Archive: Poetic Essay

The White Kid at the Native American Camp

By Ron Riekki

The White Kid at the Native American Camp

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Saami

By Ron Riekki

Saami

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Embodying education: performing environmental meanings, knowledges, and transformations

By José Castro-Sotomayor, Jeff Hoffmann, Melissa Parks, Maggie Siebert, Mariko Thomas and Tema Milstein

This essay presents an exploration of a wide spectrum of current ecocultural relations through the creative methodology and expression of performance. We present a script of a performance inspired by a seemingly simple prompt for a pedagogical free write exercise “When I say ‘nature,’ I mean…” The goal of the free write exercise is to illuminate and open up for questioning and transforming our cultural assumptions, embodied meanings, and social constructions associated with the idea of “nature.” The authors/performers reflect about the process of creation and their intimate struggles with environmental ideologies often hidden behind the veil of common sense, political posturings, or disciplined concealments. As an art form, performance allows engagement with imaginations that emerged as radical, thus insinuating the need for a more nuanced and free scholarship, as well as for embracing performance as liberating pedagogic activism.

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Place: War, Cosmos, Perspective

By Mary Jackson

Place is more than an environment – it is about the activities, memories, and relationships that are a part of it. It has a history. This essay is about the places that are a part of a relationship and experiences with a family member. It entangles memories of childhood, war, politics, learning, and the simplicity of mountain tops. As this essay examines, the materiality of an environment is much more than mere matter and becomes inseparable from relationship and meaning.

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Finding Hope and Gratitude in the Climate Change Classroom

By Stephen Siperstein

Abstract: Through several original poems and contextual narrative reflection, “Finding Hope and Gratitude in the Climate Change Classroom” explores what it means to be a climate change educator and reflects on the author’s own experiences with cultivating agency and hope in the classroom.

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Photos

By Rich Lewis

Photos by Rich Lewis

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Evening Gratitude Song

By Chiara D'Amore

This is a gratitude song created with children’s bedtimes in mind.

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Finding Nature, Finding Love

By Daniel S. Helman

Camping in the national forest is recounted via a poem, replete with rhyme, relation, and rapture.

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The Self System Drawing: Teaching a Sustainable Worldview through Creativity

By Elizabeth Meacham

A personal reflection, from the professors’ perspective, of an arts integrated learning tool created to teach systems concepts in college level environmental studies and sustainability courses.

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Food Futures: A Poetic Essay

By Pramod Parajuli

The problems we are facing are linked.
It is not a set of problems.
It is a system of problems.
Now it is time to look at the system of solutions.
— Janine Benyus, Nobel Laureate Symposium, 2011.

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