ABSTRACT
The climate fiction course I taught at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Okanagan in 2014-15 was a first-year service course that would cater mainly to non-English majors. I wanted this most crucial of topics to reach the largest possible number of students, and I wanted to use the course to demonstrate the value and significance of humanities-based approaches to a subject that is overwhelmingly discussed in terms of science, engineering and governmental politics. I had a class of 35 students, which meant I gave only a few formal lectures and spent a lot of time practising close textual analysis. The next version of this course will be a large section of 150 students, so I will be giving a lot more formal lectures and allocating reading and writing practice to the Graduate Teaching Assistants. My choice of literary and other texts could, I hoped, enrich students’ knowledge
and understanding of climate change, while teaching evaluation questionnaires (TEQs) could provide a rudimentary sense of whether or not the objectives of the class had been achieved. However, students normally complete TEQs in a rapid, unconsidered fashion, and some research suggests such questionnaires really only measure the likeability of the teacher and the students’ estimate of their expected grade for the course (see Clayson, Frost and Sheffet; Clayson and Sheffet), so I also included an essay prompt that implicitly asked for reflection on the value of the course: “‘Literature has little to contribute to progressive climate politics.’ Do you agree?” Quotations from students below appear under their real names, are drawn verbatim from both TEQs and essays, and are used with permission. It is worth noting, though, that the addressee of these statements, qua pedagogical researcher, was also grading the students’ essays, making them questionable as sources of reliable evaluation (Garrard, “Problems and Prospects in Ecocritical Pedagogy” 236) The responses gathered by means of a learning-focused essay question suggested that formal assessment is underused as a means of obtaining more reasoned and thoughtful pedagogical reflections from students than TEQs. The 13-week course justified its ‘service’ designation by incorporating substan-
tial elements of composition. The course texts included Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth; selected stories from Helen Simpson’s In-Flight Entertainment; Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (the title of which we perennially confused with
Simpson’s, as in my chapter heading above); Steve Waters’s play, The Contingency Plan; and a small number of critical essays and extracts. The objectives of the course had to be strictly limited from the outset. The
requirement to spend a minimum proportion of 35% on the writing component had to be borne in mind, even if the stated figure is impossible to measure and in any case never checked. Additional objectives included introduction of basic narratological terminology, and reflective analysis of the ways various disciplines characterize, or ‘frame’, climate change. The commitment to spend a decent amount of time on each literary text meant that other attractive options relevant to the teaching of climate change fiction, notably Mitchell Thomashow’s suggestions for enhancing ‘biospheric perception’, were not included (Garrard, “A Novel Idea: Slow Reading”). Nevertheless, Thomashow’s characterization of the problem was a guiding insight throughout:
A fine paradox emerges. Global environmental change is too elusive to grasp, yet too profound to ignore. Not yet the province of concentrated public attention, it appears more subtly, through its images and metaphors. Not easily understood, it leaves its marks and trails nevertheless, in the form of local signs and global reflections. International networks of commerce and communication may hide the ecological origins of your daily life, but they bring images of the planet to bear on your every move, whether it’s the Netscape icon of a comet passing over the globe, or a Coca-Cola ad panning the world’s cultures for coke drinkers.
