An Eco-Horror Curriculum for Teacher Education

• In Event: 21st Century Collaborations in (Re)Imagining Activist Teaching: Addressing Social Justice and Sustainability in Teacher Education

Abstract

As humans, we find ourselves in an earthly home that is both ours and not ours, a gift left behind by the species who lived here before us and rightfully belonging to those who will come after us. In education, climate change discourse often includes the rhetorical devices of a horror story—with the Earth attacking humans, humans annihilating the Earth, or both (Seymour, 2018). Such stories render our shared planet into a haunted house of the Anthropocene—trapped within walls of impending doom and haunted by commingling systems of oppression (e.g., white supremacy, settler colonialism, anthropocentrism, and heteropatriarchy). “Eco-horror,” a concept branching from ecocriticism which “assumes that environmental disruption is haunting humanity’s relationship to the non-natural world” (Rust & Soles, 2014, p. 510), can be introduced into education in ways that promote greater self-reflexivity, equity, and justice at inter- and intra-species levels. In this paper, we consider how engaging with eco-horror in teacher education (e.g., through reimagined approaches to environmental pedagogies and media literacy) can lead to understandings of humans as both the haunted and the haunter, as beings that are not just living on a suffering Earth but rather living with and as multispecies ecosystems. We discuss the need for turning a critical lens onto eco-horror itself, considering instances in media, pedagogy, and lived experience in which eco-horror slips into “us versus them” frames of hyper-individualism, human saviorism, total misanthropy, or even ecofascism (Carter, 2018).

Philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers (2011) poses the unsettling existential question, “What has happened to us?” How did we, as a human species, become the ghosts and monsters we fear? Such questions are not “nostalgic lament[s],” but are rather “a lure for giving the possible a chance, for regenerating our imaginations, for experimenting with other ways of inhabiting our present” (Savransky 2018, 7). These questions can also be pedagogical, shared with students in ways that encourage humility and sense-making beyond hegemonic binaries of humans as saviors or humans as villains. We must, as abolitionist educator Bettina Love (2019) proclaims, “do more than survive” any horror story. Our educational goal is to transform the systems and stories that have long threatened meaningful livability, especially for the most vulnerable and marginalized among us. Inspired by posthumanist feminisms (Haraway, 2016; Stengers, 2011), affect-based frameworks of environmentalism (Chen, 2012; Seymour, 2018), and Indigenous cosmologies (Monani & Adamson, 2016; Kimmerer, 2013), we (re)tell stories of eco-horror. These stories range from the lived experiences of educators working with pre-service teachers and first-year college students, to instances from film (e.g., The Host, Annihilation) and TV series (e.g., Hilda, Sweet Tooth). We probe these stories for possibilities of learning to live with the horrors of climate change, socio-ecological injustices, and public health crises in and beyond the 21st century. Finally, emerging possibilities set the stage for creative, critical, and relational approaches to teacher education.

Authors

• JT Torres, Quinnipiac University

• Emma Minke McMain, Washington State University - Pullman