Kate Ryan
Reflection on Green Thread
The Green Thread workshop was well-timed for me, as I’ve been increasingly thinking about
sustainability and composition. In my discipline, rhetoric and composition, there is a subfield called
ecocomposition that I’vefollowed throughout my career simply out of personal interest. One
perspective (forwarded particularly by Sidney Dobrin and Christian Weisser) is to keep writing the center
of the writing classroom by focusing on the ecologies of writing, which includes teaching discourse as an
ecology. Derek Owens argues for locating sustainability in the composition classroom as a site of inquiry
in much the same way we do with race, class, and gender. Dobrin and Weisser worry that this move is a
“move away from seeing writing as the subject that should be studied in a writing classroom.” This is a
concern I shared going into the GT workshop, and one I still share simply because composition is too
often seen as a handmaiden to “real” content – as if rhetoric and composition isn’t actually a legitimate
or possible subject itself.
However, in the course of the workshop, I got to thinking that it would be a
worthwhile experiment to focus the WRIT 101 curriculum on sustainability
because Montana is a place where the environment matters and because it
seemed like a potentially productive way in to the curriculum for students
and their teachers. And of course, sustainability matters in an utterly
global sense. Each year, I redesign the focus on the curriculum partly to
keep it “fresh” but also because I haven’t seen us satisfactorily “settle”
on a focus. So, this summer, I revised the first year writing common
syllabus and assignments to focus on inquiring into sustainability following
Owens’s approach. That meant I also had to revise our TA orientation
workshop and our graduate course for TAs. Taking the approach of “inquiry
into” frees me and the rest of the teachers from feeling a need to be
experts since the class is a site of inquiry not a site of teaching content
(a very important distinction) nor is it a site of teaching students certain
beliefs, but simply to raise and explore new questions, which often includes
questioning assumptions. The greatest challenge was developing a set of
readings to go alongside this new curriculum. I realized I knew we’d stick
with this focus on sustainability in the foreseeable future when I started
making notes about readings and reading needs for the next time. The
classroom challenge doesn’t seem to change too much – that ever-present
challenge of teaching what is perceived as a devalued required course likely
means simply shifting to attend to new forms of resistance related to
teaching students to value the course content. From my perspective, the
benefits include the excitement a number of teachers expressed about the
focus on sustainability, the way the new curriculum can encourage students
and teachers alike to get to know the place they are in (Montana, Missoula,
UM) in an engaged way (since who we are is related to where we are), and the
prospect of students at the end of this semester feeling a sense of
accomplishment in writing their way into understanding issues they may
previously have not considered as they learn new rhetorical strategies for
composing texts in college.