Cohen, Jody

Dalke, Anne

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr
College
English Faculty Research and Scholarship English
2013
Querying the "Natural": Re-thinking Classroom
Ecologies
Jody Cohen
Bryn Mawr College, jccohen@brynmawr.edu
Anne Dalke
Bryn Mawr College, adalke@brynmawr.edu
Let us know how access to this document benefits you.
Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/engl_pubs
Part of the Educational Methods Commons, Higher Education Commons, and the Higher
Education and Teaching Commons
This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/engl_pubs/8
For more information, please contact repository@brynmawr.edu.
Custom Citation
Cohen, Jody, and Anne Dalke. "Querying the "Natural": Re-thinking Classroom Ecologies." Teaching and Learning Together in Higher
Education 1.8 (2013).
 1 
 
 
Querying the “Natural”:  
Re-thinking Classroom Ecologies 
Jody Cohen and Anne Dalke 
 
for a Special Issue of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education: 
Creating Natural Critical Learning Environments,  
Ken Bain, Editor (Winter 2013) 
 
One of the languages we teach and learn at summer camp is a language of 
setting and achieving goals.  Nearly every conversation I have with my 
campers during the summer and in our emails throughout the year focuses 
on how they will go about doing the things they plan to do.  You are far and 
away the least goal oriented teacher I have ever had.  This semester, you 
have shown me the merits of this pedagogical practice, and I have learned 
from it.  You are a good teacher because of it....You do not let your students 
fool themselves into thinking that they can do something or know something 
once and for all….Perhaps…the value of your pedagogy [is that]…it creates 
space for filling up. I wonder if I will use your tool in my own teaching. 
(froggies315) 
 
We write as two experienced teachers, in the fields of Education and English,  
who are accustomed to creating open-ended exploratory classrooms, and to 
receiving feedback from students such as the passage above (this one was taken 
from the final self-evaluation of a senior biology major, who was completing an 
advanced English seminar on “Ecological Imaginings”). 
In Fall 2010, we enrolled ourselves in the faculty seminar Ken Bain offered at 
Bryn Mawr College on “natural learning environments,” where we were asked to 
engage in a very different sort of pedagogy: to create goal-based scenarios for our 
students, identifying target skills and creating learning environments to support 
them.  The Natural Learning Initiative begins with the presumption that “people 
tend to learn most effectively…when they are trying to solve problems that they find 
important,” and when they can do so in an “environment in which they can feel a 
 2 
sense of control over their own education” (Bain). In the seminar, we were asked to 
consider what we wanted our students to be able to do as a result of taking a class; 
how the class might contribute to that development; what major paradigms we 
would want our students to question, and perhaps change; and how we would put 
them in a situation in which those paradigms do not work.  
We very much value the attention paid in these so-called “natural learning 
environments” to igniting student interest, but find ourselves uneasy with the 
tension between cultivating students’ “sense of control,” on the one hand, and 
guiding them to discover the unworkability of their paradigms, on the other. This 
process of using the classroom as a site where students’ “mental models” of the 
world are explicitly challenged and changed feels to us too packaged and predictive. 
In fretting about the unintended outcomes of this well-intentioned work, we 
raise several questions: What happens, here, to self-directed learning? How 
“natural” is it, really, to focus student attention, even on topics of their own declared 
interest?  What of the inevitably unexpected ways that human beings take up and 
learn from our encounters with the environment and with one another? What about 
leaving space for surprise, for what the teacher hasn’t anticipated, for directions she 
herself has not yet explored? What about the possibility of, and need for, divergent 
thinking? 
In the year since that faculty seminar, we have co-designed and co-taught 
several linked courses on ecological literacy. Emerging from our interdisciplinary 
collaboration is a pedagogical orientation, strongly guided by the experiences and 
reflections of our students, that understands learning as a dance between the sort of 
 3 
individual decision-making attended to in “natural learning environments,” and the 
insistently unpredictable intra-action of parts in an emergent whole (cf. Barad). 
Along with a number of ecological and pedagogical theorists, our students have 
helped us re-conceptualize both the assumption of what’s “natural” in teaching and 
learning environments in general, and what might be well suited for ecological 
instruction in particular.  
Our querying of the “natural” has been impelled by the work of ecological 
literary theorist Timothy Morton, who observes that 
saying that something is unnatural is saying that it does not conform to a 
norm, so “normal” that it is built into the very fabric of things as they 
are….”nature”…has the force of law…against which deviation is 
measured….Thinking, when it becomes ideological, tends to fixate on 
concepts rather than doing what is “natural” to thought, namely, dissolving 
whatever has taken form. Ecological thinking…that did not stop at a 
particular concretization of its object, would thus be “without nature.” (14, 
24)  
Our own resistance to calling any learning environment “natural” is thus a 
resistance to normalization, to the construction of a replicable framework, and a 
concomitant search for the sort of agency that such resistance makes possible (cf. 
Ellsworth 44).  As the ecologist Buzz Holling has observed, “policies and 
management that apply fixed rules for achieving constant yields…lead to systems 
that gradually lose resilience,” because our 
knowledge of the system we deal with is always incomplete. Surprise is 
inevitable....ecosystems...are inherently uncertain....Part of that is because 
...management changes the system being managed. Successfully managed 
systems are ever-changing targets because they release the resources for 
new kinds of human opportunity....In principle, therefore, there is an 
 4 
inherent unknowability, as well as unpredictability... sustaining the 
foundations for functioning systems. (733-734) 
In such an unknowable, and therefore unpredictable system, we invite our 
students to go exploring, with an awareness that the process will be both full of 
surprise—and unending. One of our students, who has long struggled with “learning 
disabilities,” a purported inability to “focus” in the classroom, responded powerfully 
to our invitation to “get lost” (cf. Solnit) in the classroom. In her final self-evaluation 
for “Ecological Imaginings,” Sara Gladwin wrote that 
From a very early point in my life, I’ve been identified as notoriously unable 
to finish everything I touch. From a plate of food, to drawings, conversations, 
papers- to quote my mother, I’ve never been able to “cross the finish-line.” As 
I’ve grown in my learning, I’ve come to appreciate some of the ways in which 
I allow myself room to grow, to add, to change and edit myself….It is too 
important to me not to close the door on what might come if I choose to 
remain unfinished, choose to open myself up for change. (Gladwin, 
“Classroom”) 
 
Sara also responded strongly to a podcast by Gordon Hempton, an “acoustic 
ecologist” who is recording “The Last Quiet Places” on earth. Hempton’s project, 
Sara reported, had 
a huge effect on my thinking. One of the things discussed in the podcast is 
how children are taught to direct their attention, to close themselves off to 
divergent and distracting thoughts… I’m starting to wonder whether or not it 
is “ecologically literate” to teach and condition children to filter out divergent 
thinking….the majority of children are being taught not to pay attention to 
their surroundings, to let the environment fade into the background….Maybe 
a more environmentally friendly way of teaching children would be to 
actually use the environment as a place of learning….maybe the environment 
would be better protected if we indulged divergent thinking more, instead of 
always attempting to shut it down. Maybe the world would be better served 
if instead of reprimanding the student whose eye has been caught by 
whatever environment can be seen from a classroom window, we were to 
give that student the opportunity to go outside, to broaden their thinking 
 5 
horizons. Maybe we would be able to expand our concept of importance, give 
focus to what has been consistently pushed into the backgrounds of our 
imaginations. (Gladwin, “Divergent Thinking”) 
 
Sara, like froggies315, describes the kinds of teaching and learning we seek to 
cultivate in our classrooms: environments where, among other pursuits, we “expand 
our concept of importance, give focus to…the backgrounds of our imaginations,” and 
thereby create “space for filling up.”  
We quote our students at length here to share our sense of our classrooms as 
places where we respect what pedagogical theorist Elizabeth Ellsworth identifies as 
the  “eruptive, unruly space between a curriculum’s address and a student’s 
response,” a space that is “populated by the difference between conscious and 
unconscious knowledge, conscious and unconscious desires” (41). In doing so, we 
focus less on creating pathways for students to reach our goals for paradigm shifting 
than on modeling classroom ecology on other, less predictable dimensions of the 
world.   
Morton, who first queried our presumptions about the “nature of nature,” 
describes the rich unruliness of the environment as “the strange stranger...any 
entity whose arrival we can't predict, whose being is fundamentally uncanny and 
unfathomable” (160-161). Holling also underscores the “dynamic, inherently 
uncertain” nature of ecosystems, which have “multiple potential futures” (734).  If 
we understand classrooms in this way, then no learning environment can be termed 
“natural,” but there are a plethora of possibilities for classroom ecologies.  We 
choose to pursue the fecund dimensions highlighted by Morton and Holling as 
resources for dynamic, divergent forms of teaching and learning.  
 6 
 Such pedagogies respect the diversity and disequilibrium that can 
characterize human action and interaction; as described by Emma Wipperman, they 
are dynamic and integrative rather than linear and unidirectional.  In a blog entry for 
a course on “Educating for Ecological Literacy,” Emma enlarged the classic humanist 
focus of radical educational theory: 
I think we need to ecologize Freire. He has been arguing against teachers 
acting upon their students, and for teachers and students to live with, in 
solidarity. We cannot just act upon the world, we must live with it; we cannot 
act "in order to transform it," but must act, transformed by and with the 
world.  (Wipperman) 
 
These pedagogies have worked well for a wide range of our students, including 
those, like froggies315, who first thought teaching and learning was, camp-like, 
about achieving goals; those, like Sara Gladwin, who had found classrooms as sites 
for the construction of disability (cf. McDermott & Varenne); and also those who, 
like our first-semester international students, are adjusting to the cultural 
differences posed by U.S. college classrooms. As one of them wrote at the conclusion 
of her ecological seminar, 
There were times that I felt I made a mistake to come to United States.  The 
classes are much harder than I imagined. I had to squeeze my brain hard to get 
the idea of the readings and express my ideas through English letters. 
Sometimes I felt I was being thrown onto a foreign land to stand on my own 
shaky legs….Then I learned to take a Thoreauvian walk – a sauntering without 
a goal, a ruminating of the thinking. I learned to get lost so as to extend the 
boundaries of self into unknown terror and try to see the world through the 
lenses of different people. I enjoyed playing with alternative languages…I 
began to take new approaches to the world…to value the earth as a whole that 
natural and society is inseparable. (Shengjia-Ashley) 
 
Much outcomes-based educational work has short-term optimization as its 
goal (Callahan, 1962; Oakes & Lipton, 2006; Ravitch, 2010). We offer here an 
 7 
alternative in more flexible, open-ended teaching practices that thrive on diversity, 
an alternative way of thinking about “unbounded” teaching, of recognizing our 
classrooms as part of larger ecosystems characterized by an unlimited, often 
“unruly” fecundity and diversity that do not submit to the limitations of injunction, 
testing, command or control.  
  
Works Cited 
 
Bain, Ken. Natural Bain, Ken. Natural Critical Learning Environments. June 19-21, 
 
 2013. http://www.bestteachersinstitute.org/id24.html 
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 
Callahan, R. Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That 
 Have  Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools. Chicago: The University 
 of Chicago Press, 1962. 
Ellsworth, Elizabeth. Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of  
 Address.  New York: Teachers College Press, 1997. 
froggies315. Final Self-Evaluation. English 313: Ecological Imaginings. Bryn  
 
Mawr College. December 15, 2012. 
Gladwin, Sara. “A Classroom without Walls.” Final Self Evaluation.  English 313:  
Ecological Imaginings. Bryn  Mawr College. December 21, 2012. 
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/classroom-without-walls 
-----. “Divergent Thinking.” Online posting. English 313: Ecological Imaginings. 
 Serendip Studio. December 2, 2012.  
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/divergent-thinking 
Hempton, Gordon. The Last Quiet Places.  On Being, with Krista Tippett. May  10,  
 8 
2012. http://www.onbeing.org/program/last-quiet-places/4557 
Holling, C.S.  “Surprise for Science, Resilience for Ecosystems, and Incentives for  
People.” Ecological Applications 6, 3 (August 1996); 733-735. 
McDermott, Ray and Hervé Varenne. "Culture as Disability.” Anthropology and 
 Education Quarterly 26 (1995): 323-348. 
 Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Re-thinking Environmental Aesthetics.  
 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.  
Oakes, J. & Lipton, M. “Schooling: Wrestling with History and Tradition.” In Teaching 
 To Change the World, 2nd ed. Columbus, Ohio: McGraw-Hill Higher  
Education, 2006. 2-39. 
Ravitch, Diana. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing  
and Choice are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books, 2010. 
Shengjia-Ashley. Final Self-Evaluation. Emily Balch Seminar. Bryn Mawr College.  
 December  22, 2012. 
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/self-evaluation-4 
Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York. Penguin, 2005. 
Wipperman, Emma.  Blog Post.  Education 268: Educating for Ecological Literacy. 
 Bryn Mawr College.  January 31, 2012.   
 


Querying the  Natural : Re-thinking Classroom Ecologies

Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College | Bryn Mawr College Research

Bryn Mawr CollegeScholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn MawrCollegeEnglish Faculty Research and Scholarship English2013Querying the "Natural": Re-thinking ClassroomEcologiesJody CohenBryn Mawr College, jccohen@brynmawr.eduAnne DalkeBryn Mawr College, adalke@brynmawr.eduLet us know how access to this document benefits you.Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/engl_pubsPart of the Educational Methods Commons, Higher Education Commons, and the HigherEducation and Teaching CommonsThis paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/engl_pubs/8For more information, please contact repository@brynmawr.edu.Custom CitationCohen, Jody, and Anne Dalke. "Querying the "Natural": Re-thinking Classroom Ecologies." Teaching and Learning Together in HigherEducation 1.8 (2013). 1   Querying the “Natural”:  Re-thinking Classroom Ecologies Jody Cohen and Anne Dalke  for a Special Issue of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education: Creating Natural Critical Learning Environments,  Ken Bain, Editor (Winter 2013)  One of the languages we teach and learn at summer camp is a language of setting and achieving goals.  Nearly every conversation I have with my campers during the summer and in our emails throughout the year focuses on how they will go about doing the things they plan to do.  You are far and away the least goal oriented teacher I have ever had.  This semester, you have shown me the merits of this pedagogical practice, and I have learned from it.  You are a good teacher because of it....You do not let your students fool themselves into thinking that they can do something or know something once and for all….Perhaps…the value of your pedagogy [is that]…it creates space for filling up. I wonder if I will use your tool in my own teaching. (froggies315)  We write as two experienced teachers, in the fields of Education and English,  who are accustomed to creating open-ended exploratory classrooms, and to receiving feedback from students such as the passage above (this one was taken from the final self-evaluation of a senior biology major, who was completing an advanced English seminar on “Ecological Imaginings”). In Fall 2010, we enrolled ourselves in the faculty seminar Ken Bain offered at Bryn Mawr College on “natural learning environments,” where we were asked to engage in a very different sort of pedagogy: to create goal-based scenarios for our students, identifying target skills and creating learning environments to support them.  The Natural Learning Initiative begins with the presumption that “people tend to learn most effectively…when they are trying to solve problems that they find important,” and when they can do so in an “environment in which they can feel a  2 sense of control over their own education” (Bain). In the seminar, we were asked to consider what we wanted our students to be able to do as a result of taking a class; how the class might contribute to that development; what major paradigms we would want our students to question, and perhaps change; and how we would put them in a situation in which those paradigms do not work.  We very much value the attention paid in these so-called “natural learning environments” to igniting student interest, but find ourselves uneasy with the tension between cultivating students’ “sense of control,” on the one hand, and guiding them to discover the unworkability of their paradigms, on the other. This process of using the classroom as a site where students’ “mental models” of the world are explicitly challenged and changed feels to us too packaged and predictive. In fretting about the unintended outcomes of this well-intentioned work, we raise several questions: What happens, here, to self-directed learning? How “natural” is it, really, to focus student attention, even on topics of their own declared interest?  What of the inevitably unexpected ways that human beings take up and learn from our encounters with the environment and with one another? What about leaving space for surprise, for what the teacher hasn’t anticipated, for directions she herself has not yet explored? What about the possibility of, and need for, divergent thinking? In the year since that faculty seminar, we have co-designed and co-taught several linked courses on ecological literacy. Emerging from our interdisciplinary collaboration is a pedagogical orientation, strongly guided by the experiences and reflections of our students, that understands learning as a dance between the sort of  3 individual decision-making attended to in “natural learning environments,” and the insistently unpredictable intra-action of parts in an emergent whole (cf. Barad). Along with a number of ecological and pedagogical theorists, our students have helped us re-conceptualize both the assumption of what’s “natural” in teaching and learning environments in general, and what might be well suited for ecological instruction in particular.  Our querying of the “natural” has been impelled by the work of ecological literary theorist Timothy Morton, who observes that saying that something is unnatural is saying that it does not conform to a norm, so “normal” that it is built into the very fabric of things as they are….”nature”…has the force of law…against which deviation is measured….Thinking, when it becomes ideological, tends to fixate on concepts rather than doing what is “natural” to thought, namely, dissolving whatever has taken form. Ecological thinking…that did not stop at a particular concretization of its object, would thus be “without nature.” (14, 24)  Our own resistance to calling any learning environment “natural” is thus a resistance to normalization, to the construction of a replicable framework, and a concomitant search for the sort of agency that such resistance makes possible (cf. Ellsworth 44).  As the ecologist Buzz Holling has observed, “policies and management that apply fixed rules for achieving constant yields…lead to systems that gradually lose resilience,” because our knowledge of the system we deal with is always incomplete. Surprise is inevitable....ecosystems...are inherently uncertain....Part of that is because ...management changes the system being managed. Successfully managed systems are ever-changing targets because they release the resources for new kinds of human opportunity....In principle, therefore, there is an  4 inherent unknowability, as well as unpredictability... sustaining the foundations for functioning systems. (733-734) In such an unknowable, and therefore unpredictable system, we invite our students to go exploring, with an awareness that the process will be both full of surprise—and unending. One of our students, who has long struggled with “learning disabilities,” a purported inability to “focus” in the classroom, responded powerfully to our invitation to “get lost” (cf. Solnit) in the classroom. In her final self-evaluation for “Ecological Imaginings,” Sara Gladwin wrote that From a very early point in my life, I’ve been identified as notoriously unable to finish everything I touch. From a plate of food, to drawings, conversations, papers- to quote my mother, I’ve never been able to “cross the finish-line.” As I’ve grown in my learning, I’ve come to appreciate some of the ways in which I allow myself room to grow, to add, to change and edit myself….It is too important to me not to close the door on what might come if I choose to remain unfinished, choose to open myself up for change. (Gladwin, “Classroom”)  Sara also responded strongly to a podcast by Gordon Hempton, an “acoustic ecologist” who is recording “The Last Quiet Places” on earth. Hempton’s project, Sara reported, had a huge effect on my thinking. One of the things discussed in the podcast is how children are taught to direct their attention, to close themselves off to divergent and distracting thoughts… I’m starting to wonder whether or not it is “ecologically literate” to teach and condition children to filter out divergent thinking….the majority of children are being taught not to pay attention to their surroundings, to let the environment fade into the background….Maybe a more environmentally friendly way of teaching children would be to actually use the environment as a place of learning….maybe the environment would be better protected if we indulged divergent thinking more, instead of always attempting to shut it down. Maybe the world would be better served if instead of reprimanding the student whose eye has been caught by whatever environment can be seen from a classroom window, we were to give that student the opportunity to go outside, to broaden their thinking  5 horizons. Maybe we would be able to expand our concept of importance, give focus to what has been consistently pushed into the backgrounds of our imaginations. (Gladwin, “Divergent Thinking”)  Sara, like froggies315, describes the kinds of teaching and learning we seek to cultivate in our classrooms: environments where, among other pursuits, we “expand our concept of importance, give focus to…the backgrounds of our imaginations,” and thereby create “space for filling up.”  We quote our students at length here to share our sense of our classrooms as places where we respect what pedagogical theorist Elizabeth Ellsworth identifies as the  “eruptive, unruly space between a curriculum’s address and a student’s response,” a space that is “populated by the difference between conscious and unconscious knowledge, conscious and unconscious desires” (41). In doing so, we focus less on creating pathways for students to reach our goals for paradigm shifting than on modeling classroom ecology on other, less predictable dimensions of the world.   Morton, who first queried our presumptions about the “nature of nature,” describes the rich unruliness of the environment as “the strange stranger...any entity whose arrival we can't predict, whose being is fundamentally uncanny and unfathomable” (160-161). Holling also underscores the “dynamic, inherently uncertain” nature of ecosystems, which have “multiple potential futures” (734).  If we understand classrooms in this way, then no learning environment can be termed “natural,” but there are a plethora of possibilities for classroom ecologies.  We choose to pursue the fecund dimensions highlighted by Morton and Holling as resources for dynamic, divergent forms of teaching and learning.   6  Such pedagogies respect the diversity and disequilibrium that can characterize human action and interaction; as described by Emma Wipperman, they are dynamic and integrative rather than linear and unidirectional.  In a blog entry for a course on “Educating for Ecological Literacy,” Emma enlarged the classic humanist focus of radical educational theory: I think we need to ecologize Freire. He has been arguing against teachers acting upon their students, and for teachers and students to live with, in solidarity. We cannot just act upon the world, we must live with it; we cannot act "in order to transform it," but must act, transformed by and with the world.  (Wipperman)  These pedagogies have worked well for a wide range of our students, including those, like froggies315, who first thought teaching and learning was, camp-like, about achieving goals; those, like Sara Gladwin, who had found classrooms as sites for the construction of disability (cf. McDermott & Varenne); and also those who, like our first-semester international students, are adjusting to the cultural differences posed by U.S. college classrooms. As one of them wrote at the conclusion of her ecological seminar, There were times that I felt I made a mistake to come to United States.  The classes are much harder than I imagined. I had to squeeze my brain hard to get the idea of the readings and express my ideas through English letters. Sometimes I felt I was being thrown onto a foreign land to stand on my own shaky legs….Then I learned to take a Thoreauvian walk – a sauntering without a goal, a ruminating of the thinking. I learned to get lost so as to extend the boundaries of self into unknown terror and try to see the world through the lenses of different people. I enjoyed playing with alternative languages…I began to take new approaches to the world…to value the earth as a whole that natural and society is inseparable. (Shengjia-Ashley)  Much outcomes-based educational work has short-term optimization as its goal (Callahan, 1962; Oakes & Lipton, 2006; Ravitch, 2010). We offer here an  7 alternative in more flexible, open-ended teaching practices that thrive on diversity, an alternative way of thinking about “unbounded” teaching, of recognizing our classrooms as part of larger ecosystems characterized by an unlimited, often “unruly” fecundity and diversity that do not submit to the limitations of injunction, testing, command or control.    Works Cited  Bain, Ken. Natural Bain, Ken. Natural Critical Learning Environments. June 19-21,   2013. http://www.bestteachersinstitute.org/id24.html Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Callahan, R. Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That  Have  Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools. Chicago: The University  of Chicago Press, 1962. Ellsworth, Elizabeth. Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of   Address.  New York: Teachers College Press, 1997. froggies315. Final Self-Evaluation. English 313: Ecological Imaginings. Bryn   Mawr College. December 15, 2012. Gladwin, Sara. “A Classroom without Walls.” Final Self Evaluation.  English 313:  Ecological Imaginings. Bryn  Mawr College. December 21, 2012. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/classroom-without-walls -----. “Divergent Thinking.” Online posting. English 313: Ecological Imaginings.  Serendip Studio. December 2, 2012.  http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/divergent-thinking Hempton, Gordon. The Last Quiet Places.  On Being, with Krista Tippett. May  10,   8 2012. http://www.onbeing.org/program/last-quiet-places/4557 Holling, C.S.  “Surprise for Science, Resilience for Ecosystems, and Incentives for  People.” Ecological Applications 6, 3 (August 1996); 733-735. McDermott, Ray and Hervé Varenne. "Culture as Disability.” Anthropology and  Education Quarterly 26 (1995): 323-348.  Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Re-thinking Environmental Aesthetics.   Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.  Oakes, J. & Lipton, M. “Schooling: Wrestling with History and Tradition.” In Teaching  To Change the World, 2nd ed. Columbus, Ohio: McGraw-Hill Higher  Education, 2006. 2-39. Ravitch, Diana. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing  and Choice are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Shengjia-Ashley. Final Self-Evaluation. Emily Balch Seminar. Bryn Mawr College.   December  22, 2012. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/self-evaluation-4 Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York. Penguin, 2005. Wipperman, Emma.  Blog Post.  Education 268: Educating for Ecological Literacy.  Bryn Mawr College.  January 31, 2012.    

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Querying the Natural : Re-thinking Classroom Ecologies

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Scholarship; Research; and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College | Bryn Mawr College Research