Teaching through objects: grounding environmental studies in things

Abstract

Old paradigms in environmental studies are being challenged and giving way to new ones. Discussions of scarcity, wilderness, and restoration have all evolved in the context of the Anthropocene. Learning the vocabulary of environmental studies in a world of conceptual diversity and ongoing change is an enormous challenge for students. Students themselves have changed in recent years as well, with traditional environmental learners being joined by a diversity of those interested in commerce or justice. These kinds of upheavals present challenges for teaching and learning in environmental studies. This is in part because the growing diversity of perspectives is difficult to metabolize in traditional approaches to teaching, many older concepts still enjoy popular hegemony, and debates over these questions are often rarified, abstract, and difficult to ground. We therefore propose an approach that mobilizes teaching through objects, where common and material things—bottled water, wolves, e-waste, trees, or lawns—are used as case objects from which learning begins. We maintain that such an approach, though not new, allows environmental studies to move beyond environmental problems. We further suggest that this approach better allows students to compare, address, exercise, and critique diverse theoretical ways of thinking about human-environment relationships. Finally, we believe that this approach is potentially transformational for learning in the field, simply because upending banal and familiar material things through iterative inquiry has the most immediate and affective potential for truly reaching students and transforming the way they think about the environment.