Introduction
This article explores two types of pedagogy in depth—experiential learning and multimodal composition—applied to teaching Romantic literature and environmentalism. Experiential learning integrates learning outside of the classroom into a course, while multimodal composition is a practice of writing that incorporates other media or modes, most commonly the visual or aural. I describe one class, a 200-level literary studies course for English majors and minors taught at Hunter College, CUNY, in Spring 2017, which I themed “Dark Ecology: Race, Gender and the Environment.”
The course title plays with Timothy Morton’s concept of “dark ecology” by exploring ways in which ideas of nature have been used against marginalized groups and the environment itself. Readings ranged from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest to contemporary texts, centering Romanticism through Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, to illustrate for students a cultural continuum along which the concepts of race and gender have long been bound up with ideas of “nature” and what is “natural.”
Experiential learning fostered a sense of place and materiality for my students through visits to local cultural and natural spaces. Students also used a digital platform (WordPress) for public writing and media to connect literary history to personal, cultural, and political contexts. Both pedagogies facilitate student learning in spaces beyond the classroom. My goal in this course was to reconceptualize ideas of “nature” through a multiplicity of places and experiences that challenges traditional boundaries between nature/culture, indoor/outdoor, material/digital, etc.
These two pedagogies are rooted in part in Romanticism. Romanticism is broadly interested in questions of place, experience, knowledge, and communication in ways that can inform and enliven pedagogy today, especially in relation to environmental studies. The Romantic era gave rise to new models of education centered around the theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (see Richardson). In part critiquing these models, Mary Shelley explores the nature of education in Frankenstein where Victor and the Creature receive vastly unequal forms of instruction. Poets such as William and Dorothy Wordsworth developed ideas of place and place-attachment, particularly in the Lake District, that foregrounded the embodied experience of place in shaping identity from childhood onward. Likewise, many Romantic poets, particularly William Blake, connected what Wordsworth called the “Sister” arts of Poetry and Painting (“Preface” 298), exploring the power of images alongside text. Percy Shelley’s dissemination of political tracts via unconventional methods to reach the masses arguably constitutes a fascinating precursor to the internet as an “information superhighway,” and later even to social media.
With this foundation in mind, I chose a library archive, an art museum, and a botanical garden as spaces to engage our course texts and themes from intersecting contexts.
Each trip offered the experience of a curated space in which “nature” was represented in varied material and cultural forms, from the pages of an archive, to paint and canvas, to the intricate borders of ornamental gardens and grounds. At the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library, students explored The Last Man in the context of contemporaneous works by other Romantic writers. Likewise, our trip to The Frick Collection for the exhibition of J.M.W. Turner’s port paintings deepened students’ understanding of Romantic themes across art forms. Finally, in the New York Botanical Garden and library, students were able to study botanic art and literature across centuries, while simultaneously exploring the garden grounds and an outdoor Chihuly art exhibition. While a series of site visits may be difficult to coordinate in one semester or course, simply taking students to different types of spaces outside the classroom even on campus (the library, an art gallery or any space with visual art, and an outdoor space) creates a serialized form of experience and multimodality that could lend itself well to courses interested in the interplay of nature and culture, as well as more broadly to pedagogical questions of where and how learning takes place.
Each of our class visits built upon the previous excursion as we explored the idea of “natureculture,” following Donna Haraway’s work in deconstructing these binaries. Val Plumwood argues that the term “allows us to conceive the field in more continuous and less regimented ways, recognizing nature in what has been seen as pure culture and culture in what has been seen as pure nature,” though she goes on to critique a full conflation of the terms (141). This key concept was perhaps most evident in the botanical garden: the most ostensibly “natural” space we visited, but one heavily mediated by cultural values and norms. The botanical garden also featured a library archive and an outdoor art exhibition that echoed our first two site visits in ways that heightened the entanglement of the terms in “natureculture.”
To further encourage students to explore alternate spaces, I created a WordPress blog in place of a discussion forum or reading response papers. Prompts included writing about a sense of place, as well as parallels between course texts and themes in both popular culture and the news. For the purposes of composition, a blog’s critical affordances include the chance to read and comment on each other’s work (thereby providing a sense of purpose, audience, and support), as well as to create a sense of community and place that extends beyond the physical limits of the classroom.
These pedagogies helped enliven teaching a Romantic text like The Last Man in dialogue with contemporary environmental issues. This enlivening dialogue is an example of what is now called the Environmental Humanities (EH), which emerged as a twenty-first century term for interdisciplinary work in the academy to integrate aesthetic, cultural, and affective dimensions into environmental studies.
While this field tends toward contemporary literary texts and environmental issues, the primary concerns of EH—such as the relationship between nature and culture—are definitional to the Romantic period.
Romanticism provides a historical and aesthetic ground from which EH emerged, particularly when we trace a longer legacy than the environmentalist movements of the late twentieth century,
which themselves have historical roots in nineteenth-century ideas of conservation and resistance to industrialization. Acknowledging this history addresses both the formative contributions of writers finely attuned to nature, place, and ideals of equality, as well as the period’s history of inequity and violence across race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationality. The current Environmental Justice (EJ) movement focuses on such inequalities, again primarily in contemporary issues and texts.
To trace the longer history, my course centered Romanticism’s attention to the social and environmental effects of colonization and industrialization (see Washington). Teaching in EH further requires interdisciplinarity not only across the arts, but also with the sciences. Romantic literature provides an important methodology for EH in its engagement with the science of its time, not simply as a kind of replication or refutation, but rather in a lively conversation that both extends and challenges scientific ideas and principles.
While the Environmental Humanities (EH) is a burgeoning research field, attention to its pedagogy has lagged significantly behind (O’Gorman, et al. 429). Because EH is interdisciplinary and experimental, it lends itself well to innovative pedagogy (451), particularly student-centered, public-facing, and experiential learning (451). EH often involves “stretching humanities teaching beyond the classroom, developing the skills and training students to communicate and collaborate with a variety of publics” (451). In keeping with this framework, the seriality of both the field trips and the blog posts was intended to help students trace some of the complex connections and interrelationships across seemingly different categories, time periods, disciplines, etc. My goal was for students to begin to draw their own “web of complex relations” (Charles Darwin’s description of evolution) (Darwin 80) using the key terms in the course title: Race, Gender, and Environment.
These themes are interwoven throughout Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic novel The Last Man, which is arguably the first example of what is now called climate fiction (“cli-fi”) in its rendering of a global pandemic linked to a changing climate. As Alan Bewell recognized well before COVID-19, the novel is “amazingly prescient” of future epidemics as he demonstrates the historical continuum from which Shelley draws (310). My students in 2017 were particularly interested in the speculative quality of the novel, set in 2099, especially since many climate models end in 2100 with a world that could be so radically transformed as to be unlivable for most species, including our own. The uncanny prescience of the novel in relation to climate change likewise derives from its historical reality as Shelley observed the effects of war, colonization, and industrialization.
In the following sections, I detail how my course used experiential learning and multimodal composition to match pedagogical form to this kind of content. Experiential learning centers issues of place in ways that allow us to think through how we participate in different kinds of environments. The creative process of composing a multimedia piece online is itself a kind of experience of an elsewhere, underscoring the relationship between an online “space” or environment and the sense of physical place explored in our course visits. Taken together, these two pedagogical approaches allow students to engage and expand on course materials through their experiences outside of the classroom, whether physical or virtual.
Experiential Learning: Three Site Visits
1. The Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library (Archive)
The sequence of essay assignments for this course began with a short close reading essay, followed by a short essay focused on understanding a literary text in critical or historical context. For the final paper, students had to combine these two skills into a longer paper (with the option to expand one of the shorter essays). I paired The Last Man with the second short essay focused on context. To help students place the novel in its broader context, I collaborated with Dr. Elizabeth (Liz) Campbell Denlinger, Curator of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library. One of my goals was to expose English majors and minors to the archive, which I hoped would bring texts to life in new ways for them, as well as introduce them to a set of practices if they continued literary study. Our goal was to go beyond a “show and tell” to allow students to explore the materials themselves. Liz demonstrated the process of how scholarly editions are produced through meticulous transcription, annotation, and commentary, with the examples of Charlie Robinson’s edition of Mary Shelley’s short stories and Frederick Jones’s edition of Percy Shelley’s letters.
Among the texts and objects for study were numerous holographs, including two short stories by Mary Shelley: “Transformation” and “The Invisible Girl;” letters from Mary Shelley to Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and Thomas Campbell (editor of the New Monthly Magazine); letters from Percy Shelley to William Godwin; letters from Byron about Greece; a draft of Byron’s Don Juan Canto XVI; a fragment from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; and an essay by William Godwin, “Of Public & Private Education.” Also included were a published copy of Percy Shelley’s Vindication of Natural Diet; Percy Shelley’s copy of G. Gregory’s Economy of Nature (1804), and even a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair. Each of these items was selected to provide additional context for The Last Man. In addition, we provided a copy of the only material in the collection directly about the novel, a damning review from 1826 collected in The Romantics Reviewed from Panoramic Miscellany, which attests to the popularity of the novel at the time. The contemporaneous review served well as a form of both critical and historical context. The conservative reviewer objected to the novel’s politics, form, narration, and prose style, which immediately prompted student debate.
Students were invited to circle around these items and then choose one to spend 15 minutes studying more fully in a small group. While students were awed by these one-of-a-kind texts, they were not able to read the original handwriting with any ease, which precluded a deeper understanding of the material. Though this was part of the design to demonstrate the arduous work of critical editions, students were more engaged than I expected by this strange form of close reading (trying to make out the handwriting) for themselves as they tried to decipher the word choices from context clues.
While my main goal for the visit had been to deepen context for The Last Man toward the essay assignment, students found much more than this in the archive. Not only were they able to see artifacts in historical context, but they also began to reflect on their own processes as writers as they looked through the different drafts and copies of the texts. In the leaves of the archive, students found not only a sense of literary history, but also of the writing process itself. The archive then became a living example of writing as a process of revision and collaboration, something we had been discussing in our peer review sessions and for their own writing on the course blog. Further, the materiality of the archive (the tangibility of these unique artifacts) helped to place these objects in an even broader context, recovering a kind of missing link in a chain of production that otherwise becomes obscured. This recovery allowed us to begin to think about how our interactions with “nature” are heavily mediated (as we would explore in the other site visits and their relationship to place in Blog Post 1), often only a simulacrum. By recovering some of the lost traces in an archive, we could begin to reconnect the links that comprise the idea of natureculture.
2. The Frick Collection (Art Museum)
We next visited an exhibition of Romantic art. The Frick Collection (a short walk from our campus) was showing Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages through Time, fortuitously apropos of our class themes. Not only would students gain a deeper sense of Romantic themes through Turner’s work, but the ports would allow us to consider the intersection of nature and commerce/industrialization (something we had only begun to explore in the archive as we traced the process by which original manuscripts became commercial books). Nature was not nearly as wild or sublime in these paintings as in Turner’s more famous works, but the precarious relationship between humans and the active forces of nature was rendered subtly.
Our guide, Caitlin Henningson, selected The Harbor of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile (1825) from the exhibition for a “long look,” about 15-20 minutes. In the 1820s, when Turner visited Dieppe in Normandy, France, it was a bustling fishing port that had reopened to the British after the Napoleonic Wars (“Turner’s”). At the center of the painting, the sun reflects light onto the water below, with human activity taking place in minute detail on the margins. Within the human scenes, there is a range of class positions and locations from labor to leisure, fish market to outdoor cafe. The light dominates the painting, bathing everything in yellow. While critics at the time did not review this last detail favorably, it calls to mind John Ruskin’s claim that Turner was best able to represent nature’s “fulness, space and mystery” (134) as the light blurs the human scenes. Students were captivated by Turner’s paintings and their discussion of them led back to several of the course’s themes: Who is represented in the paintings? What is their relationship to nature? How is nature represented? Being able to consider these questions in the paintings, alongside our course texts, allowed students to build not only on their knowledge of the Romantic period, but also on the politics of representation more broadly.
Before taking my class on this field trip, I had used large, projected visual images for “close looking” exercises in class. As the term suggests, “close looking” follows the same process of “close reading.” While projections suffice, they fail to capture color, texture, or size well. Perhaps even more important, though, is what the experience of going to a place to view an original artwork offers. The change in routine, space, and authority can redefine the work of a class. These shifts mark the experience for students as something special or extra (planned just for them) toward what John Dewey defines as “an experience”: something “integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences” (37). Through a trip outside of the classroom, we are at least partially freed from some of the usual constraints and expectations, in a different space of learning that can move us out of our comfort zones and routines. While this freedom can be intimidating, I found that my sense of loss of control was surprisingly positive, a kind of loosening of roles and expectations. When we moved collectively into another institution’s space, our sense of ourselves as a classroom community strengthened. Simultaneously, my role as the instructor shifted as our museum guide came to embody a new and different kind of authority.
I have been fortunate to work with museum educators who practice the same kinds of pedagogy that I attempt in the classroom. In Teaching in the Art Museum, Elliot Kai-Kee and Rika Burnham argue for a shift in pedagogy in the gallery that is akin to student-centered pedagogy in the college classroom. Rather than view their role as museum educators as one of information or knowledge transfer, as in a lecture, they instead guide viewers through a series of questions. Inspired by Susan Sontag, they “encourage visitors to postpone the hermeneutic moment, if only a little, at least until after they have surrendered to the sensual experience of the object’s presence” (63). (What could be more Romantic?) Similarly, the primary questions in a technique from Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) parallel how we might approach a literary text:
- “What’s going on [in this picture]?”
- “What do you see that makes you say that?”
- “What more can we find?” (VTS)
These questions are designed to explore stories within the artwork. One student noted this explicitly in her blog reflection since she had never looked at art as a story before. Just as close reading and looking support each other, these strategies lend themselves well to structuring writing around claims, evidence, and analysis.
While the art museum mirrored the library archive in terms of the experience of an alternate space of learning, as well as in the aesthetics of a space devoted to precious objects (quiet, formal, ornate, costly, etc.), the art called for increased attention to the nature of representation. As we considered how Shelley represented nature in her novel, we could now compare how Turner represented nature in his paintings, in part drawing comparisons between our own visual experiences of nature (sun, water, etc.) and Turner’s artistic takes on these common elements. The art museum also served to further reinforce the importance of students’ choices of visual images to accompany their written blog posts, which would be echoed in the illuminated manuscripts from our final course trip.
3. The New York Botanical Garden (Gardens, Library Archive, and Art Exhibition)
Building on our previous trips, on the last day of class, we took the subway up to the Bronx to The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). The NYBG allowed us to experience some of the natural world that we had been studying come to life, which was particularly important given the urban setting of the college. While the NYBG is renowned for its outdoor settings, within the extensive library collection was yet another trove of wonders, which I had discovered the previous summer through a research fellowship. Stephen Sinon, Curator of Special Collections, generously offered to curate a “dark ecology” collection from their materials for the class visit.
The works were unique and visually stunning; students were as taken with these literary texts as with the gardens themselves. Works that stood out to students included a tribute to Linnaeus’s system of plant classification that was so artistically elaborate to print that it bankrupted the publisher; Elizabite: Adventures of a Carnivorous Plant (1942) by HA Rey, author of the Curious George series, which was an inspiration for Little Shop of Horrors; Burnett’s floral handbook and Ladies calendar (1869) on the symbolism of flowers; Le fleurs animées, French illustrations of women transformed into specific flowers through their attire; and Sea and Land, which featured fantastical accounts of nature, including sea monsters from the deep.
In addition to the library collection, we were able to explore the gardens both on foot and via tram. The garden is sprawling and magnificent at every turn encompassing 250 acres, 50 specialty gardens, and a Victorian-style glasshouse (NYBG). The juxtaposition between the carefully curated garden acreage and the “dark,” uncontrollable forces of nature that we had been studying allowed us to reconsider Romantic themes and tensions we had explored in class.
At the time we visited, a major outdoor Chihuly art installation was scattered throughout the garden. These large, colorful, elaborate glass sculptures were embedded into the natural landscape, creating a sense of the uncanny. The art objects aggrandized the already imposing scale and scope of the garden. While some were naturalistic, most were fantastical, and yet, in no way felt out of place. If anything, their spectacle enhanced rather than detracted from the garden’s own cultivation of nature’s grandiosity and creativity. The art had a whimsical, yet reverential interplay with the natural setting, as if whispering secrets and inside jokes to one another. The sculptures raised questions about the material and representational relationships between nature and culture, the binary that had been in question throughout the course. Students took many pictures on their phones, not only of the glass sculptures and unique plants, but also of the library texts. One student noted the contrast between the illustrations in the library texts and the Chihuly exhibit. Both were forms of art in response to nature, but on very different scales and media.
While I wish we had more time to analyze and discuss our experiences on that last day of class, several students wrote their final blog posts on the visit. Their posts concluded “The Botanical Gardens were absolutely awe-inspiring... It brought upon a weird feeling of being lost, even though I knew exactly where I was. I felt absolutely relieved of the stress finals was pressing onto us at that time” (wrcadelina par. 4) and “it allowed me to feel a little closer to nature and history itself” (errorcomics par. 3). Here, again, students took away much more from the visit than I had planned.
In many ways, the final visit brought all three types of natureculture spaces into dialogue, from the beginning idea of the materiality of objects in production to the representation of nature and commerce in art. In particular, the interplay between the garden, the embedded art, and the archival materials in the botanical garden library returned us to the foundational questions of the course: What is “nature?” How and why is it represented? What are the (cultural) politics of those representations?
Multimodal Composition
Our course blog provided yet another alternate form of place, experience, and modality for students to process the course’s questions and ideas about natureculture, including our course trips and texts. The term “multimodal composition” is akin to “mixed media,” a frequent descriptor of the materials for modern art. In Writing Studies, it refers to a process of composition that does not privilege the linguistic alone, but rather accounts for the “Aural, Visual, Gestural, and Spatial” (Ball and Charlton 42). Because of this, it tends to be associated with digital technology, which has affordances to integrate other media into writing online.
But, as Jodi Shipka reminds us, multimodality is not exclusive to the digital. Indeed, experiential learning itself creates a kind of multimodality of experience for students: each of our field trips put literary texts and ideas into dialogue with other modalities, particularly the visual and spatial. Alongside students’ experiences of these places and objects, they could also become creators of spaces, objects, texts, and experiences themselves via our course blog. Their writing, accompanied by at least one other sensory mode (usually visual), often reflected on their experiences of the field trips, fully integrating experience in Dewey’s terms. Following some of the illuminated manuscripts they had seen, some students created their own art to accompany their posts. One student, for example, created her own collages, line drawings, and photos of hand-annotations. This multimodality, particularly the relationship between the linguistic, visual, and spatial, is itself deeply Romantic.
I designed a series of blog posts (in tandem with the series of course trips) that would help students to connect course material to contemporary issues, personal experience, and popular culture, with each experience/assignment building on the previous one.
Students used the blog to then make connections to content outside the course including their own lives, popular media, and the news. The creative spark in students’ posts came in part from the agency to choose the text, visual, and topic about which to write.
Blog Post 1, which asked students to write about a personal sense of place, was inspired by Romantic nature writing and travel narratives—a Wordsworthian (both Dorothy’s and William’s) attempt to capture a particular time and place of one’s immersion in a natural environment. This post corresponded to our first essay focused on close reading. This assignment was particularly important to begin with for this course in part because “nature” is often a foreign concept in the “concrete jungle” of New York City. While many students wrote about visiting a local park, others wrote about the natural environments where they had grown up before coming to the city. Across the pieces came a clear sense of pausing, appreciating, and reflecting. This kind of attentiveness, a slowing down to process, was the same ethos and practice I wanted students to bring to close reading our course texts, which were themselves meditations on nature. We also experienced this kind of reflective pause during our close looking activities on several of our field trips.
Blog Post 2 asked students to connect course texts and ideas to popular media, expanding from literary to cultural studies. For a multimodal assignment, making media the object of analysis allows students to redefine “text,” developing their analytical skills beyond traditional writing to include art that pervades their everyday lives. Blog posts analyzed the course themes in comics, video games, song lyrics, TV shows, and films, as well as novels and poems. Being able to add to the syllabus in this way not only invites students into the creative process of “curating” texts for attention and analysis, but also of exploring the course’s central questions in media of their own choosing. This ability to think through the course questions in a different context deepened the connections between their lives and the course, and between the everyday and the academic.
Building from the connections in the second post, Blog Post 3 was designed to heighten the political stakes of our course questions and themes. How do our course texts matter today? How do they speak to us across time and place? How are they part of a history that we are still living? Most posts connected either the concept of gender or race from a course text to a contemporary issue including the International Women’s Strike, AIDS, Civil Rights, and Black Lives Matter. This assignment led one student to write a post titled “The Shelley Prophecy” about the Syrian refugee crisis due to political and environmental disruption in relation to narratives of displacement in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. The blog post begins ‘As a result of evolving international conflicts, the migrant crisis has been currently at the forefront of political discourse. Mary Shelley, in The Last Man, eerily predicted such a time in Western Europe. In The Last Man, readers are introduced to a migrant crisis caused by a plague. Although the plague manifests itself as a human disease, which decimates mankind, Shelley may also be implying that irresponsible stewardship on behalf of governments can become a plague which infects and erodes the political structure (Contreras par. 1)’ This exemplary post demonstrates the student’s deep engagement with the literary text through her ability to situate it in a different but related context.
Collectively, the blog assignments allowed students to expand on our course texts by connecting them to lived experience, contemporary art and culture, as well as current events and our course trips. The blog encouraged students to move beyond the literary texts themselves, but not to leave them behind. Instead, the texts took on new meanings when placed in different contexts—ones that were alive with new possibilities and ideas. Students’ creative connections between the past and the present demonstrated the stakes for the issues raised in the course.
Conclusion
This course offered multiple modes and opportunities to interconnect sometimes divided terms, particularly nature/culture, written/visual, physical/digital, past/present, literary/popular, academic/personal, text/context, etc. Through iterative forms of multimodality in both experiential learning and online composition, students were able to make complex interconnections across a wide array of content. Through an Environmental Humanities approach, I blended the origins of Romantic nature writing—characterized by an attentive appreciation to nature, and literature and art about nature—with the environmental justice movement, centered on systemic inequities, particularly in relation to race and gender, that are worsening as the planet is warming. These strands came together in our reading of The Last Man, which allowed us to explore how Romanticism continues to speak to us today on the pressing issues of race, gender, and the environment.
These pedagogies, and their underlying philosophies, can create memorable and transformative learning for all students. Multimodality not only provides students with varied entry points to engage with course materials, but also allows them to develop their own sense of agency as learners and creators. My hope was not that students would “master” the course content, but rather that they would continue to engage with some of the difficult ideas and skills well beyond the end of the course. This goal is particularly relevant in continuing the powerful legacy of Romanticism in the Environmental Humanities, where it is imperative to give students the tools to face the intersections of environmental and social injustice.
