"Put Your Ear Close to the Whispering Branch..." Deep Listening in the English Classroom

Abstract

W live in a society of excessive noise. Coffee grinders screech at Starbucks. Hand dryers scream in our ears at Target. Traffic, TV, radio ads, cell phones, and the relentless stream of emails, Facebook, and Twitter plague us with their chugging, ringing, buzzing, and humming. In many places, even a hike comes with the distant drone of some highway or airplane. According to Scott Russell Sanders, by age 21 the average American has seen over 30 million ads and has spent more hours watching TV than attending school (Conservationist Manifesto 35). G. Lynn Nelson writes, “In a society filled with ‘words by the millions’— the I-It words of advertising and information and entertainment— we learn not to listen. We grow deaf as well as blind, sinking further into isolation and alienation. Perishing ‘by the word’” (“Warriors” 44). Contemporary life leaves little room for quiet unless we seek it out. During the academic year 2007 and 2008, I was invited to serve as Writer in Residence for Cuyahoga Valley National Park (CVNP) in Peninsula, Ohio. As the visiting writer, I was to dwell for a year in a historic farmhouse a mile from the Cuyahoga Valley Environmental Education Center (CVEEC), and spend my teaching days on the trails with the upper elementary and middle school students who attended the CVEEC’s weeklong camp programs with their teachers. Each year, the park’s non-profit partner, the Conservancy for CVNP, raises need-based scholarship funds for children whom they believe would benefit from hands-on outdoor learning at the CVEEC.1 Many of these students are reluctant readers and writers, struggle with behavioral problems, and/ or live in urban areas. During their stay, they participate in an integrative curriculum called “All the Rivers Run,” which focuses on watershed ecology and draws upon concepts and processes from science, social studies, language arts, math, the arts, and technology. I was assigned to teach nature poetry to a new group of about 20 students four times a day, one to two days a week, which meant I would have one shot at reaching them during my one and a half hour workshop. Before I arrived at the CVEEC, I had been driving 120 miles a week to serve as adjunct faculty in an English department, proofread for an advertising firm, and direct