Growing the Green Unknown: Teaching Environmental Literature in Southeastern North Carolina

Abstract

Walking to class, we're still lesson planning. Indeed, although we had thought about and discussed since we were hired in fall 2006 the idea of team-teaching an environmental literature class from the perspectives of our disciplinary specialties (American Indian Studies for Jane, African American literature for Scott), our class still was a work in progress. We were excited on this first day of our brand new course at the University of North Carolina, Pembroke, "Literatures of Ecoliteracy and Environmental Justice," the first ever of its kind here. Despite its evolving character, our collaboration was strong, for we were united in our convictions: respecting our students, their communities, and their heritages; enacting environmental justice; and reconnecting ourselves, our students, and our university to our shared world. Even now, we remain inspired by the course. It still prompts us to think about our relationships to our environment, especially as we make our home in a place different from where we grew up. What's more, it allowed us to get to know our students in new, more personal ways, as those from Robeson County gave force and shape to the love of their homeland, while those from outside the community-from places as near as the North Carolina foothills and coast,

Introduction: African American Environmental Knowledge at Niagara

“…Ecocritical work on African American literature, which had a forerunner in Melvin Dixon's Ride Out the Wilderness (1987), continues to be driven by the observation that "literary critics have largely overlooked African American literary traditions" (Ruffin 10). Forming only in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the field comprises by now a number of book-length studies (K. Smith 2007;Outka 2008;Finseth 2009 (Monani and Beehr 2011), and with questions of teaching African American literature environmentally (Myers 2008;Haladay and Hicks 2010). Historically, much scholarship has focused on contemporary African American writing, e.g.…”