Hi thanks Pamela and Michelle

I know the first email was not really a call for comments but I will just
chip in that I think it is important that all students anywhere near this
kind of stuff need a sense of the history of environmental thinking
particularly in the second half of the 20th C and on  - when key works like
Sand County Almanac and Silent Spring appeared (the environmental movement
re-kicking into gear after WW2). 

Cheers 

Owain Jones; Professor of Environmental Humanities; School of Humanities and
Cultural Industries:

Hydrocitizenship Project   
Publications, presentations, projects and cv @ Academia.edu/OwainJones

Tidal Cultures  Sonic Severn 
Priston Festival   
The (Greatness Of The Magnificence) Fantasy Orchestra 

    skype - owainonskype        Mobile: 07871 572969


-----Original Message-----
From: Extinction Studies Discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of BASTIAN Michelle
Sent: 24 February 2015 13:42
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: English 383: Extinction Literature, course syllabus, Winter
2015

Thanks very much for this Pamela. I'm currently developing a related course
and am trying to do something different with my assessments, and have been
thinking of some ideas relatively similar to yours. I keep wondering whether
some of Donna Haraway's methods of developing figurations might work as a
nice scaffold for coursework that emphasises interdisciplinarity, multiple
modes of written expression, and addressing issues from multiple
perspectives. 

Looking forward to reading your course outline more closely. 

With best wishes, 

Michelle

--
Dr Michelle Bastian
Chancellor's Fellow, Edinburgh College of Art [log in to unmask]
www.michellebastian.net


--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland,
with registration number SC005336.


-----Original Message-----
From: Extinction Studies Discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Pamela Banting
Sent: 21 February 2015 18:30
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: English 383: Extinction Literature, course syllabus, Winter 2015

Hi everyone,

I just found the extinction studies listserv, and wondered whether anyone
might be interested in browsing a course outline for a course I'm teaching
this term on Extinction Literature at the University of Calgary in Calgary,
Alberta, Canada.  It is a half course that I'm offering under English 383
Topic in Literature and the Environment.  It has no English or any other
university-level prerequisite so 383 attracts students from across the
disciplines, which is one of its additional merits as a course both from my
own perspective but also the students themselves have commented on that
fact.  It also tends to attract students beyond the first year of
undergraduate studies, the English students for the topics and the others
for their half-course credit in English that they need in order to graduate.
In some ways, the class and reading schedule is more illuminating than the
simple outline, but I thought you might be interested in what texts we are
studying here in Alberta.  Strictly speaking the poetry book, OCEAN, by Sue
Goyette isn't really about extinction but it is about humans' (a sort of
hybrid bunch of humans who are themselves both prehistoric and contemporary)
relationship with ocean.  I included texts that are about mammals (bears),
insects (monarch butterflies), fish (salmon and salmon restoration), birds
(Thom Van Dooren's book), and an overview of animals in the anthropocene,
J.B. MacKinnon's THE ONCE AND FUTURE WORLD: NATURE AS IT IS, AS IT WAS, AS
IT COULD BE.  

I am experimenting in this first iteration of the course with having
students select at random a particular animal as the center of a multi-stage
"extinction project."  I chose first the animals at the center of each of
the required texts on the course, and then added mostly endangered and
threatened Alberta animals.  Two students have individually offered to
create a website for the final projects, and one went ahead and did a mockup
of such a site even before she mentioned it to me!  And it was good too.
It's not everyday one sees that amount of initiative in a class of just 21
students.

First they had to draft a proposal and an annotated bibliography around
their particular species, and the next assignment is to write two to three
pages as if from the point of view of an individual of that species.  The
purpose of that assignment is twofold.  First, in BLACK GRIZZLY, Sid Marty
writes several sections as if from the points of view of the particular
bears involved in his forensic reconstruction of the events in Banff the
summer of 1980 following the ecological disturbances caused by the eruption
of Mt. St. Helen's.  By being asked to write as if from the point of view of
the species they are researching, students will come to appreciate Marty's
literary achievement in that respect and be better able to perceive literary
technique.  Secondly, in order to write their own short piece, they will by
next week have had to come to a sufficient understanding of their species in
order to construct a day or few days in the life of it.  In other words, it
furthers their project along.

I was and still am a little uneasy about the "extinction project" as a major
assignment because technically it does not require the students to do any
literary criticism of the central texts on paper, and because it is worth so
much -- as only appropriate if they have to spend most of the course working
steadily on it -- it crowds out such work.  However, it will teach research
skills, how to write a proposal, annotated bibliographies, creative writing
(the POV mini-essay), structuring a fairly loosely defined project, writing
for the web (if that pans out), selecting images and sounds, etc.  Moreover,
we are doing textual analysis for the next few weeks as we discuss the novel
and the poetry book, and we are "doing theory" as we discuss the MacKinnon
and Van Dooren texts.  

Anyway, this is getting lengthy, and I really just offered this outline as a
way of chiming in and making a small contribution to the field in terms of
my current teaching. I am also teaching a directed readings course on
Animals in the Anthropocene, and I taught a course last term on Animality.
I have research under way on animals in the Alberta context, and I expect
that wherever you are situated in the world you have some idea of what is
going on in this province and the challenges more-than-human animals are
facing in the northern part of the region.

Pamela Banting