A Follow-up to “Writing Environments”
by Russell Mayo, PhD
I am thrilled to be invited to write a follow-up to my “Writing Environments” post for Ethical ELA. Four years later, I am still very proud of the piece, which distills my writing, research, and teaching on ecocomposition. This piece brings together theory and practice for integrating environmental studies into writing instruction, offering a valuable guide for teaching environmental writing. I’ve found myself returning repeatedly to this piece to inform my own work. My work continues to be informed by ecocomposition scholarship.
For example, I am excited to share the recent publication of Teaching Writing in the Age of Catastrophic Climate Change (Lexington Press, 2024), a collection of essays that I contributed to and co-edited with Justin Everett. Our book builds on ecocomposition as it was initially developed by many of the scholars cited in “Writing Environments.” We present the ongoing climate emergency as both the content and context for teaching and writing today. Each contributing author presents how climate concerns shape their work with college writers.
Given the present environmental concerns for our students and communities, we aim to show the vitality of ecocomposition in this current conjuncture. Acclaimed literacy scholar Richard Beach writes that our collection of essays “documents the value of students using ecocomposition to portray relations with ecosystems and humans and responding to literary texts and media to convince audiences of the need for change in status-quo systems impacting climate change.” We hope the book offers an accessible guide for those teaching college writing, including AP/Dual Credit instructors.
Ecocomposition also informs my current work as a middle grades teacher in Chicago. Specifically, my 8th graders end the school year with my “Climate Narratives and Rhetorics in Fiction and Nonfiction” unit. We begin by studying the engaging climate fiction novel Two Degrees by Alan Gratz, while student-led “book clubs” read and discuss nonfiction climate stories studied, including A Bigger Picture, A Hot Mess, How to Change Everything, The Story of More, and We Rise.
Throughout the unit, we also critically analyze climate documentary films—An Inconvenient Truth, Chasing Ice, Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World, and 2040—using these as multimodal nonfiction texts for understanding the rhetorical tools filmmakers employ to move audiences on the subject. I wrote at length about this teaching approach in my forthcoming chapter, “Documentary Rhetorics and Public Pedagogy,” for the book Digital Video Composing: Multimodal Teaching and Assessment.
In the end, students work independently or with a partner to create a “Climate Narrative Arts Project.” For this, they have a choice to create either an environmental documentary proposal, based on the guidelines for One Earth Film Festival’s Young Filmmakers Documentary Contest, or a fictional short story that considers the future climate impacts based on Grist Magazine’s annual “Imagine 2200” fiction writing contest. The results are always exciting and inspiring.
While I’m proud of this work, it’s important to note that teaching environmental writing and literacy is not enough. It cannot reverse decades of fossil fuel burning leading to rising temperatures, ever stronger storms, increasing wildfires, glacial melt, ocean acidification, and rising seas. In the decades since the publication of Dobrin and Weisser’s Ecocomposition and An Inconvenient Truth, the climate catastrophe has significantly worsened. Raising awareness and publishing scholarship will not end this crisis.
That said, nothing could be more important to teach about than the future of our planet and young people’s role in it. Engaging students in ecoliteracy projects, teaching the tools of rhetoric and critical media literacy—supporting their creation of climate art for public audiences—offers one of the best tools we have as literacy educators for moving our students toward thoughtful action around the climate and ecological crises we collectively face. I hope my teaching and scholarship can be a small, hopeful step toward the collective action necessary to address the climate emergency.
Russell Mayo is an English Language Arts teacher at Burley School, a public K-8 school on the northside of Chicago. Russ completed his doctorate in English Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2020. His research centers on writing studies, critical pedagogy, and the environment. He is currently writing a new series for Ethical ELA called “Leaving Academia for K-12 Teaching.”