Teaching Resources Database
Welcome to the Environmental Humanities and Environmental Studies Teaching Resources Database. Below are the resources available, listed under the name of the Teaching Resource, with an overview and a button to view the resource details and download the PDF. You can also use the filters below to search and sort using criteria from one or more of the categories below, and only the Teaching Resources that contain that mix of criteria will be displayed.
Clicking the “View Details + Download” button for a teaching resource brings you to the individual post for that Teaching Resource. Categorical and descriptive information for each Teaching Resource is listed there. The “Download Teaching Resource” button will open the PDF in a new tab from which it can be downloaded. There is a button at the bottom of each individual Teaching Resource post so you can return to the main Teaching Resource Directory page.
Please also consider submitting your own teaching resource to help grow our database! You can do so by clicking on the “Submit to the Database” button below.
Language
Discipline(s)
Topic(s)
Resource Type
Learning Outcome(s)
Against the Ecofascist Creep
A group of scholars from universities across the United States formed the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative to expose and debunk the common ecofascist myths that circulate in our everyday lives. In partnership with graphic designer Melody Keenan, we created Against the Ecofascist Creep, a web zine and teaching resource that explores six “everyday ecofascist myths” and offers researched, concise essays that address the structural conditions of climate crisis and other environmental concerns
Animal Log Assignment
The purpose of the Animal Log Assignment is for students to become attuned to the wild and domesticated animals that live both with and around us—to become aware of their physical features, habitats, movements, behaviors, and perhaps even desires. Each Log allows students to closely observe just one animal during one moment, as well as to practice written composition skills.
Apocalypse, Risk, and Disaster
This syllabus outlines a special topics course taught under the umbrella of "Environmental Literature and Culture." The course schedule shows a more detailed reading list.
Building Parchives Project
For this collaborative archive-building assignment, groups of students will be assigned one national park. Throughout the term, each student will share at least four digital artifacts—photos, maps, digital humanities projects, films, online artwork, news articles, posters, etc.—connected to their assigned park. The purpose of this assignment is to view parks as spaces that inspire diverse physical and digital archives and to understand “the archive” as a living, expanding, in-process collection.
Climate Change Case Studies Around the World
The aim of this course is to teach students to prepare case studies based on environmental issues and climate change from sociological perspectives.
Climate Changed Futures
This creative and critical assignment asks students to engage in imaginative speculation about climate-changed futures and create their own works of cli-fi (climate fiction). The process requires students to draw on their knowledge of climate science (and current research in the field) as well as on their understanding of literature and climate fiction.
Curious, Compassionate Conversation
Environmental and social problems are exacerbated by recent culture wars in the U.S. As social psychologists show, values about climate change, for example, have more to do with identification with our "tribes" than with logic or reason. And the affective mode of public discourse is outrage. In service of repairing democracy and finding common ground around environmental issues, this assignment asks students to be more "in relation" than "right" by practicing compassionate conversation.
Developing Topics in an Environmental Humanities Writing Course
This invention handout is intended for a first-year writing class, with example titles included to help students think about a range of possibilities for written, oral, and digital work.
Digital Herbarium
Digital Herbarium: Choose a plant, either one familiar with / fond of / have strong feelings about. Register for a free padlet account.Name your project with your name and the plant name you have chosen. Research: its place of origin and “discovery", its movement/trade, symbolism, agency, uses, problems, manipulation / breeding, use and image or metaphor in art or fiction or poetry. Students post their padlet, instructor combines all into a digital herbarium.
Ecopoetry and Environmental Imaginings Syllabus
While ecopoetry as a subfield of American poetry has only been defined and developed in the past few decades, American poets’ engagement with the environment, both built and natural, is embedded within America’s poetic roots. In this course, we will trace the relationship between environment and poetry, moving from traditional nature poetry to contemporary lyrical conceptions of the interconnectedness of humans and nature in a time of environmental crises.
Energies Course Syllabus
Energies is a 4th-year university English course. As I teach in Calgary, Canada's oil and gas headquarters, the syllabus has more oil and gas content than it might if delivered in other locales. The course includes both critical-theoretical readings and literary texts.
Environmental Humanities Transmedia Syllabus
English 2501: Environmental Humanities, Literature, and the “Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet" is an interdisciplinary BA-level seminar in transnational American literature, environmental humanities, and transmedia storytelling. It is intended for English majors and refugee students/academics and was first taught in collaboration with NTNU for Refugees/Academic Guest Program, The Falstad Human Rights Center, Trondheim Kommune, and Trondheim Kunsthall.
Environmental Justice in Literature and Culture: Just Transitions
This is a syllabus for an Environmental Justice in Literature and Culture course taught at the University of Wyoming during the Spring 2020 semester. It was cross-listed as an English and Environment and Natural Resources course. Themed around the concept of a Just Transition, the class focuses on a range of cultural (literary fiction, poetry, drama, film, photography, music, etc.) to explore the generative potential of the humanities for imagining livable, equitable futures.
Green Media Syllabus
This module considers the media’s role in relation to environmental concerns and questions how various media and popular cultural forms can enable us to
address environmental questions in our own lives. Working with both scientific and social concepts of ‘ecology’, in classes conducted around lectures, screenings, seminars and workshops, the module will consider the representation of environmental issues via a series of case studies in popular culture.
Guía general: comprensión auditiva
This is a Spanish-language guide for comprehension of auditory or multi-media texts, particularly short texts like those often circulated in social networks. The guide directs students to pay attention to information related to production & distribution; specific language used; and the ideological posture of the auditory or multi-media text.
Guía general: control de lectura y análisis preliminar
This Spanish-language guide is for readings of primary texts in a Latin American environmental humanities course taught in Spanish. It prompts students to identify the main ideas of the text and then to direct their attention to details related to environmental and spatial justice.
Herbal Cures in America: Digital Humanities
This course is a survey of herbal medicine in the United States, the Americas, and Canada with an emphasis on the uses of data science and archival methods in the humanities. Students are required to contribute to a database on the history of herbal medicine in America.
History of Herbal Medicine
The course is a survey of the history of herbal medicine around the globe.
Introduction to the Environmental Humanities Syllabus
This introduction to ecocriticism in the humanities syllabus tackles questions such as:
Why do we think of “nature” as something apart from human “culture”?
How have past representations of this disconnect informed our attitudes today?
What is the potential agency of the arts and humanities to create and maintain a more resilient and biologically diverse world in our present moment of global ecological crisis?
Latin American Environmental Humanities: Supply Chain Research & Presentation Guide
This is an English-language guide for student collaborative research on historically important supply chains for products (guano, bananas, wool, etc.) sourced in Latin America. It directs students to consider geography, labor, transport, governance (at source and destination), financing, and policies. Emphasizes research and synthesis for oral presentation.
Literature and the Environment
Syllabus for an entry level course in Literature and the Environment with an oral communication component.
Literature of Climate Crisis Syllabus
The syllabus Identifies readings, assignments, and in-class resources relevant to a course in literature and climate crisis.
Making a Start: Objects and Artifacts
This first-day-of-class exercise asks students to bring an object (found) or artifact (made) to introduce themselves and to describe their relationship to the more-than-human world.
National Park Resource Review
This assignment, which includes a field trip component, asks first-year composition students to both describe and evaluate how national parks interpret their diverse cultural, natural, wilderness, and historic resources.
Public Humanities Syllabus
This course is designed as an upper division undergraduate survey course. In "Introduction to Public Humanities," we will look at where the public humanities happen. We will question what makes a public, what makes scholarship public, and what role the university plays in ensuring accessibility and justice outside the classroom.
Shakespeare & Ecology in Special Collections
This worksheet guides students in my intro-level Shakespeare class on the day I introduce them to Special Collections. I set up a table for each of the categories listed on the worksheet, then ask the students to pair up and answer as many questions as they can. I share the last 2 pages (included) after class so that students can return and re-examine items of particular interest. My goal is to get students thinking about how books were made—and from what—in Shakespeare's lifetime.
Sustainability Visualization Exercise
This in class exercise develops students' personal investment in questions of sustainability and the value of narrative for imagining and building worlds. Can be used in a literature, composition, or other classroom with a major writing assignment.
Syllabus: Petrocultures/Energy Humanities
An upper- or graduate-level seminar on Petrocultures and an introduction to the Energy Humanities that focuses on the imbrications between energy and cultural production in order to understand the ways in which material forces like coal or petroleum literally fuel culture.
Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents: A Resource Wiki
This document provides information about and contents pertaining to a resource wiki that accompanies a book on teaching climate change literature and other ecocritical materials to adolescents. The wiki not only collects pre-collegiate pedagogy resources, but also itself serves as a useful instructional tool. See more at http://climatechangeela.pbworks.com.
Teaching Resources for Race and Nature
List of scholarly sources at the intersection of race and environment.
The Stories We Live By: Teaching Materials
The social and ecological issues that humanity currently faces are so severe that they call into question the fundamental stories that societies are based on. This resource bank/course provides tools for revealing the stories we live by, questioning them from an ecological perspective, and contributing to the search for new stories to live by. The materials are available at http://storiesweliveby.org.uk.
Tiny Ecology
Tiny Ecology is an exercise of sustained attentiveness in place. Students choose a place near their home for intense and sustained ecological observation, and present their findings (as poems, essays, etc.) via weekly oral presentations and a culminating final presentation.