Laura Wright: Using Cli-Fi at Western Carolina University

About this course

A graduate-level seminar in literature.

students

3 hour classes

per week for 15 weeks

Mid-sized, public 4-year university

African Literature course syllabus (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 188kB Dec31 15)

Show the description of the African Literature course

Understanding what is meant by "African literature" is no simple task. There is really no such thing as a monolithic African literature—or a monolithic Africa; Africa, as a geographical locale and ideological construct, is not a uniform location, even though it is often presented to Western audiences as a singular entity. The continent of Africa is made up of (at last count) 58 distinct countries—and the category of "country" is dependent upon a colonial legacy that divided the continent in accordance with imperial mandates. Therefore, "Africa" as we understand it is an entity at once constituted by colonization and at odds and acting in response to the European colonial project. African literature, if we are thinking both pre-colonially and postcolonially, is made up of the oral and written traditions that have resulted from the various cultures, languages, and peoples that have populated the continent for millennia. It would be impossible to do justice (over the course of a single semester) to such a diversity of narrative expressions, so in this class, we will focus on Anglophone postcolonial African literature from a handful of countries: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Botswana, and South Africa. And we will focus primarily on contemporary narratives, those written since 1945.

Show more about the course goals and content

Course goals and content:

The objectives of this course are aligned with the WCU campus theme, "Africa! More than a Continent": To increase cultural competency, to increase global awareness, to increase WCU's global reputation, and perhaps most importantly, to address our role in our colonial history with regard to Africa. Further, in this class, we will deconstruct the way that we in the West understand "Africa" and why we understand (or misunderstand) Africa as we do. We will examine African literature through a variety of theoretical and intersectional lenses including postcolonial, ecocritical, feminist, and Marxist. We will read and discuss significant and foundational scholarship about African literature, the role (and controversy) of the English language in shaping its history, and the impact that African literatures have had on the established literary canon.

A Success Story in Building Student Engagement

Teaching the module in this course was not my original plan; I attempted to pilot in the fall of 2014 an undergraduate contemporary literature seminar focused entirely on "Cli-Fi." I was unable to complete the pilot, as it became clear that our team needed to do further work to make the materials accessible to teachers and students in the humanities. So I piloted it in this graduate seminar, even though the course material was not particularly amenable to the pilot. But: one thing that happened this fall was the Global Climate Change Conference in Paris, which allowed us to talk about the global consequences, politics, and intercultural interactions of multiple nations as they tried to work toward a protocol for dealing with the consequences of climate change. I chose literature from various countries in Africa that deals with environmental issues, many of which are the product of, or exacerbated by, climate change. The short stories we have included in the module both deal with the West—the United States and England—and

...one of the things that came to light over the course of my class is the fact that "cli-fi" is a specifically Western genre, written by white authors from the United States and England; there is no "international" or even "African" literary understanding of the genre. As a result, several of my students and I have proposed a panel for the forthcoming African Literature Association Conference on considering African Cli-Fi Literature.

My Experience Teaching with InTeGrate Materials

The module was taught as a component of my African Literature graduate seminar. The summative assessment was given during the final exam period.

Relationship of InTeGrate Materials to my Course

We started talking about the module on the first day of class, and I told my students that part of their task was to help me figure out how to make sense of science in a literature class. So in this sense, I am lucky to have been working with graduate students, many of whom are teaching their own college-level composition classes and several of whom are high school English teachers; these are students who are also teachers and who are very interested in pedagogical exploration. We talked quite a bit about the science of climate change before implementing the module, and my students looked at the NOAA data at the beginning of the semester in order to have context for undertaking all aspects of the module and for thinking about climate change in the context of Africa.

A Unit-by-Unit Breakdown of How I Taught this Module

Unit 1

Unit 1 serves as an introduction to Earth's climate system components. After exploring climate data, students are introduced to the natural processes responsible for global climate and how specific variables are interpreted by scientists.

We did this unit early in the semester, as it was essential that the class understand the science of climate change and be able to understand how to interpret data conveyed on graphs (literature students generally do not deal with data in graph form, so it was important for us as a class to talk about the story that this data told us).

Unit 2

Using climate data, students develop a graph and present the result in a blog, emphasizing effective scientific communication. Students work individually or in teams to graph, describe, and explain the data sets in terms of climate system processes. In the final part of this module, students will compare and contrast the various graphs in an effort to understand the differences between the variety of climate data.

We did this unit late in the semester, and this was the most difficult unit for my students. For literature students, graphing scientific data is both unfamiliar and complicated. My students blogged about the experience and wrote haikus about the difficulties of graphing scientific data. It took them two tries to get it right. This was the unit that presented the most problems for my students the first time I tried to pilot it. I recommend that humanities/literature professors do substantive preparation prior to teaching this unit, as it will prove difficult for those of us who are not in the sciences to both understand the material and explain how to graph the data.

Unit 3

After being introduced to scientific communication in Unit 2, students will continue by exploring different literary representations of climate change during this unit. Students will analyze various kinds of textual genres—including peer-reviewed journal articles, trade journal publications, editorials, works of fiction, and blogs—that engage with the concept of climate change in order to articulate the differences between different types of texts and the audiences for each. They will complete a formative analytical exercise that measures their ability to differential between types of texts and the ways that those texts engage with climate change issues.

I adapted this unit to fit the context of an African literature graduate seminar. We read the various genre texts included for this unit, but we also read articles/blogs/journal articles about climate change in Africa and about African literature. English graduate students already know about how to write rhetorical analyses and about how to identify various types of writing, so this unit was much less important to the class than the two that preceded it.

Unit 4

Building on the work they did in Unit 3, students will perform an "ecocritical" rhetorical reading (the theoretical lens for examining the way that literary texts engage with climate and climate issues) in order to analyze a short story chosen from several provided by the instructor. They will utilize literary terminology in discussing this text and generating a rhetorical analysis of it.

As with the previous unit, my students did not really need information about the terms for literary study, as these were very familiar to my students. We read a considerable amount of ecocritical theory, much more than was required of this unit. One of the major assignments of the seminar was a student presentation on a specific school of literary theory, and a significant amount of the theory that we covered was ecocritical in nature. The class read "Diary of an Interesting Year," one of the two stories specified by our module.

Unit 5

In the final unit of the module, students will synthesize their understanding of climate science and modes of communication. Students are assigned to groups and given a climate change issue that they will use to demonstrate their understanding of ethos, pathos, and logos when presented with a variety of audiences.

My class did this activity via an in-class discussion about how this particular unit could be used in my students' own classes; much of what is covered in this unit is particularly useful for students/teachers teaching composition at the college level, as one of the goals of many composition programs is to teach students to communicate with a wide variety of audiences, most of which are not English majors.

Assessments

My students did the various formative assessments along with each of the units in the module. The summative assessment was completed during the final exam period. Because the final exam was a three-hour class, we discussed "Diary of an Interesting Year," the role of climate change and environmental degradation in the literature that we read, and the complexities of utilizing science in a literature class. We also concluded that literature—whether or not it "accurately" depicts the science of climate change—may very well have a greater impact in terms of its ability to shape consciousness with regard to activism and engagement with ways of addressing the problem of climate change.

Outcomes

Because of the nature of the course in which I piloted, I was primarily concerned with being able to complete the pilot, to make the material relevant to my students, and to feel confident discussing disciplinarily unfamiliar material. I feel that I largely succeeded and that my students were interested and engaged with the concepts covered in the module. I hope to be able to utilize the module in a future course that is more focused on environmental/climate change literature, but I am also very interested in further exploration of a truth that was revealed to me during this pilot: climate change literature, in its current manifestation, is very much a Western genre that, I hope, I can read into more international contexts.

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Laura Wright: Using Cli-Fi at Western Carolina University

About this course

A Success Story in Building Student Engagement

My Experience Teaching with InTeGrate Materials

Relationship of InTeGrate Materials to my Course

A Unit-by-Unit Breakdown of How I Taught this Module

Assessments

Outcomes

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