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Collaborative teaching and ecological literacy.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

After examining Walt Whitman's "This Compost" in the context of the whole of Leaves of Grass, we see how this poem is an example of nature as teacher for the American nation recovering from the carnage of the Civil War. In order to understand the literal idea of the symbolic compost, we describe the scientific process and interpretation as the students explore it in a series of brief laboratory exercises devoted to the actual process of leaf litter decomposition and application of decomposition products to growing wild rye plants. Combining both science and literature enriches an understanding of the actual ecological process of organic decay. The beneficial aspect of compost to plant growth is synonymous with Whitman's renewal for the individual, the local environment, and for the entire American nation after the Civil War.

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In the subdued light of a symbolic "Roll Your Own Blackout," the Fourth Biennial Association of Literature about the Environment (ASLE) conference convened in Flagstaff, Arizona in June 2001. On the Summer Solstice, Scott Slovic introduced the plenary speaker, Gary Paul Nabhan, and went on to reinforce the interdisciplinary nature of environmental education where science and literature should "cross pollinate." Nabhan began his remarks by describing the necessity of marriage between the literary arts and science for strengthening environmental education and awareness.

But how do we work together and merge interdisciplinary perspectives? What are the risks and disadvantages? What are the benefits that are incurred with collaboration? These are familiar questions for us; I teach literature and writing while Stephen teaches ecology and environmental science. Many people ask us how we started working together. They are often curious as to why we would want to collaborate after spending years in graduate school developing a specialty. Our collaboration began in the spring of 1998. As a teacher who instructs students in describing the natural environment, I have always been curious about nature and why authors use particular images or metaphors to describe nature. I was eager to learn more of the facts of the natural world and the local color and regionalism in literature. As someone who wrote a dissertation on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, I did not understand the literal of the metaphor implicit in "This Compost." I asked Stephen, a colleague in...