English and Sustainable Development

1   Introduction

Not only are there problems of definition related to sustainable development, but as the accompanying article by Andrew Stables indicates, English teachers may have concerns about the subject being used as a vehicle for ‘delivering’ curriculum objectives. At the same time, and particularly perhaps in the primary sector, teachers are often keen to link English to other curriculum areas to help pupils make connections in their learning.

The government is placing greater emphasis on sustainability with priorities for action:

Sustainable consumption and production – working towards achieving more with less
Natural resource protection and environmental enhancement – protecting the natural resources on which we depend
Sustainable communities – creating places where people want to live and work, now and in the future
Climate change and energy – confronting the greatest threat

In addition to these priorities, changing behaviour also forms a large part of the Government’s thinking on sustainable development. Education is one of the key ways in which the Government expects to realise this broad agenda.

The question for English teachers is how to address what is clearly an important agenda without compromising the subject itself. 

Linking English with sustainable development, however defined, necessarily means taking an environmental view. Of course, literature, and arts of all kinds, have celebrated the natural world since Virgil – and even before.  In terms of literary analysis, this has often meant studies of pastoral writing, Romantic poetry, wilderness narrative and nature writing sometimes with an explicit agenda of ecology politics. In children’s literature there has been similar emphasis on the world of nature – and, indeed, on the wild. In some cases the natural world is seen as the means of calming turbulent young emotions or behaviour, as in The Secret Garden, for example. However, the relationship between emotion, or character, and nature is not a straightforward matter since there is thematic tension in the novel between the cultivated garden and the wild moors. At other times wilderness is used as an arena for trials and rites of passage, as in Gary Paulsen’s Tracker or Dogsong where an individual works with, and sometimes against, nature in getting wisdom.

Ecocriticism

Greg Garrard traces the development of this branch of literary criticism (Garrard, 2004) arguing that modern environmentalism began with ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’ in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) where a pastoral idyll is blasted apart by a mysterious blight. No cause can be found and the fable concludes that no wicked spell or enemy had destroyed this perfect world but that ‘The people had done it themselves’.  The term ecocriticism was introduced in 1978 by William Rueckert but was not in wide currency until Cheryll Glotfelty used the term in a critical approach to studying nature writing since when it has been more widely used. However, definitions vary. According to Glotfelty:

Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.  (Glotfelty, 1996: xviii)

and:

…ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the culture artifacts of language and literature… as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the non-human. (ibid. xix)

In the accompanying background paper, Andrew Stables briefly defines ecocriticism as ‘literary study through a Green lens’, identifying five different approaches to texts:

• The development of understanding of environmental issues through the study of  literary and media texts 
• The study of texts specifically concerned with the environment
• Creating texts relating to environmental issues
• The study of aspects of the environment itself as text
• The re-creation and enhancement of the environment with reference to aesthetic considerations.

Running throughout these approaches is a view of English as a forum for critical appraisal of the texts and arguments which are associated with the topic of sustainability.

This topic includes activities relevant both to sessions with student teachers and for use in classrooms related to these categories. While Sections Two and Three are linked, the other sections do not follow any order of progression. Section Four focuses on poetry and Section Five on film. Section Six contains a series of case studies and suggestions for school based activities with pupils.

Links to standards: Q14, Q15, Q17, Q18, Q22, Q23, Q24, Q25 b, Q26b   

References

Children’s books
Gary Paulsen (1984) Tracker. New York: Simon & Schuster  ISBN 0689840888
Gary Paulsen (1985) Dogsong. New York: Simon & Schuster  ISBN 68983960X

See also
Stables, A. (2003) Education for Diversity: making differences. Aldershot: Ashgate Press