How can student-teachers learn efficient ways to encourage sustainability thinking in their pupils and fulfil the competence aims on sustainability outlined in national subject curriculums as a response to UNESCO’s programme on Education for Sustainable Development, ESD? The core hypothesis of this project was that tailored literature circles, focused on the ecocritical aspects of literary texts, would make student-teachers aware of how they can use literature as a process to reflect on sustainability. This would enable them to incorporate sustainability thinking into their own teaching practices.
The project’s tailoring of the standard literature circle roles (Daniels 1994, 2002, 2006) involved the design of reading roles that highlighted ecocritical and generic aspects of the studied texts and the application of an analytical matrix developed by literary scholars researching the representation of nature in children’s and young adult literature. This article presents the results of a small-scale study testing the ecocritical literature circles approach and its impact on student-teachers’ conception of their own ability to meet the competence aims on sustainability in their teaching. The intervention included lectures on ecocriticism and on the posthuman debate prior to the literature circles and student feedback through pre- and post-circle questionnaires. It was implemented in the teacher-training classroom, working with dystopian science fiction texts for young adults. These texts present the reader with visions of the future. The study showed that the ecocritical literature circles, and in particular the ecocritical reading roles, were considered useful by the participating student-teachers. The participants also reported a significant increase in confidence relative to their own ability to discuss sustainability issues with their pupils.
Departing from Jane Suzanne Carroll’s contention that “Landscapes are at once geographical and historical, natural and cultural, experienced and represented, and present a spatial interface between human culture and physical terrain” (2), this article draws on game studies (Aarseth; Sicart; Yee; Isbister) and on discussions of game design (Schell; Chen; Sahlin) to analyse the landscape and avatar design of Journey and Unravel. Developing the term semiotic register as an analytical lens, the article seeks to pin-point the means by which the two games move the player to adopt distinctly different attitudes and relationships to the games’ natural scenes. The article starts by positioning the study in relation to previous ecocritical analyses of games (Backe; Bianchi; Bohunicky; Chang; Lehner; Parham) and by discussing some aspects of indirect player management before analysing and comparing the two games in more detail.
Lykke Guanio-Uluru's research focus is on literature and ethics, with an emphasis on ecocriticism, fantasy, game studies and reading research. She has published a number of articles in international journals and anthologies, is the author of Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer (2015), and the co-editor (with N. Goga, B. O. Hallås and A. Nyrnes) of the anthology Ecocritical Perspectives on Children's Texts and Cultures: Nordic Dialogues (2018), both published by Palgrave Macmillan.
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