching. Instead, I suggested, we need to shift our focus to the local histories of institutions where we can learn what the profession is doing beyond our inevitably parochial point of view. My goal for the special session was to investigate what might be possible in the small college department as well as to suggest how these possibilities might inspire comparable intellectual work in other professional and institutional contexts. The speakers were Jeffry C. Davis, associate professor of English at Wheaton College, James M. Lang, associate professor in the English Department at Assumption College, and Ann Green, associate professor at Saint Joseph’s University. We were fortunate to have close to fifty people in the audience and a good question and answer period.

An evening watching ice hockey on the TV, a green curry Thai dinner, a good night’s sleep and a morning run though the cold and windy canyons of the city and along the icy shore of the Schuylkill river—then back to the convention hotel to help out as a job counselor for the MLA. In the afternoon, I joined David Lawrence, Steve Olson, Sheridan Blau, and John Ottenberg in a special session arranged by the MLA Office of Research called “Reading as a Teacher: a Workshop for Teachers of Literature.” We designed this session to explore a pragmatic question: Does reading to teach a work of literature call for forms of attention that are distinctive—ways of thinking and observing that differ from those we use as scholars or as readers generally? Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Moose” was to be the focus of the discussion. Before the workshop, participants were asked to read the poem as if they are preparing to teach it in either a lower-division undergraduate literature course taken chiefly by nonmajors or an upper-division course in twentieth-century American poetry taken mainly by English majors. (The poem is available online at the Web site of The Poetry Foundation.) We each offered brief introductory remarks and then we divided the room into small discussion groups of eight people. The organizing questions for the group included the following: What problems and possibilities for teaching and learning does Bishop’s “The Moose” offer? What challenges or difficulties follow from this poem’s way of doing what it does, whether for a student attempting to read it or for a teacher attempting to guide or enable students’ reading? Ostensibly, we were to conclude the workshop with thirty minutes of full-group discussion. But we really only had a few minutes to report on its discussion. My group, in fact, talked more generally about the idea of reading as a teacher and the assumptions of the workshop itself. We all agreed that the session was a good start; but we needed more time to address the interesting questions we had raised.

My friends and graduate student colleagues J and M were at the session and we went out for a nice Italian dinner. The three of us work together on the journal and it is always good to catch up in person. I was also fortunate to have a nice breakfast the following morning with my friend and graduate school advisor before catching the train back to New Haven where R picked me up and whisked me back to Shelton to watch the girls win another hockey game and qualify for the final day of games.

My contribution to our sixth biennial symposium was “Teaching the Local in an Age of Globalization.” My goal was to bring together a panel of speakers whose teaching and writing has deepened our awareness of the natural and cultural systems of which we are a part.  I wanted to feature professors whose students have experiences outside the classroom (in the towns and cities and farmlands and forests near their colleges); whose courses emphasize interdisciplinary learning (integrating the study of literature and story with the study of history, nature, and science); and collaboration (with local residents, towns, and organizations).

The speakers I invited were Pavel Cenkl, of Sterling College, John Elder, of Middlebury College, John Harris, of Franklin Pierce University, and Kent Ryden, from the University of Southern Maine—all of whom have made notable contributions to the study of the nature and culture of New England. Pavel Cenkl is Dean of Academics at Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vermont where he also teaches courses in humanities and regional studies. He has recently organized two summer institutes focusing on the rural heritage of the Northeast. Pavel has published This Vast Book of Nature: Writing the Landscape of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, 1784-1911 and, more recently, edited the collection of essays, Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast. He lives on a steadily expanding homestead in Craftsbury with his wife and son. John Elder has taught English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College since 1973, where he has taught courses in American nature writing, Romantic English poetry and contemporary American poetry of nature, Japan’s haiku tradition, and community-based courses that focus on the future of Vermont’s towns and farms.  John’s three most recent books have all combined discussion of literature, descriptions of the Vermont landscape, and personal memoir.  He and his wife Rita live in the Green Mountain village of Bristol and operate a sugarbush in the adjacent town of Starksboro with their grown children. Kent Ryden teaches in the American and New England Studies program at the University of Southern Maine, of which he was director for the past four years. Kent is the author of Mapping the Invisible Landscape:  Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place and Landscape with Figures: Nature and Culture in New England, as well as many articles and chapters on topics in ecocriticism, cultural geography, and regional literature. He has a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University, and is a recipient of the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize. And John R. Harris is Director of the Monadnock Institute of Nature, Place and Culture at Franklin Pierce University, and a faculty member in the Environmental Science and American Studies Departments.  His work on the study of place in the Monadnock Region has appeared in Where the Mountain Stands Alone (University Press of New England, 2007) and Teaching North American Environmental Literature (Modern Language Association, 2008). John and his wife Susie have lived with their three daughters in Westmoreland since 1985.

Pavel’s presentation focused on the Work-Learning-Service program at Sterling College and its emphasis on place and identity, The program’s emphasis on cultivating a sense of place provides opportunities to explore the global frameworks of local places. John elaborated on his interest in the global context of the local-food movement in New England. John described teaching a community-based course called “Farm Stories,” in which students read the literature of farming, interview, and work on stories about families who operate eleven farms near the Middlebury campus. He used both Virgil’s Georgics and recent farmers’ protests in Brussels relate the challenges of Vermont farmers to a global context. John also reported on organizing two conferences that speak to this topic: one in Middlebury on local food and culture in Vermont, Quebec, and France and one in Siena on local food and culture in New England and Tuscany.  Kent’s presentation focused on the cultural politics of place in Falmouth, Maine, asking which place-defining narratives get privileged, and why, and what the implications of that are. He also touched on how northern New England places have historically existed in a kind of economic and cultural “colonial” relation to southern New England. Finally, John Harris reflected on distinctive features of the New England identity over time and the strong sense of community he finds in our region through his discussions with local town residents around issues of town government, community size and the importance of celebrating communal history.

Faculty and staff publications table

October 29, 2009 marked the first annual National Day on Writing. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) established National Writing Day to explore and celebrate the place of writing in our lives. The US Senate even took a few minutes to pass a resolution declaring the National Day on Writing. The idea is a good one, as people are writing more than ever before –in multiple media and for different purposes and audiences.  Clear and effective writing, moreover, is indispensible for full and meaningful participation in civic and professional life.

The Writing Task Force at Keene State College participated in this national celebration by offering the College community an opportunity to showcase our personal and professional writing. We designed “Keene Writes” to showcase the diverse forms of writing produced by faculty and staff. A table at the center of the room was filled with books, journal articles and other writing; we featured excerpts from the blogs of faculty and staff; Jeff Friedman, one of the accomplished writers on our faculty, led workshops on poetry writing; and we staged a headline writing competition, a cartoon caption and a six-word memoir contest.

The event was a success. Over three hundred people visited the Mountain View Room in the Student Center. The premise that people are writing more than ever before—that writing is a daily activity that contributes to personal, professional and civic life—was exemplified by our participation in the National Day on Writing. The members of the Writing Task Force are already looking ahead to next year with plans to feature staff, faculty, and student writing with our ongoing commitment to strengthening the culture of teaching and learning at Keene State College through writing.

The Keene is Blogging board

To extend the exploration and celebration of writing through June 2010, my colleague Katherine Tirabassi set up two archives at the NCTE Gallery of Writing to feature work at Keene State College: a gallery for student writing at http://galleryofwriting.org/galleries/633720/ and a gallery for faculty and staff at http://galleryofwriting.org/galleries/627684/. If you are a student, faculty or staff member, please consider submitting something to one of the archives.

What is English? This question is at the center of a conversation that has been unfolding since I arrived at Keene State College in 1998. Provisional answers to the question, as well as the multiple ways the question can be answered, have motivated changes in how we conceive and deliver our undergraduate program. How do we cultivate careful reading and the use of literary vocabulary? How do they experience the process of writing about literature and culture and learn to use writing for a range of expressive and persuasive purposes? How do we help students understand the ways historical, social, and cultural contexts shape literary works?  In what ways are students introduced to those works in literary and expressive traditions produced by cultures whose collective humanity and aesthetic identity have been historically devalued, denied, or dismissed? How do students come to understand literary genre? How literary works relate intertextually? How the history of language has affected the development of literature? In what ways are students exposed to the history of criticism and critical theory, its application in literary analysis as well as current scholarly debates in the field of English studies?

For the past ten years our thinking about (and as) a program has been motivated by a desire to improve conditions for student learning and, at the same time, ameliorate the difficult working conditions faculty face. New members of our department have invigorated this discussion in collaboration with those who have been at the College for some time. And College-wide curricular changes (that English, in part, initiated) have transformed the work that we do.  As a result, we now share the responsibility for a program that grows out of the ongoing and ever-present questions about English as a field of study.

I’ve been thinking about all of this over the summer as the primary author of the English department’s Self Study. For those reading who are not aware, college and universities undertake a self study every ten years or so. The University System of New Hampshire policy requires the Academic Overview Committee (AOC), which reports to the Keene State College Senate, to oversee and facilitate program review on our campus. The purpose of the academic overview process is to evaluate the strengths and challenges of the academic programs and its current and projected resource needs. Program review includes self-analysis by members of the program, external peer review, evaluation by the Academic Overview Committee, and response from the administration.

So, what is English? Well,  The StoryI tell in this attached excerpt from the forty page document gives an overview of who we say we are and the history of the program, and might be of interest to anyone curious about English at Keene State College. The conversations around our central question are intense, ongoing, and deeply engaging. While we may not have a definitive answer to the question (in fact, we might want to question the value of such a thing), we are always working to articulate the reasons why we have the program we have–among ourselves, with our students and to the others who support the work that we do.