SITUATING ‘PLACE’ FOR ENVIRONMENTAL LITERACY

Abstract

This essay reflects on recent experiments in teaching English at a South African university in response to the local/global crisis of environment and development. It suggests that if our pedagogy in literary studies is to enable a discourse equipped to demonstrate the key insight that ecological sustainability and social justice are inextricable, and boldly assemble conceptual tools for materially changing the world, then the way that we view place and situatedness is crucial. In this regard, a worthwhile challenge is to find ways of valuing personal, present-tense apprehension of place and places and a sense of locatedness and bioregional specificity, without lapsing into a myopic parochialism or ahistoricism. This may be put more positively as a question: in working with students in literary studies, how may close attention to the particularities of (for example) home, neighbourhood, bioregion, and so on, offer not an alternative to but precisely a window or lens into discussion of broader historical, geographical, political and environmental networks? A related challenge concerns a change in the sort of words we use to read and write in the transmission of our discipline: to find within our pedagogy (alongside the discourse of critique and analysis which it has been our business to develop), the place for a ‘utopian’ language of appreciation and celebration; words to facilitate effective engagement and hopeful action. In exploring practical responses to these challenges, the essay discusses examples from an undergraduate course in ‘Reading the Environment’ at the University of the Western Cape.