I designed the "Blogging About Nature and Politics" activity to accomplish two broad goals.

First, the assignment is a weekly journal designed to mimic the common pedagogical technique of short weekly writing about course content. However, this activity takes weekly writing to another level because students must 'go out' beyond the classroom and apply the knowledge they are acquiring in the classroom. In this regard, the goal is for students to move beyond superficial or abstract engagement. Instead, students are to do deeper inquiry while looking outward (beyond the classroom) and inward (into their emotional selves) as they work on challenging material dealing with politics and nature. For example, one prompt is called "Greenwashing". This prompt asks students to locate a piece of greenwashing (a public relations/marketing technique where companies use disinformation or spin techniques to give their product a desirable "green" status). In the conceptual material of this political economy class we examine how capitalist political economy impacts our relationship to the web of life. The course includes reading and lecture material on commodification, mass consumption, planned (and perceived) obsolescence, and the construction of consumer desire. Therefore, I want students to explore and contemplate these concepts when they pick the "Greenwashing" prompt. The goal here is that students do more than just write down (or recite) the definition of greenwashing. Students are to proactively find greenwashing in their life and additionally reflect upon the impact of greenwashing on their own sense of place and nature.

Second, the goal of the "Blogging About Nature and Politics" activity is to prepare students for their final assignment, which is a podcast on some element of the political economy of climate change. As such, the topics for this weekly assignment require that students make their own (or make use of) recorded audio. In this regard, I attempt to give the students some scaffolding to complete their final podcast project.

I designed this assignment for an interdisciplinary social science class at a community college. It is most appropriate for introductory undergraduates. It is an individual journal and therefore it can be used with large or small classes. However, in a very large lecture class, it would be difficult to bring student work into the classroom. As such, I suggest using this activity in smaller classes or in large lecture classes that also have weekly, smaller discussion sessions. I use it with a simple WordPress class blog, but students could do a very similar version on Canvas or other course management system (CMS). This assignment can also be altered to be a handwritten journal.

The journal topics require that students 'locate' or 'find' conceptual material out in the world. Each topic also includes a reflective or contemplative component. I therefore recommend giving students some conceptual scaffolding before they do the assignment. Additionally, I recommend using the book Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone to give students an introduction to the use of contemplative practices when addressing climate issues. Active Hope includes numerous practical "try this" contemplative practices that I've incorporated into the assignment. Therefore, it can be beneficial to have students purchase the book and read it alongside the journal assignment.

Student Handout for Blogging about Nature and Politics Assignment (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 132kB Jul29 17)

The topics for the weekly blog entries are the following:

1. Podcast Inspiration (required as a first submission): Share a story about who you are. Then post a podcast that inspires you and share how this particular podcast expresses something about your sense of self.
2. Ideology in Popular Culture: Ideology is all around us but can be difficult to see. Your task is to bring it into relief by identifying a manifestation of ideology in popular culture. You might discover this in a book, magazine, movie, advertisement, on social media, or somewhere else entirely.
3. Nature Where You Least Expect It: Find nature in a place you least expect it! Explore the limits of the Western idea that nature is separate from human society.
4. Talk to Someone Engaged: Confront the myth of apathy. Find someone in your community who is engaging with the environmental crisis as an activist or policy maker.
5. Nature Commodified: Find an example where nature has been commodified or simulated in the interest of profits.
6. Greenwashing: Find an example of greenwashing in your daily life. Then contemplate how public relations and marketing firms "normalize" ideas about nature, the economy, and climate change.
7. Music as Political Inspiration: Listen to music and get inspired!
8. Poetry and Nature: Find and savor a poem that deals with nature. Then explore the role of artists and poets in society's conception of nature.
9. Action!: Some humans are destroying the planet, and other humans are transforming themselves and their communities in order to fight for the planet. The objective of this topic is to understand action through personal experience rather than political commentary or the experience of others.
10. Sounds of Nature/Sounds of Capitalism: Spend contemplative time focusing on a sense other than sight. Find and gather sounds of nature and sounds of capitalism.
11. Build Community!: Understand the role of communities in political transformation. Build your community!

This activity can be simultaneously joyful and very stressful for students. There are several elements about the assignment where my students have expressed being stressed and nervous. This is because many students will be unfamiliar with WordPress, despite the fact that WordPress is a very simple and ubiquitous tool for online publishing. Still, even more students will be unfamiliar with audio recording and basic editing. (This latter issue is why we incorporate audio, which is to provide scaffolding for the students' final podcast project.) In order to alleviate the stress and adequately support students, it is important to provide class time at the beginning of the quarter/semester for students to log in to WordPress and practice creating blog posts. I generally use the classroom computer and projector to demonstrate to students how to use WordPress. If needed, I will also post a screen-recorded video on Canvas that demonstrates the same skills. It is important to do the same thing with audio. We generally have a radio journalist give a guest presentation on audio and we reserve a day in the computer lab where students learn basic audio-editing techniques in Audacity (a free audio-editing program). This activity can be done without the audio component, so I encourage teachers who feel less comfortable with audio to simply drop this portion of the assignment.

Although this is a weekly assignment that the students complete on their own, it is very important to provide time throughout the quarter/semester for in-class sharing. In-class sharing provides students with an opportunity to voice what is working and not working. It is also a time where they can share with their peers what they did to complete a particular topic. Because students are free to complete the topics in any order, sharing leads to students collaborating and helping one another with the topics that they still need to complete. Ideally, I would use about a half-hour every other week for some small- and large-group sharing. The small group sharing can be very simple and straightforward. Ask students to get into groups of 4-5. Ask each student to share about their most recent blog post by describing it, explaining what worked and what didn't work. After the necessary time for all members to speak in the small group, then ask students to voluntary share with the whole group. If possible, bring up the blog posts on the projector.

My co-teacher BJ and I assessed this activity using a total of 100 points for the whole activity (10 points for each journal entry and 10 journal entries total during the quarter). We shied away from grading the students on the content of their journal entry and generally assigned grades on an effort basis. If students met all the requirements of the prompt, then they received a 10/10 grade for their journal entry. We initially decided to do it this way because we wanted to encourage students to be much more personal and genuine with their journal entries. We also did not want to create a scenario where we were grading students' self-reflection and other 'inward' moments.

Upon reflection, there were some predictable shortcomings to this method of assessment. In each prompt there are 1 - 3 key conceptual points that we want to see in students' journal entries. By grading solely on student effort, we were not able to assess the students on these key conceptual points. Instead, we provided students with conceptual feedback in the comments section of the class blog. As a result, this meant that students with a wide range of conceptual mastery all received 10/10 scores. In general, we still felt that this technique met the major goals of the activity. This activity remained as an effort grade while we assessed conceptual mastery in the midterm, the final, the final podcast, and the weekly reading questions. In the total picture of the class, it worked. However, in future classes we will build a different assessment strategy that combines our desire to facilitate genuine journaling and to assess conceptual understanding.

Overall, we found that some students seemed to try their hardest to do their weekly prompts without really "going out" into the world. These students found their poetry and music inspiration online, which we begrudgingly expected. They also found commodified nature, ideology, and greenwashing online, which was disappointing. Of course, we understood this tendency in some students. In the future, we will be more specific about the expectation that students get up off the computer and how this will be reflected in the assessment method.

Macy, Joanna, and Chris Johnstone. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in Without Going Crazy. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2012.