Leveraging a Place-Based Eco-Pedagogy in an English for Academic Purposes Program

• In Event: Love and Loss of Land and Language: Reciprocity With the Earth in Language Education

Abstract

The English language has long been recognized as a colonial and hegemonic power (Edge, 2003, 2009; Errington, 2001, 2008; Kumaravadivelu, 2009, 2016; Pennycook, 1994, 1998; Phillipson, 1992, 2008) that reproduces practices and narratives leading to ecological destruction and social injustice (Stibbe, 2014). In fact, English is deeply infused by root metaphors (Bowers, 2012; Gruenewald, 2003) or Discourse models (Gee, 1998, 2005) of consumerism, progress, and scientism (Blenkinsop, 2012; Goulah, 2011, 2017) at odds with the conservation and revitalization of the cultural and environmental commons (Martusewicz, Edmundson, & Lupinacci, 2015).

In this light, language professionals have been reconsidering their role in reproducing English hegemony (Canagarajah, 2010), wrestling with the fraught curricular question posed by Pennycook (1990): “apart from language itself, what is a language lesson to be about?” (p. 13). A burgeoning ecological turn in the field provides rich opportunities. Goulah (2017), in part, provides a response in the form of lessons meant to “ask students to awaken to the way they live and communicate in places with others” (p. 95), thereby transcending standards-based language and content curriculum.

The intentional use of place as content for critical language pedagogy is rather unique in the field. As such, this presentation emerges from a place-based ecopedagogy meant to explore the intricate linguistic, social, and spatial elements of place as language learning content. The pedagogical spaces used are informed by the local, but also with an eye to the global, exploring ecological issues of relevance to the Western US but which also are germane to students’ experiences. Indeed, these issues are embodied by a truly unique aspect of this pedagogy, a week-long excursion to the Capitol Reef Field Station (CRFS) in Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park, one of only eight such entities managed by a university inside a national park (Stevens & Gilson, 2016). This extraordinary setting provides a virtually endless array of pedagogical choices and varied opportunities for deeply grounded language learning and teaching.

In fact, with the CRFS as a centerpiece of each semester, a qualitative dissertation study was conducted over four semesters to clarify the implementation of such a pedagogy and how it might further students’ English language development, but also to interrogate students’ taking up, negotiating with, or rejecting Discourse models. With a view of language as a result of socially, discursively, historically, and politically constituted acts, an ecolinguistic approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (Stibbe, 2014) was used to analyze student interviews, interactions, and writings.

Consequently, this presentation not only explores the pedagogy but, more importantly, also examines that pedagogy in action as articulated by students themselves as potent social actors in their own right within their linguistic and social landscapes, thereby adding new voices to thinking and strategies to communicate novel visions of just sustainability (Agyeman, 2007). Ultimately, the presentation provides a window into the compelling pedagogical benefits of such an approach, not only for language learning and teaching but also for building local knowledge, strengthening connections between both people and place, and complexifying awareness of the more-than-human world.

Author

• Kevin Eyraud, Utah Valley University