Abstract
Ecocriticism extends, but also departs from, the long tradition of considering ‘English’ as charged with a countercultural ‘mission’. And both ecocriticism and the vision of a degree programme that prevails among politicians and business leaders construct higher education as urgent and instrumentalised. This chapter incites teachers to keep their pedagogic heads in a situation of environmental emergency. Teaching is not simply a process of transmitting the current state of knowledge, or inciting action according to already-known imperatives. The readings it fosters are both situated and embodied. We must reframe ecocritical pedagogy as a practice of emergency that holds urgency and emergence in creative tension; that consciously juxtaposes spatial and temporal scales in order to foster biospheric perception; that teaches quandaries, not received ecological truths; and that practises reflective close reading. The central argument is that, rather than a pre-given notion of sustainability directing our pedagogy, the ecopedagogy of the unprecedented will yield a provisional, dynamic practice of sustainability. In other words, our pedagogy should mould our politics, not the other way around.
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Garrard, G. (2017). Towards an Unprecedented Ecocritical Pedagogy. In: Knights, B. (eds) Teaching Literature. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-31110-8_12
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