A Quick Guide to Ecocritical Perspectives (Full Version): https://goo.gl/vLkbjp
How can an English course integrating ecocriticism be practiced in high school?
This course is designed to integrate with a set of school-based curriculum in National Experimental High School at Central Taiwan Science Park. The class is intended to invite students who are interested in observing environmental changes around their neighborhoods, reading contemporary Taiwanese nature writings, and critiquing various landscapes of nature and humanity in Taiwan.
Each of students will be guided to learn the major theories in the field of ecocriticism with the nature writings of contemporary Taiwanese writers. Students will gain basic understandings of historic backgrounds of Anthropocene, environmental imaginations of nature, settler ecocriticism, landscapes of feralities, and environmental sentimentalism. The ecocritical theories are made easy with examples selected from environmental issues in Taiwan and abroad. Moreover, students will be instructed to read the Taiwanese nature writings and examine the texts with the ecocritical perspectives. The nature writings are selected to help students understand what the relationship between nature and literature indicates and revisit the landscapes of Taiwan literature in the contemporary Chinese writings.
Following the ecocritical perspectives, students are led to observe the changing landscapes of their neighborhoods with a focus on the development of Taichung Science Park, a newly-built industrial park nearby their campus. They are guided to examine how the introduction of new industries and facilities would change the environment and how the locals have responded to the changes. Besides, they are also taught to think twice what nature means to them and what it really is. In the end of the course, students are required to present a report in a preferred format (a blog, a webpage, a digital portfolio or a video clip). Their projects will be uploaded to an interactive platform, which allows those who are interested in ecocritical perspectives and localogical studies to access what students in high school think about nature and how they respond to environmental changes in Taiwan. For the project, they can choose one of the nature writers in Taiwan and introduce the figure to the classmates. They can also find a nature text or a local landscape and examine the discourse of nature in relation to humans. Following the final presentation on their project, they have to make a column to introduce their work and compile a tabloid to promote their project.
Through the course, students will be guided to think about the environmental issues ecocritically and examine the nature texts independently. With the ecocritical perspectives in a critical mind, they are expected to expand their cosmopolitan attitude toward nature and rethink the position of humans in relation to nature. When engaging themselves in the environment, they become a freelancer, traveling between the boundary of nature and humans and transcending the border between humans and nonhumans.
