Computers in the Classroom? A Critique of the Digital Computer as A Metaphor for Mind

Because we can design computers that follow rules when they process information, and because apparently human beings also follow rules when they think, then [some argue that] there is some unitary sense in which the brain and the computer are functioning in a similar—and indeed maybe the same—fashion.

—John Searle

For many years, literacy theorists have sounded the call for a complex understanding of their subject. Though literacy is often viewed as the “simple” ability to read and write, many in academia are encouraging a perspective that recognizes its interactional aspects (see, for instance, Oxenham, Robinson, Gee, and Ogbu). These teachers and theorists have persuaded many in the academic community of this point of view, but perhaps the most important audience—the general public, specifically the parents of the students—remains unconvinced. The demand for school accountability in this country is growing, as seen in the political platforms of both major parties in this country for the past several years as well as President Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy. This demand is generally in the form of clamor for higher standardized test scores, a desire driven by panic-stricken reports detailing the ignorance of our youth (based on declining test scores) and the certain disastrous consequences (Copperman). These reports, given ominous titles like A Nation at Risk in 1983 or the current anxiety-inducing “Nation’s Report Card,” tend to fuel the notion that the numbers are the important thing, that our chief educational objective should be breaking 1400 on the SAT, despite many studies illustrating and many educators decrying the inadequacy of standardized tests to measure much more than students’ ability to completely fill in small circles (as indicated in Kaestle and Breland).

The conclusion we are to draw from this state of affairs is an unsurprising one: the general public has very different views on education than educators do. At the same time, the public wields a great amount of power (and rightly so, since their children are involved) over our educational system, exercised in the form of electing officials who write government checks. I propose the way around this difficulty is not removing the power from the people, but rather bringing their views more in line with “the experts” in the field.

This is clearly not going to be an easy task, but I believe we can take a great step in the right direction by looking briefly at the power of metaphor. In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that “metaphors allow us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another” (117). This generally occurs when we are trying to understand a concept that is fairly ambiguous; to help us grasp it, we search for a concept that is more concrete and attempt to explain it in those terms. The two concepts will necessarily not be identical, so when we explain one in terms of another, we are not going to be perfectly accurate. We are willing to put up with this for the sake of our understanding, and, in many cases, the presence of the metaphor is not forgotten; we are always aware, for instance, that time is not actually flying. There are instances, however, when metaphors become so entrenched in our language that we begin to mistake the metaphor for the reality, and it is my contention that this phenomenon is at the heart of our troubles with literacy. Specifically, Americans have gotten used to the idea that the mind is a digital computer, and this idea has had a negative impact on literacy theorists’ attempts to introduce a complex understanding of the subject.

The notion that the mind is a digital computer has been around for nearly half a century since artificial intelligence researchers began supposing that a computer could potentially duplicate all the actions of the brain. In the beginning, there was certainly nothing wrong with this idea; as John Searle has pointed out, this is simply the latest in a long line of explanatory metaphors:

Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured the brain was a telephone switchboard. (‘What else could it be?’) I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told that some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. (Science, 44)

The danger has come in the past few decades; as computers have come to resemble, and in certain areas outperform, our brains (in a way that catapults certainly never did), we have been much more accepting of the metaphor as an actual physical explanation. Indeed, cognitive scientists have formulated what is called the “computational theory of mind”; Steven Pinker describes it as the idea that “beliefs and desires are information, incarnated as configurations of symbols. The symbols are physical states of bits of matter, like chips in a computer or neurons in the brain” (25). Scholars that have PhDs in fields like artificial intelligence or cognitive psychology certainly understand the limitations of such a metaphor; Pinker himself qualifies his statement: “The claim is not that the brain is like commercially available computers. Rather, the claim is that brains and computers embody intelligence for some of the same reasons” (26–27). Most of us, however, do not have Pinker’s level of expertise, and the more we hear about speech-recognition programs for our PCs and see Deep Blue beating Gary Kasparov at chess, the more likely we are to fully accept the idea that our brains really are computers. The effects of this metaphor are often quite subtle, but I believe they are pervasive and influential. I claim a substantial percentage of American parents have come to believe that the minds of their children can be taught in ways fundamentally similar to programming a digital computer, and this belief is having serious effects on our education strategies.

These effects come from extending the mind-as-digital-computer metaphor to cover learning. If we want to improve the capacity of a computer, the method is simple and straightforward: we load a program or upgrade the memory. Furthermore, a single set of instructions will work perfectly for any computer of a similar type. To the extent that we believe our minds are simply digital computers, we are also led to some questionable ideas about teaching. We are led to believe that literacy is an easily identifiable thing that students either have or do not have. We determine whether or not they have it by running a (standardized) test, and if they do not have it, we can simply give it to them. We are also led to believe that imparting this literacy “program” is basically the same for all students; once we determine the proper method, it will work universally.[1]

I claim that our stubborn insistence on this metaphor has reinforced three distinct educational ideas: 1) because one virus-checker can diagnose an unlimited number of machines using a simple objective test, we believe standardized tests are effective measures of achievement; 2) because a word processor can be successfully installed with or without a spreadsheet program, we believe that composition can be successfully bracketed off from the other disciplines; and 3) because identical copies of a CD-ROM can load the same data on any brand of PC, we believe a single educational strategy can reach a student of almost any cultural background. These are notions that rhetoric and composition scholars (among others in academia) have been trying to overthrow for quite some time (see Crowley for an excellent discussion of this struggle), and the good news is that some headway has been made: a recent Public Agenda report indicates that, though 92 percent of parents and 87 percent of teachers believe that students should be required to pass a standardized test to graduate, only 22 percent of parents believe that test scores are “the best way to measure achievement” with most (61 percent) believing that classroom work and homework offer the best indicator. The latter two beliefs, however, remain common, and it is important that we, as writing instructors, confront these issues. Thorough, academic explanations of cause-and-effect in student learning have not yet been effective, so I am suggesting we try a new approach: attack the problem at the source. Since the digital computer metaphor strongly reinforces those beliefs, an examination of that metaphor could help rhet/comp scholars deal more directly with them. Thus, in this paper, I will conduct an analysis of the fitness of our current metaphor for mind, and I will show that much of the latest research in artificial intelligence argues against the reality of that model. To accomplish this goal, I will first examine the theoretical background of digital computing; I will then describe two of the most influential objections to that theory; and I will conclude by suggesting approaches writing instructors can employ in the classroom to reduce the pervasiveness of this counter-productive metaphor for mind.

This argument will necessarily be a complex one, and many of the details will be unfamiliar to most rhet/comp specialists. But I believe an understanding of the issues at hand can go a long way toward success in our drive to assist our students in obtaining the rhetorical skills they need and to provide the American electorate with a more sophisticated view of literacy for them and for their children. In this endeavor, I hope to be accurate and persuasive, but I also hope to present the argument in a way with which non-specialists can be comfortable. If this notion of mine—changing Americans’ minds about education by changing their metaphors for mind—is to work, it must be accessible to those unfamiliar with the subject of artificial intelligence. With that in mind, I will quickly define some of my terms.

Classical v. Quantum Physics : Classical physics is used to explain the behavior of objects that are roughly the size of cannonballs. When I say “roughly,” I am intentionally giving myself a fair amount of leeway; in this context, objects are roughly cannonball-sized if they are anywhere between the size of a water molecule and the size of the earth. Objects on either side of this cannonball-ness require quantum physics (if smaller) or relativity (if larger).[2] Thus, digital computers, and all their inner workings, fall squarely in the realm of classical physics; if we want to claim that the mind is a digital computer (and some of us clearly do), we are claiming that it can be understood and duplicated (and that all of its important parts can be understood and duplicated) using only classical physics. I am arguing that human-like intelligence cannot be re-created on a digital computer, and, more generally, that a thorough understanding of mind is not possible using only classical physics.

Consciousness, Mind, and Intelligence : In philosophical circles, there is a clear lack of consensus regarding the meanings of these terms, and I do not find it particularly easy to draw sharp boundaries for them, either. Fortunately, my discussion does not depend as much on an independent meaning of each term as it does the relationship the terms have with each other. I see mind as the housing of any sort of consciousness, and consciousness as a necessary prerequisite of intelligence. Thus, the real issue for me is consciousness: if that is present, there must be a mind, and we must understand it on the way to understanding intelligence. As I discuss the issues, I will keep focused on what aspects are needed to explain consciousness, as opposed to either mind or intelligence.

The Theoretical Foundations of Digital Computing

In 1928, a British mathematician named David Hilbert suggested that one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics was what he called the halting problem.[3] Eight years later, Alan Turing, at the tender age of 25, solved it—sort of. Turing actually proved that Hilbert’s halting problem could never be solved, and his proof was so thorough and so persuasive that it quickly settled the debate and now, more than seventy-five years later, not even mathematicians think much about the halting problem. But the paper in which the proof appeared, “On Computable Numbers,” remains important to this day because in it, as a vehicle to establish his proof, Turing developed the idea of a Turing machine.

The Turing machine employs (theoretically) a series of squares on a tape; in each square there can exist one of two possible markings—let us say a 0 or 1. An apparatus moves along the tape reading each square; it either changes the marking to its opposite or leaves it the same. In Turing’s paper, he demonstrated the ability of this machine to perform any computation for which it could be given instructions. Earlier, an Austrian mathematician named Kurt Gödel had proven that any message that can be symbolized (for instance, a list of directions) can be translated into numbers, or, more specifically, into a series of 0s and1s (a process which later came to be called Gödel-numbering). Turing, together with Alonzo Church, combined this conclusion with his own work to formulate the Church-Turing thesis: any computation that can be carried out by mechanical means can be performed by some Turing machine. This led to Turing’s conception of the Universal Turing Machine, a machine capable of performing any computable function. Turing did not live to witness the effect his theories would have, but now the entire world is familiar with them: modern digital computers are based on the theory he described over 70 years ago.

Clearly, then, Turing Machines are very powerful instruments, but we want to know exactly what they are capable of. We will be concerned with three relevant features: they contain an apparatus capable of considering a single piece of input at any one time; their potential input is unrestricted, as is their output; and they are capable of performing (in principle) any computation which can be carried out by mechanical means. Taken together, these concepts have led many to assume Universal Turing Machines generally (and their modern instantiations as digital computers particularly) possess the same capacities as the human mind. Turing himself believed this; in 1950 he published a paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in which he described a test whereby one of his machines’ intelligence could be measured in relation to a person’s.[4] Furthermore, Turing’s work is clearly reliant on classical physics; to the extent that a Turing machine can explain consciousness, then, we must accept that consciousness is a classical phenomenon.

Despite the obvious power possible with a Turing machine, it has clear limitations. As mentioned previously, Turing’s initial exposition of his theory was in a paper which explained the impossibility of using it to solve Hilbert’s halting problem. This restriction points to the Turing machine’s single greatest liability: its inability to consider more than one piece of information at any one time. In this way, a Turing machine is a serial processor; it must do one thing at a time and finish it completely before moving on to the next item on the list. If the machine wants to remember what happened at any time previously, it must go back to that particular location on the tape; the reading apparatus itself has no memory capabilities .

Problems with the Turing Machine Duplicating Human Thought

Any theory is bound to have detractors, but as Turing’s thought experiment moved from conjecture to reality, more and more scientists and philosophers began realizing the potential power of the Turing machine. As artificial intelligence research became a serious endeavor in the late 1950s and early 1960s, optimism was high that this time our metaphor for mind could become more than just a figure of speech. Many researchers issued bold predictions about digital computers equaling and surpassing human intelligence in rather short periods of time; even when these predictions fell short, the focus was on the progress, and nearly everyone involved with AI work saw intelligent Turing machines as a question of “when,” not “if.”

But progress slowed considerably in the 1970s, and the critics’ voices began getting louder and more influential. There have been many individuals with many different critiques of Turing machines; in this piece, I will represent the group by describing the grounds of two of the most common objections: semantics and incompleteness.

The Turing Machine’s Trouble with Semantics

The Turing machine received one of its first serious challenges as a potential bearer of consciousness over 40 years after Turing first proposed it. In 1980, John Searle wrote an article, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” in which he proposed a thought experiment which, he claimed, showed the inability of a Turing machine to possess intelligence. He called his thought experiment the Chinese Room, and it consists of a person inside a room communicating with the outside world by passing cards back and forth through a slot in one wall. The cards to be passed have various assortments of “squiggles” and “squaggles” on them. These designs on the cards are unintelligible to the person in the room, but that person has an instruction book telling her which card to pass back through the slot when a certain card is received. As it turns out, the squiggles and squaggles on the cards represent actual Chinese characters, and, as the person passes them back and forth, she is holding an actual conversation with Chinese speakers on the outside. Searle then asks his readers to imagine if you were that person, would you actually understand Chinese? The answer is, he hopes, no, and he argues that a digital computer, in all its complexity, is no more than the person inside the Chinese Room. Manipulating meaningless symbols according to rules it does not understand does not make the machine intelligent.

For Searle, formally trained as a linguist, the key term is semantics, and it is precisely this that digital computers lack. He is even uncomfortable allowing that computers employ “formal symbol manipulation” since the word “symbol” implies something is being symbolized. But for computers, there is no meaning at all in the symbols; “In the linguistic jargon, they have only a syntax, but no semantics” (Searle, “Programs,” 83). If the computers are simply moving around meaningless symbols, there cannot possibly be any intentionality (which, for Searle, is mandatory for intelligence), just as the person in the Chinese Room cannot be said to have any actual intentionality even if one of the cards she passes through the slot reads “I want a hamburger.” Any meaning derived from the conversation would be inferred by those with whom she was conversing since the person in the room had no idea what any of the cards actually meant. For digital computers, the story is the same: “such intentionality as computers appear to have is solely in the minds of those who program them and use them” (Searle, “Programs,” 83).

Another perspective on this issue of semantics can come from a look back at Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. There he argued that a word’s linguistic value is “not determined merely by that concept or meaning for which it is a token. It must also be assessed against comparable values, by contrast with other words. The content of a word is determined in the final analysis not by what it contains but by what exists outside it” (Saussure 114). Thus, words have meaning for us as a result of our consideration of many simultaneous concepts. As we understand all the things a word is not, we begin to form a picture of what it is. In this way, linguistic value is an emergent property; a single concept emerges from many others.

This is something of which a Turing machine is not capable, even in principle. If we return to our discussion of Turing machines, we recall that they are set up in such a way that the apparatus considers a single square on the tape at any one time: it is a serial processor. But Saussure reminds us that we do not achieve semantics by thinking about one concept at a time; we consider many concepts, and the single one emerges from them. Digital computers have no way of dealing with this difficulty.

The Effects of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem

A complaint of similar character to Searle’s was articulated in 1989 by Roger Penrose. In his book The Emperor’s New Mind, he put his considerable ethos behind an argument that had been made in many forms, dating back to a 1961 article by J.R. Lucas, “Minds, Machines, and Gödel.” Though distinct in some very important ways, Penrose and Lucas both argued that a Turing machine is necessarily a victim of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Gödel’s landmark 1931 paper (later published in its own volume) not only established the existence of Gödel-numbering (mentioned above), but put an end once and for all to the Russell-Whitehead project of deriving all mathematical truth from a small set of axioms in the Principia Mathematica. Gödel’s discovery was that any formal set of mathematical propositions will be either incomplete or inconsistent; in Gödel’s own words, “If c be a given recursive, consistent class of formulae, then the prepositional formula which states that c is consistent is not c-provable” (70). The intricacies of the math used to prove this theorem are beyond the scope of this paper, but, since its original publication, there have been no serious challenges to it, and it is now wholly accepted in the mathematical community.

The implications of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, however, are not wholly accepted by any large group of mathematicians, but Roger Penrose is staking his claim with a handful of others in arguing that Gödel’s work demonstrates the incapacity of a Turing machine to possess human intelligence. The argument hinges on the difference between formal and non-formal systems; a formal system is one that begins with a set of axioms and, from those axioms, produces propositions which are true because they can be created from the system. A system is consistent if it never produces two contradictory statements, and it is complete if it can produce any statement expressible in its language. Turing machines are without question formal systems, and, as such, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem applies to them; in the mathematical jargon, Turing machines cannot understand the truth of their own Gödel-sentences.[5] Penrose’s claim is that human minds are not formal systems, and thereby not bound by the theorem. This exhibits a qualitative difference between human intelligence and the possibilities of Turing machine intelligence: “Whatever (consistent) formal system is used for arithmetic, there are statements that we [humans] can see are true but which do not get assigned the truth-value true by the formalist’s proposed procedure [embodied in Turing machines]” (Penrose, Emperor’s, 108). Admittedly, this is a rather small result, and its implications may seem limited to a very small set of circumstances, but, Penrose argues, it indicates a fundamental obstacle that Turing machines cannot overcome. Perceiving the truth of a Gödel statement is something a computational machine cannot in principle do; since humans can perceive the truth of these statements, there is at least one part of our consciousness that cannot be duplicated by a Turing machine.

In many ways, Penrose’s argument against Turing machines is like Searle’s. The inherent incompleteness Gödel demonstrated in formal systems [6] is structurally similar to the deficiency that denies a Turing machine semantics; it implies an inability to consider more than one thing at a time. We can perceive the truth of Gödel sentences because we can understand the implications of an infinite sequence, and we can do this because we can consider lists as more than simply individual items. A Turing machine does not have this ability; when considering an infinite sequence, it must take one item at a time, never grasping the connection between them.

Confronting the Metaphor

Thus far, I have focused on making the case that the digital computer is a poor metaphor for the human mind, but there is more at stake in this discussion than the future direction of AI research. As writing instructors, we are confronted by students, parents, principals, university administrators, and politicians who (though often subconsciously) wholly accept this metaphor and many of the implications that go with it. Many of the struggles we have with those who hold simplistic views of education and assessment can be traced directly or indirectly to this inaccurate figure of speech. And I believe if we can change opinions about this metaphor, we can change opinions about literacy.

Of course, to change opinions about the metaphor, we must first identify it, and that is not always a simple task. Explanatory metaphors are like warrants in the Toulmin schema: they are rarely stated, but, if faulty, can cause all kinds of problems. No one ever comes right out and says they believe in the SAT because they think our brains are just meaty PCs; they simply hold their beliefs as long as this basic assumption is not addressed. And like an unstated assumption, we can find this metaphor by looking for its implications, namely the three beliefs about education described above: standardized tests are effective measures of achievement, composition can be successfully bracketed off from the other disciplines, and a single educational strategy can reach a student of almost any cultural background. When we see one or more of these ideas in someone who has some influence over our teaching, we may find it necessary to address the core of the disagreement: the inaccurate metaphor for mind.

Confronting this metaphor will require that we familiarize ourselves with a discussion of the problem that will be palatable to non-technical audiences. To that end, I suggest the following three points that can help explain why this metaphor is unsound, i.e., why classical physics and the digital computer are unfit to understand consciousness.

1. There is a history of conflict between consciousness and classical physics. As Henry Stapp explains, “Classical mechanics arose from the banishment of consciousness from our conception of the physical universe. Hence it should not be surprising to find that the readmission of consciousness requires going beyond that theory.” Classical physics has never quite known what to do with the mind, a confusion ultimately expressed in Descartes’ mind-body duality. We are now rightly skeptical of this binary, but Newton’s laws are no better equipped to describe consciousness now than they were in the 17 th century.
2. Classical physics is no longer in the business of providing fundamental explanations. As the twentieth century progressed, classical physics lost more and more of its grip on its explanatory power of the physical universe: beginning with electromagnetism, quantum theory has taken over more and more of the territory once apportioned to Newtonian physics. Classical physics is clearly still useful, but physicists now accord it little more than “approximation” status. It does not, then, seem reasonable that the handful of Newtonian principles that explain digital computers can also explain human consciousness.
3. Consciousness is going global. One of the biggest difficulties classical physics has in attempting to explain consciousness is its inability to handle non-local effects. Stapp reminds us that “the fundamental principle in classical mechanics is that any physical entity can be decomposed into a collection of simple independent local elements each of which only interacts with its immediate neighbors.” But consciousness is much more holistic than that; there is a qualitative difference between thoughts and the neuron firings that cause them which cannot be explained by strict classical reductionism.

Armed with this information, we must be prepared to talk about this problem with anyone who will listen. The coming years are only going to feature more debates over writing and literacy and their place in education, and I believe a discussion of this metaphor can be a helpful component of such debates. We have reason for optimism: the Public Agenda figures mentioned above, and the (relatively) rhetorically sophisticated writing assessment employed by the Department of Education for the “Nation’s Report Card.” There are still gains to be made, however, and I believe some attention on this metaphor will move the conversation in the right direction. Even though this strategy may seem to require a discussion too technical to hold our audience’s attention, in my experience, most non-specialists are willing to give such an argument a chance. There is a fair amount of public interest in artificial intelligence, and we all want to understand our minds better; an explanation of how we think about our consciousness and how we could understand it more is often very effective.

The Implications for the Writing Classroom

Of course, as writing teachers we are able to do more than simply talk about this approach to literacy and writing: we are able to implement it in our classrooms. I would like to suggest three specific activities built around this more complex view of mind that can help us better serve our students as they become skilled writers: hypertext writing, real-world projects, and assignments built around our students’ own experiences.

Hypertext Writing

It may seem odd that one of my suggestions for overcoming the metaphor of mind as a computer is turning to computers in the classroom. Hypertext writing, however, can be a way for students to see that writing and literacy are much more than sitting alone in front of a blank page (or screen). Hypertext writing invites (almost demands) collaboration, and this collaboration takes place at all stages of the writing process and by writers with widely divergent ideas about writing. Ideally, these writers may not even know each other: they could be in different classes, different schools, or different states. This kind of writing will necessarily change the way our students think about composition; as Johndan Johnson-Eilola points out, hypertext writing can help demonstrate how “the activities of writing and reading are transformed and appropriated by widely divergent communities, each of which reconstructs general characteristics of hypertext in relationship to that community’s goals” (7). As the writing process becomes more collaborative, our students will begin to understand that theirs is not the only way of writing and theirs is not the only way of seeing the world.

Real-World Projects

One of the biggest obstacles in the writing classroom is the lack of exigence for the students: their writing seems important to no one, least of all, it turns out, the students themselves. Many advanced college composition courses (particularly those in professional and technical communication) deal with this by offering outreach programs in which instructors can connect their students with actual writing projects for an actual audience. I propose we pursue these opportunities earlier, in the first-year writing course and possibly even in junior or senior-level courses in high school. There are many advantages to these programs, one of which the way students begin thinking about invention. For many beginning writers, the pre-writing stage consists of a handful of activities (freewriting, brainstorming, bubble diagrams, etc.) that they endure no matter what type of writing they plan to do: it’s like the start-up sequence for Windows. Real-life writers are much more flexible because the rhetorical situations often dictate the type of writing and pre-writing that will be the most helpful. Getting young writers into these kinds of situations will help them understand the reason we run through a variety of approaches to writing—because there really are different types of writing and different types of literacy.

Assignments Built Around Students’ Own Experiences

Reading and writing are very personal activities for our students; much of their identity is tied up in the experiences they have had constructing their own literacy. Daniel Wagner argues we must take this into account as we interact with our students, that for them becoming a better writer “means change not only in a set of skills . . . but also in behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs that define each individual, the rest of his or her community, and, ultimately, the structure of communities and societies themselves” (300). We can make this transition easier for them if we are more flexible in the subject matter of their essays. There are some advantages to constructing themed first-year composition courses in which all students write essays on the same topics: I have taught many of those courses myself. But while we gain some coherence in class lectures and save some time while grading, we lose some of our students’ ability to focus on the rhetorical principles we want them to learn while they are familiarizing themselves with what may be a completely new topic. If we build our assignments around specific skills and principles we want them to learn, rather than around a particular topic, we allow them to more easily negotiate the difficult transition from beginning to experienced writers.[7]

Conclusion

Changing a metaphor is a large undertaking, especially for one as entrenched as the mind as a digital computer. The fight we have ahead—in schools, in legislatures, and in public forums—is sure to be a long one, but it is just as sure to be an important one. I believe a discussion of metaphors, mind, and artificial intelligence can help us, in some small way, change the way we think about literacy and change the way we think about writing. Similarly, an awareness of the differences inherent in our students and in the way they achieve literacy will make us better, more effective teachers of writing.

Notes

1 It is clearly true that these ideas are older than digital computers, but though this metaphor may not have originally inspired these ideas, it has strengthened them in a time when many of our older notions are being updated. Thus, they can be viewed as being at the “source” of the trouble.

2 Relativity is usually classified with classical physics, but it is much newer than (and quite different from) most aspects of classical theory. I have thus left the two separate, but the distinction is not a vital one for this argument, anyway.

3 Hilbert’s halting problem is a formal symbolization of the attempt to determine whether a search will end. For instance, an algorithm can be written to search for the largest prime number; however, since there is no largest prime number, that algorithm will never yield a result. Hilbert wanted to know if an algorithm could be written determining if a search would end without having to carry out the search. Turing proved that is impossible.

4 The Turing Test is a blind test of a computer’s responses to inquiry. Without knowing if he is communicating with a person or a computer, an interrogator is allowed to question the other party for a given length of time. If at the end of the time the interrogator cannot tell whether it was a person or computer, the computer is said to be intelligent.

5 One of the results Gödel demonstrated is the existence, for every formal system, of a Gödel-sentence for the system. In rough terms, a system’s Gödel-sentence states “I am not a theorem of this system” (Hofstadter 272). Caught in its own formal rigidity, the system can do nothing; if it can prove the theorem, it has proved a falsehood and is thereby inconsistent. If it cannot prove the theorem, the system is incomplete because there exists a true theorem it cannot prove.

6 Mathematically, this “inherent” deficiency is known as ω-incompleteness. Hofstadter defines a system with this particular feature as one in which “all the strings in a pyramidal family are theorems, but the universally quantified summarizing string is not a theorem” (222). In other words, a system that could prove that every prime number in particular is not the largest prime number, but never prove in general that there is no largest prime number would be ω-incomplete.

7 An additional consequence of these varied essays is to expose your students to a range of new cultures and experiences when they workshop each others’ drafts. I have had several students comment on how much they learned simply by reading what their fellow students had written about themselves or their backgrounds.

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—. Minds, Brains, and Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984.

—. The Mystery of Consciousness. New York: The New York Review of Books, 1997.

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Composing Dialogues for Critical Thinking

Few contemporary scientific texts are written in the dialogue form used by earlier scientists such as Newton, Galileo and Boyle; additionally, the extended form of dialogue that exists in professional journals is usually not visible to the novice student. Therefore, students often are not actively engaged in the language and rhetoric of science. As Jay Lemke points out in his book Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values: “Talking science is not the totality of doing science. But very little science gets done, or could get done, without the semantic resources of language, and particularly the thematic patterns and genre structures specific to science.”[1] Exploring the resources of dialogue in scientific argument improves student understanding and skills in both science and language.

In their essay “Dialogue as Data,” Kathleen Hogan and Joellen Fisherkeller summarize four phases of scientific inquiry: forming questions and hypotheses; designing investigations and generating data; interpreting data and integrating information; and finally, building and communicating arguments. It is in this last phase, often neglected in traditional science education, that writing can be particularly helpful. According to Hogan and Fisherkeller, this stage of inquiry teaches students to “ . . . persuade a community of peers of the validity and significance of scientific findings; [and to] use critical response skills to judge, evaluate, and defend knowledge claims.”[2] Explicitly pursuing this phase of inquiry can help students broaden their concept of science. In addition, non-science majors can be more readily engaged in the ideas and practices of science through the process of building and communicating arguments. General students will identify with the logic and drama of dialogue even before they have a thorough grounding in the scientific content.

The project described below is a collaborative writing assignment designed for a team-taught interdisciplinary course for junior and senior undergraduate students representing a variety of science and non-science academic majors. In addition to offering an opportunity for assessing science understanding, this project supports particularly well the development of voice, the strengthening of peer response and collaborative processes, and the growth of critical thinking skills.

Teaching Context

This assignment was designed for the writing-centered course “The Literature of Natural Science” at Willamette University, a private four-year liberal arts institution in Salem, Oregon. Willamette is home to 2500 students, 1860 of whom are undergraduates; the remainder are in graduate programs in law, administration, or education. In the College of Liberal Arts, the student-faculty ratio is 11:1, and writing-centered classes average 15—20 students. “The Literature of Natural Science” fulfills one of four writing-centered requirements for Willamette students and is designed especially for upper-division students who have already completed their general education requirements in natural science and literature.

We set about exploring the nature of scientific communication with a group of upper-level undergraduates. Our plan included both an historical and a contemporary component: We read “classics” of science such as Galileo’s Dialogue, Newton’s Principia and Darwin’s Origin of Species along with papers on DNA and Plate Tectonics. While our primary goal was to subject a group of primary scientific texts to literary and rhetorical analysis, we also searched for comparisons and links between the historic and contemporary texts. For all the texts, we explored how the authors used conventions of discourse, stylistic and literary devices, and structure as argumentative tools.

We also expected the students to bridge the divide between science and the humanities. The dialogue assignment is an ideal device toward this end. Science majors understand the concepts underlying a scientific issue and bring a facility with mathematical language and visual representations of data, while humanities students appreciate the use of metaphor and its function and can analyze structure, voice, and persuasive devices. The assignment encourages students, working in small groups, to teach each other in order to create a cohesive and compelling dialogue. Thus, the dialogue assignment is an explicit attempt to meet one of the goals of the course, to have the students think on both sides of the divide. In fact, some students were so taken with the possibilities of the dialogue that they chose to write their final research papers for the course in the dialogue form.

Because this was a writing-centered course, we had an obligation to include in our work certain writing activities, such as informal writing, peer editing, multiple-drafts, and writing to learn. The dialogue assignment addressed several of the writing goals. The unusual form required the students to be conscious of the writing process and to pay attention to the rhetorical devices employed in their argument. For most students, the draft of the dialogue was a writing to learn experience as they articulated a position through the voice of a character. Peer editing and revision are natural and necessary consequences of group writing, so the dialogue assignment served us well from both a process and a content perspective.

Dialogue Assignment

As the second formal writing assignment in “The Literature of Natural Science” we asked students to work in groups to create a dialogue about a selected controversial topic. With this assignment we hoped to develop awareness of rhetorical and argumentative strategies in scientific texts, to expose students to a contemporary scientific issue, and to create an opportunity for successful collaborative writing.

When the students began this assignment, they had already read Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and Robert Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist. The dialogues were chosen as the first scientific readings because they are first chronologically and because the form is more accessible to students than contemporary scientific genres. Galileo’s Dialogue was particularly instructive with his descriptions of observations and experiments, and his use of believable characterizations. Science students and humanities students clearly read the texts differently; science students tended to look immediately and almost exclusively to content, while the humanities students looked to style to find meaning. In classroom discussions, the students helped each other to understand how style and content reinforce each other to construct a larger meaning. The texts therefore became more comprehensible to all students. Classroom discussions also included the philosophical, historical and political contexts of Galileo and Boyle, the scientific import of the works, and the relative success of the rhetorical techniques they employed. The dialogue assignment thus helped make scientific ideas accessible to humanities students and clearly put science within an historical and social context for scientists.

The interchanges between students, tentative at first, became lively discussions as the students learned to communicate. They discussed the use of setting and character in dialogue, the incorporation of evidence of various kinds, the use of examples from common experience, the use of metaphor and expressive language, and other rhetorical strategies in the classic texts. These readings and discussions provided examples of techniques that students could then apply in creating their own dialogues.

Once we had studied the dialogue form sufficiently to establish some patterns and expectations, we next introduced the contemporary scientific issue which would provide the content for the students’ own dialogues. We tried to choose a controversial issue that would naturally bring the students to their work with a variety of viewpoints. In our most recent version of the course we focused on the Human Genome Project and gene patenting. We used short articles from Science and The New Yorker, and information from the web site of the National Human Genome Research Institute to introduce students to the topic. Here is the preliminary assignment description:

The general topic for your dialogues is “Patenting the Human Genome.” We have given you several readings to begin your thinking on this issue. You may wish to do more research to contribute to your dialogue; remember, however, that our aim is not for you to come to a full and distinct understanding of the issue, but to experiment with ways of using dialogue as a form to explore controversial issues in science.

Groups will meet in the Writing Center classroom to draft your dialogues in a group writing program called Aspects. You should have done your preliminary reading before these drafting sessions, and it might help to have some idea, at least individually, about what kind of character you would like to represent in the dialogue.

Below are some criteria we will use in evaluating your polished dialogues. These are meant to be suggestive and illustrative, not exhaustive; you may have additional creative ideas about content and format. You should, however, give some thought to each of these categories:

Use of characters: definition of character and role; consistency of the personality, assumptions, theoretical position of each character.

Setting: If you wish, you may set the scene to some degree through the dialogue; where are we? who are we?

Variety of argumentative techniques: examples and anecdotes; “thought experiments”; data from article or elsewhere; mathematics or statistics; deductive logic.. . . . etc.

Variety of persuasive techniques: emotional content, figures of speech, links to common experience, appeal to other authorities, use of character movement to encourage reader movement in ideas. . . . . . etc.

Written expression: mechanical accuracy and elegant choice of language are essential; try to make good use of the dialogue potential by developing a distinct voice for each character; exploit the figurative potential of the language as appropriate.

Audience awareness: the dialogue should be accessible to the inexpert audience; you might imagine some critical audience such as Galileo faced, if you want to make things more challenging!

Overall organization: Your exposition should take advantage of the non-linear potential of dialogue structure; points can be woven together in a flexible fashion, the movement of the dialogue can even surprise the reader on occasion or be interrupted by physical realities of the setting in which the dialogue takes place.

Conclusion: you should reach some tentative resolution of the issues you consider in your dialogue

Along with the completed dialogue, each member of the group should turn in a one-page self-reflection on the process of creating the dialogue. What things worked well in developing the dialogue? What was most difficult? What were the steps in your process? What did you learn from it? How would you characterize your own contribution to the group? How would you describe the process of the group?

We assigned students in groups of four, striving for some balance between science and humanities students in each group. Please note that we began our group work with a software program called Aspects.[3] This program supports collaborative writing artfully, and though it is not necessary to the project, it does provide interesting learning opportunities. Students used Aspects in a networked Macintosh classroom where they were able to work simultaneously on the same document while having a chatbox open on the screen to support and retain conversation around the document. Students responded differently to this experience; some found it exciting and reported [4] positive results from Aspects:

It really gave us a good feel for what issues were going to be important to us and what we needed to learn more about.

The Chatbox really got the dialogue flowing between us. . . . We were all able to raise issues that weren’t readily apparent to the other parties. We were also able to incorporate the ideas that were important to each specific member without sacrificing the “group” structure within which we were working.

It was easy for people to get their thoughts down without having to wait. If you saw a point you wanted to respond to, you could do it right away. We were able to get more substantive material using this method.

Others preferred to use more conventional methods of creating their dialogues such as working on a single computer in a round-robin fashion, tape-recording and transcribing their dialogue, or drafting individually and integrating their work. Whatever method a group used, they reported positive learning about writing, voice, revision, collaboration, argumentation, and critical thinking through developing the dialogues:

I think that we’ve each learned much about our individual writing styles and personalities. By writing in [character] voices similar to our own, we explored different ways of presenting or arguing a point.

Revising posed an interesting challenge because if we changed one argument, often the entire dialogue was affected.

Writing the dialogue was rewarding because it required us to utilize various forms of persuasion. I tend to rely most heavily on logic and statistical data. I enjoyed learning how to employ other persuasive techniques.

Overall, I think I learned to be less shy about my writing and to not worry so much about being perfect.

Developing a voice is one of the most difficult things for me to do in my writing and I think that this assignment forced me to focus on that aspect of the writing process.

[For revision] what worked best was going through the dialogue page by page, rearranging the arguments, taking out unnecessary or repetitive comment, and adding statements where necessary.

I learned that one has to approach dialogue with an open mind if one wants the other sides to be objective and open.

I actually learned a great deal about the Human Genome Project and the patenting process, both of which I had little knowledge about prior to the assignment.

While our particular assignment is concerned with readings and issues in the sciences, similar assignments could easily be structured in other areas of inquiry. Colleagues in our own institution have success with various forms of dialogue in the departments of Politics, Philosophy, History, and various cross-disciplinary courses. In this assignment it is crucial to provide some model of literary, journalistic, or documentary dialogue so that students begin their work with a sense of the possibilities of form.[5] Dialogue is an especially exciting rhetorical pattern because it provides structured practice with collaborative writing and strengthens student practices of critical thinking by inviting them to consider alternative points of view, encouraging them to analyze assumptions of a position, and training them to perceive complexity and tolerate uncertainty.

Critical Context

The critical background for this assignment comes from studies of the dialogue as a literary and rhetorical form, from studies of student collaborative work, and from analysis of critical thinking skills.

The dialogue as a form is particularly suitable to support growth in writing that comes from working in a collaborative format. Such work makes clear the active and constructivist component of writing [6]; students see how audience affects tone and how different voices struggle to compromise with each other. For example, students working on the human genome dialogues found that they often disagreed about the worth and application of the scientific research they were discussing. Their disagreements drove them deeper into their research so that they could present their opinions clearly in the dialogue, and they struggled to show how their arguments were formulated from scientific evidence. Likewise, they found that in the dialogue, a simple statement of scientific evidence was not enough; they needed to pay attention to the order, context, and style of presentation in order to be persuasive.

Although contemporary students find the formality of the classic dialogues odd, as they work with this assignment they discover the contemporary analogs of the dialogue form in the short story, radio, television and film. Students had the opportunity to present a reading of part of their dialogue to the class. Rather than imagining themselves in the comfortable garden setting of Galileo’s characters, some of them envisioned a talk-show roundtable or a government hearing as the setting. They combined a familiar venue with the argumentative rigor of the classic dialogue.

The value of the historic texts in providing the model for these dialogues was considerable. The combination of story with exposition, of scientific content with familiar character types, was energizing for student readers. In addition, the discovery that some scientific “facts” had changed in the intervening centuries pointed to the contingent nature of scientific constructs. As the American Association for the Advancement of Science stated in its report The Liberal Art of Science, “The historical approach has a distinct advantage in that it does not require much initial scientific or sophisticated mathematical skill. This approach allows for the gradual development of a scientific knowledge base and science-related skills.”[7] For the general student, the encounter with classic dialogues had a positive effect on scientific literacy as well as on writing skills.

Students working on this assignment also appeared to gain strength in all aspects of collaborative skills as described by Kris Bosworth in her article “Developing Collaborative Skills in College Students.”[8] These include interpersonal skills, group building/management, inquiry skills, conflict resolution, and presentation. Depending on the goals of a particular course or instructor, these collaborative skills can be highlighted or de-emphasized. If these goals are central to the assignment, it would be useful to provide specific assessment of them through skills checklists such as those described by Sharon Farago Cramer in her essay “Assessing Effectiveness in the Collaborative Classroom.”[9] Even if the development of collaborative skills is not a key goal of the assignment, some explicit attention to collaborative process is necessary to avoid delays and conflicts within the dialogue groups.

Key critical thinking skills are also developed in the dialogue assignment. The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal [10] defines critical thinking as a composite of five sub-abilities: the ability to define a problem; the ability to select pertinent information for the solution of a problem; the ability to recognize stated and unstated assumptions; the ability to formulate and select relevant and promising hypotheses; the ability to draw valid conclusions and judge the validity of inferences. We have found that developing a dialogue implicitly requires of students that they exercise and strengthen these skills. The analysis and writing of dialogue is particularly effective in helping students to discover overt and covert assumptions in their own and others’ thinking. Developing the dialogue as a group requires students to focus on arguments from several points of view, thus uncovering their foundations. The dialogues also provide an incentive for identifying the most relevant information and give students practical experience in drawing conclusions and inferences.

As a means for learning about science or other disciplinary content, the dialogue is engaging and effective; perhaps it is even more effective as a tool for developing confidence and tenacity in writing. The dialogue assignment allows students to work on aspects of persuasion, voice, revision, logic and inference in their writing in a situation where they are affectively invested in the material and are supported in their work by peers. As a means of developing skills in writing, collaboration, and critical thinking, the dialogue offers untapped opportunities in the classroom.

Notes

1 p. 122.

2 In Mintzes, Joel J., etal., eds. Assessing Science Understanding, pp. 97–98.

3 This program is published by Group Technologies, Inc. in Arlington, VA.

4 Please note that all student comments in this article are taken from reflective writing completed in “The Literature of Natural Science” in Spring, 1999.

5 For an interesting study of dialogue in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Michael Macovski’s Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse. A more specific study of Renaissance dialogue as it relates to Galileo can be found in Virginia Cox’s The Renaissance dialogue: Literary dialogue in its social and political contexts, Castiglione to Galileo.

6 For a brief and excellent summary of the constructivist view of collaborative writing based on work by Vygotsky, Smith and McGregor, see Jeanne Marcum Gerlach’s essay “Is This Collaboration?” in Collaborative Learning: Underlying Processes and Effective Techniques edited by Kris Bosworth and Sharon J. Hamilton, pp. 5–14.

7 p. 46.

8 p. 27 Bosworth and Hamilton, eds. Collaborative Learning: Underlying Processes and Effective Techniques.

9 pp. 69–81, Bosworth and Hamilton, eds.

10 See John E. McPeck, p. 23 ff., Teaching Critical Thinking, for a description of these skills and a discussion of opinions seeing critical thinking as a general ability or as a set of specific skills.

Works Cited

American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Liberal Art of Science: Agenda for Action. Washington, D.C.: AAAS, 1990.

Bosworth, Kris, and Hamilton, Sharon J., Eds. Collaborative Learning: Underlying Processes and Effective Techniques. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, No. 59. San Francisco: Jossey-Ball Publishers, Fall 1994.

Boyle, Robert. The Sceptical Chymist. Introduction by E. A. Moelwyn-Hughes. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1911.

 Cox, Virginia. The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Galilei, Galileo. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Trans. Stillman Drake. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

King, Patricia M., and Kitchener, Karen Strohm. Developing Reflective Judgment: Understanding and Promoting Intellectual Growth and Critical Thinking in Adolescents and Adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1994.

Lemke, Jay L. Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1990.

McPeck, John E. Teaching Critical Thinking: Dialogue and Dialectic. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1990.

Macovski, Michael. Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Mintzes, Joel J., etal., Eds. Assessing Science Understanding: A Human Constructivist View. San Diego: Academic Press, 2000.

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Composing Nature

Nature writing is perhaps the most American form of writing. It celebrates America’s wilderness and open spaces. It also laments America’s greed and exploitation of the environment. Perhaps most of all, nature writing touches our spirits, inspires us, and summons us.

In college writing courses, it seems as though more and more students are interested in writing about environmental, ecological, and outdoor issues. Their interest might be credited to a few different reasons. First, the environment is a high profile issue in the media. As a culture, Americans may be finally coming to terms with their wanton exploitation of the land and the limits of our natural resources. Second, in many ways, the new mark of American individualism is to be experienced in the outdoors. Outdoor activities like hiking, camping, rock climbing, mountain biking, fishing, and hunting have become synonymous with being an American. But perhaps the most important reason for our students’ heightened interest in the outdoor issues is the use of the environment as a locus out of which educators can teach a variety of subjects. Whereas diversity and gender issues served as focal points in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, today teachers at all levels have centralized environmental issues in their educational programs. Indeed, as the exigency of civil rights issues has leveled off, ecological awareness has become a powerful backdrop for education at all levels.

The environment is a ready-made subject in writing classrooms, and we find teachers at all levels encouraging students to write about nature and environmental issues. Ecological awareness appeals to students across the political spectrum. Some students can write about global warming, the importance of alternative energy sources, or the effects of pollution. Others can extol their enjoyment of hunting, fishing, or camping while arguing passionately for preserving wildlife habitat and restoring wetlands. Meanwhile, environmental issues offer cross-disciplinary writing topics for students in the arts, humanities, sciences, engineering, medicine, and other fields. In short, environmental issues provide a equitable meeting place for students from a variety of different backgrounds, interests, and ideologies. There are also many pedagogical advantages to bringing environmental issues into the writing classroom, as proposed by ecocomposition theory. The main advantage, we believe, is that ecological issues offer social and political contexts within which students can write and interact.

In this article, I first discuss a form of environmental writing called ‘nature writing,’ Later in the article, I offer situated learning strategies for bringing nature writing into the composition course. In most ways, writing about the environment is similar to writing about other subjects. In writing classes, students can learn how to compose descriptively or persuasively about environmental issues. But, as I argue in this article, nature writing invites us to go beyond description and persuasion. It invites us, as writers, to move the readers, inspire them. American nature writers—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Ann Zwinger, Edward Abbey, John Muir, and Annie Dillard, among numerous others—do more than simply describe natural settings or persuade us to act responsibly in the outdoors. They touch our spirits. Not suprisingly, many of our students also want to learn how they can effect their readers in this way. They want their writing to fully express their passion for the natural world. My aim in this article is to offer ways to bring nature writing fully into the composition classroom.

Defining Nature Writing

To begin, what is meant by nature writing? According to eco-critic Lawrence Buell, an “environmental text” is one that meets four criteria:

• The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.
• The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.
• Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation.
• Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text (7–8).

Thoreau is held up as Buell’s prototype environmental writer, and Walden is offered as the prototypical environmental text. Indeed, America has produced numerous writers who work within Buell’s guidelines, and there is a rich vein of American environmental writing extending back over two hundred years. Nevertheless, we believe nature writing, as a genre, goes beyond these four criteria. Nature writing somehow engages our imaginations by capturing the essence of landscapes, places, and wildlife—much as a portrait painter strives to “capture the soul” of a subject on canvas. It is this feeling of movement, or inspiration, that defines nature writing as a specific genre within the domain environmental texts.

What is it about nature writing that inspires the reader? It might help to look at a few examples, the first from contemporary writer Ann Zwinger’s Mysterious Lands.

Looking out over the pure sweep of seamless desert, I am surprised to realize that the easy landscapes stifle me—closed walls of forests, ceilings of boughs, neat-trimmed lawns, and ruffled curtains of trees hide the soft horizons. I prefer the absences and the big empties, where the wind ricochets from sand grain to mountain. I prefer the crystalline dryness and an unadulterated sky strewn from horizon to horizon with stars. I prefer the raw edges and the unfinished hems of the desert landscape. Desert is where I want to be when there are no more questions to ask. (132–33)

And, here is an example from John Muir’s The Mountains of California—

Most people like to look at mountain rivers, and bear them in mind; but few care to look at the winds, though far more beautiful and sublime; and though they become at times about as visible as flowing water [ . . . ] and when we look around over an agitated forest, we may see something of the wind that stirs it, by its effects upon the trees. Yonder it descends in a rush of water-like ripples, and sweeps over the bending pines from hill to hill. Nearer, we see detached plumes and leaves, now speeding by on level currents, now whirling in eddies, or, escaping over the edges of the whirls, soaring aloft on grand, upswelling domes of air, or tossing on flame-like crest. Smooth, deep currents, cascades, falls, and swirling eddies, sing around every tree and leaf, and over all the varied topography of the region with telling changes of form, like mountain rivers conforming to the features of their channels. (472)

One common characteristic of these passages is their appeal to the readers’ sense of style and eloquence. Perhaps the proper word might even be ‘grace.’ The words and phrasings are vivid, rich, and compelling. They fairly beg to be read aloud. Readers can see, hear, and feel these words—the phrasing resonates deep within the reader.

To achieve this effect, nature writers regularly use techniques that classical rhetoricians have called the grand style. The grand style is specifically designed to strike the senses, making it especially applicable to nature writing. This style involves the quality that Longinus seeks to describe in On the Sublime. He writes “For grandeur produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer; and the combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant” (347). Sublimity is intended to go beyond persuasion, producing a powerful emotional impact on its readers. Even more importantly, as Longinus stresses, it is designed to awaken readers by appealing to their higher natures. Indeed, this is what makes grand style so effective in nature writing. Nature writing is often meant to rouse readers, resensitizing them to landscape and place. Longinus himself is aware of the connection between nature and the sublime. He writes, “Though nature is on the whole a law unto herself in matters of emotion and elevation, she is not a random force and does not work altogether without method” (347). The affiliation between nature and the sublime is ever palpable. Oravec goes so far as to say that “the sublime is the founding narrative—the primary trope—in the rhetoric of environmentalism”(73). We see nature as sublime, and recognize the grandeur, power, and wonder of the natural world. Writers express this sense of the sublime through their use of the grand style, which aligns nature with human nature and inspires readers.

Our initial premise, therefore, is that nature writing, as a genre, distinguishes itself from other forms of environmental prose by strategically employing techniques of the grand style. To illustrate, consider Edward Abbey’s classic, Desert Solitaire (1968). Written about Abbey’s experiences as a ranger at Arches National Park in Utah, Desert Solitaire is often described as a Walden in the desert. It has long been held up as a classic work of ecological rhetoric. And yet, curiously enough, readers of Desert Solitaire often rave about the first half of the book, but they lament how the second half seems to “lose it.” The first half is spiritual and uplifting. You want to grab your backpack, fill your water bottle, and walk out into the desert. You want to hang out with the snakes and scorpions and feel the searing heat of the desert in midsummer. The second half of Desert Solitaire, however, is somewhat uninspiring and flat. What changed? A critical look at Desert Solitaire reveals that the difference between the first and second half of the book is not due to a shift in content or organization. After all, the content and organization of each chapter is rather consistent—Abbey uses narrative to describe a strange adventure he or someone else had in the beautiful but unforgiving desert. The difference between the first and second half of the book is the style Abbey uses. The first half of the book is consistently poetic and moving—a good example of the grand style as Cicero, Augustine, or Longinus might define it. The second half of the book, however, is much less poetic. Abbey shifts exclusively to a “middle” or even “plain” style, and his writing becomes increasingly prosaic and unspiritual. In the first half of the book, Abbey is like an inspired painter, capturing the essence of the desert for his readers. In the second half, the inspiration seems to fade as Abbey simply describes what he sees in the desert and exhorts his readers to accept his opinions. In the second half of the book, there seems to be little attempt to move the readers.

According to Buell’s criteria, the second half of Abbey’s Desert Solitaire still falls safely within the boundaries of environmental writing. After all, environmental prose is often simply descriptive or persuasive. But readers expect something more from nature writing—they want the words to inspire them. Our understanding of nature writing, therefore, is in line with Buell’s four criteria for an environmental text. With Buell, we agree that the natural world must be more than a framing device for writing, and that human history must be entwined with natural history. We also agree that nature writing must go beyond human interest, and it must embrace human accountability to the environment. However, we would like to go one step further. Nature writing should also strive to touch the spirit, thus renewing readers’ connection with landscape. The best nature writers regularly elevate their style above descriptive and persuasive prose.

This understanding of nature writing is also consonant with definitions being forwarded in the field of eco-criticism. In The Norton Book of Nature Writing, Robert Finch and John Elder point out that “nature writing fulfills the essay’s purpose of connection. It fuses literature’s attention to style, form, and the inevitable ironies of expression with a scientific concern for palpable fact.” (25). Thus, according to Finch and Elder, nature writing is a form of lyrical prose, melding factual information and observation. It goes beyond the taxonomic descriptions found in a scientific or environmental text, because the writer is keenly aware of style and the arts of narrative. Likewise, as Frank Stewart points out in A Natural History of Nature Writing (1995), nature writing holds a closer resemblance to poetry than do other types of prose. Like a poet, the nature writer is concerned with the textures and tastes, sights and sounds, feelings and thoughts that are experienced when an individual is engaged with nature. Or, as Stewart puts it, “nature writers have made the world larger and richer by giving us ways of seeing with our hearts and imaginations as well as with our eyes” (xxiii). Like lyric poetry, nature writing is intended to capture and express essence, specifically of landscape and place. Even further, it also seeks to capture the essential connectedness between landscape and the individual. To put it in the words of Barry Lopez, there are “two landscapes—one outside the self, the other within” (64). Nature writing intimately explores the connection between these two landscapes. Scott Slovic reflects this point by arguing that nature writers are interested in achieving “heightened attentiveness to our place in the natural world,” striving to awaken environmental consciousness within themselves and their readers (3).

Nature Writing and American Sermonics

Naysayers might suggest that the idyllic elements of nature writing are unteachable. They might point out that asking students to inspire their readers is a bit much, especially when they often struggle to simply describe and persuade. We believe quite the opposite. Nature writing and the grand style are teachable in writing classrooms. And, even more importantly, students want to learn how to fully express their passions and energy. They want to know how to convey their feelings to the readers. In our experience, once students learn how to use the grand style, the added ability to move readers often stirs their interests in writing, stimulating their imagination. Even weak writers, given the ability to inspire, often gain a renewed commitment to writing.

Classical rhetoricians certainly believed that grand style was teachable, and their books are filled with practical advice about how to move readers. But what is the grand style? Since antiquity, classical rhetoricians like Cicero, Quintilian, and Augustine have divided style into three levels: plain, middle, and grand. In Orator, Cicero defines the functions of these three styles as follows:

He then will be an eloquent speaker—to repeat my former definition—who can discuss trivial matters in a plain style, matters of moderate significance in the tempered style, and weighty affairs in the grand manner. (379)

In De Oratore, Cicero writes that the primary characteristic of the grand style, which distinguishes it from the plain and middle styles, is an attention to how words “strike the senses” (239). Specifically, the grand style allows readers to see, hear, and feel the words in the text. For Cicero, sight was the most powerful quality of the grand style. He writes,

For such expressions of the odor of urbanity, the softness of humanity, the murmur of the sea, and sweetness of language, are derived from the other senses; but those which relate to sight are much more striking, for they place almost in the eye of the mind such objects as we cannot see and discern by the natural eyes (238).

Hearing and feeling, however, were also important characteristics of Cicero’s understanding of the grand style. He believed that a writer, like a musician or poet, could add sound and texture to prose by paying attention to rhythm, pace, and tone. Indeed, many writing teachers encourage their students to “write visually” or “write through the senses.” For the most part, these teachers are unknowingly prompting their students to use the grand style, although in an ad hoc way.

In On Christian Doctrine, a book primarily about the rhetoric of preaching, Augustine refined the three levels of style by assigning them distinct roles. He writes,

But although our teacher must be a speaker on important matters, he should not always speak of them in the grand style, but rather use the restrained style when teaching and the intermediate style when censuring or praising something. But, when action must be taken and we are addressing those who ought to take it but are unwilling, then we must speak of what is important in the grand style, the style suitable for moving minds to action (125).

According to Augustine, all three styles are applicable to different forms of preaching. Plain style is suitable for instructing or informing. The middle style is most appropriate for exhorting people to believe or act differently—that is, to persuade them to change their minds. The grand style is used when members of the audience know what should be done, but they are reluctant to take action. For the most part, according to Augustine, the grand style is to not be used when teaching others or persuading them to change their minds (142). After all, in instructional or exhortive contexts, the grand style can seem overly ostentatious, perhaps even bombastic. Instead, the grand style should be reserved for times when the audience needs to be moved or inspired (141–142). In the end, Augustine suggests that the mark of an effective preacher is the ability to go beyond informing and persuading. An effective preacher must also be able to motivate and animate with words.

But what does instruction on fifth-century preaching have to do with American nature writing? Interestingly, the two traditions intertwine, specifically in the person of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of America’s earliest nature writers. As a student at Harvard, Emerson originally aimed to fill a university chair as a professor of rhetoric (Oliver 119). His studies included the works of Cicero, Augustine, and Longinus. Moreover, he would have almost certainly studied the rhetorics of Hugh Blair and George Campbell, whose works on rhetoric were the dominant texts in American colleges in the early nineteenth century. Emerson did not go on to receive that chair in rhetoric. Instead, he made his living as a Unitarian preacher, employing the techniques he garnered from classical rhetoricians. Seeking to break away from the institutionalized style of European homiletics, Emerson used grand style techniques to develop an epideitctic discourse “whose end was to teach and delight, to pass on the established values of the culture and thus to sustain the common ground” (Clark and Halloran 2). In other words, Emerson applied the grand style to preaching, much as Augustine described it in On Christian Doctrine. More importantly to nature writing, Emerson also went on to write Nature (1835) which, next to Thoreau’s Walden, is perhaps the most influential early nineteenth-century American work of nature writing.

Indeed, American sermonics and nature writing share a common heritage. In Nature, Emerson consciously applied his sermonic use of the grand style to his writings about nature, striving to move his readers. Later, Emerson’s protégé, Thoreau, used the grand style in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854) to likewise lend spirituality to his prose. Thoreau, a fellow Harvard graduate well-versed in Cicero, Augustine, and Longinus, took on much of Emerson’s sense of all-pervading divinity, intertwining sermonic rhetoric with nature writing. In “Politics in American Nature Writing,” Slovic notes the curious similarity in style between sermons and texts about the natural world (97). In the end, we see that nature writing has been reliant on the grand style since the beginning—at first deliberately in the works of Emerson and Thoreau, and later intuitively by nature writers who followed in their footsteps.

One caveat before moving on. Grand style is sometimes confused with formal tone, which often involves abstruse diction, elaborate sentence structure, and lengthy paragraphs. In reality, though, grand style can be either informal or formal in tone. For example, Emerson’s Nature, like much of his prose, is written in a formal tone. Today’s readers often struggle with his full diction and complex sentences. But even the most informal texts and speeches can be moving due to their use of grand style. For example, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes in an informal tone but still uses grand style techniques to inspire her readers. Our point is that grand style is defined by its use of visual, aural, and sensual techniques to move or inspire readers. It accomplishes this effect by striking the senses, creating impressions of sight, sound, and texture. Grand style is not defined by formality of tone.

Seeing and Hearing in Nature Writing

Let us now discuss how words can be used to strike the senses, starting with visual writing and following with aural writing. Unfortunately, “write visually” has become one of those oft-repeated English teacher comments like “write clearly” or “write more concretely” that leave students scratching their heads. We toss these chestnuts to our students as though writing visually or clearly is simply a matter of making up our minds to do so. Putting these chestnuts aside, we need to teach students how to write visually, not just advise them to do so.

Writing Visually

Writing visually starts with an attention to visual detail. A writer can help readers envision a particular scene by simply noting what the eyes can see, like colors, textures, and relationships among parts and wholes. Instead of merely saying, “Trees were in the valley below me,” a writer can add a visual touch by saying, “Pinon trees dotted the broken, burnished earth in the valley below.” The color and texture in this second sentence adds a vividness to the scene that the pallid first sentence cannot match. A writer can also pay attention to visual relationships among parts and wholes: “The black bear hastened into the brush, becoming part of the mountain again.” In this sentence, the relationship between the black bear and the mountain draws the readers’ attention to their interdependence. Indeed, much of nature writing is simply a matter of paying close attention to what the eye can see and the ways in which parts and wholes interrelate.

But visual writing requires more than attention to visual detail. It also means employing tropes like simile, analogy, and metaphor to create images in the minds of the readers. These particular tropes, as Aristotle suggests, make things “appear before the eyes” (1405b). Indeed, even a casual glance at the works of great nature writers will reveal their replete use of tropes to add a visual dimension to the text.

Similes and Analogies

Similes and analogies compare items that differ in genera but have similar characteristics. For example, we might write, “The tree swayed over us like a frail umbrella against the angry storm.” In this simile, the items ‘tree’ and ‘umbrella’ differ in genera, but their common visual characteristics make them suitable for use in a simile. In most similes, the words ‘like’ or ‘as’ draw the readers’ attention to these resemblances among words. To illustrate, in Nature Emerson writes,

I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. (234)

Annie Dillard uses the following simile in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

In flat country I watch every sunset in hopes of seeing the green ray. The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting fountain at the moment of sunset; it throbs into the sky for two seconds and disappears. One more reason to keep my eyes open (17).

And, in Walden, Thoreau writes,

The water is a vitreous greenish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown (203).

As illustrated in these examples, similes are used locally to offer a momentary image in the readers’ minds. In most cases, the simile occupies one sentence or phrase without expansion. Writers simply use a simile to create a visual impression on the readers, and then they move on. In nature writing, as these examples show, similes are often used to express unique experiences that go beyond a simple statement of descriptive facts. Similes allow nature writers to illustrate the unfamiliar by drawing out its semblances to the familiar.

Analogies are extended similes, working on parallel planes. If a simile tends to take the form of ‘A is like B’ then analogies can be said to take the form ‘A is like B, as C is like D.’ For example, using an analogy, Abbey compares the mating of two snakes to a dance in Desert Solitaire:

I happen to glance out the little window near the refrigerator and see two gopher snakes on my verandah engaged in what seems to be a kind of ritual dance. Like a living caduceus, they wind and unwind about each other in undulant, graceful, perpetual motion, moving slowly across the dome of sandstone. Invisible but tangible music is the passion which joins them . . . There I get down on my hands and knees and creep toward the dancing snakes . . . Obsessed with their ballet, the serpents seem unaware of my presence (20).

In this example, we find the analogy working on parallel planes. Specifically, it includes two parallel similes, “snakes are like dancers” and “mating is like dancing.” Extending the analogy, Abbey introduces other dance-related concepts like music, ballet, graceful, and passion.

As visual tropes, similes and analogies are very much local devices, which appear on the face of a text. Nature writers use them to offer the readers quick visual comparisons, providing a glimpse into the scene. Then, the writer moves on, rarely using these tropes at length. Indeed, it is possible to extend similes and analogies into entire paragraphs or pages; but when used at length they often become tedious to the readers. After all, readers are willing to briefly visualize Emerson’s clouds as “fishes in the sea of crimson light” or Abbey’s gopher snakes as “ritual dancers.” But if similes or analogies are extended too far, the rational limits of these tropes soon become apparent. The comparisons between two unlike things become increasingly contrived and plastic.

Metaphors

Metaphors correspond to similes and analogies in their use of comparison to draw the readers’ attention to semblances. However, whereas similes and analogies are local devices, metaphors can be used to create ingrained perspectives from which the readers can conceptualize or reconceptualize nature. For example, Muir writes in My First Summer in the Sierra,

The embowered river-reaches with their multitude of voices making melody, the stately flow and rush and glad exulting onsweeping currents caressing the dipping sedge-leaves and bushes and mossy stones, swirling in pools, dividing against little flowery islands, breaking grey and white here and there, ever rejoicing, yet with deep solemn undertones recalling the ocean (49).

Muir consistently uses this metaphor “river as chorus” throughout this book, returning to it over and over whenever water is mentioned. For Muir, the metaphor provides a consistent perspective from which his readers are urged to view rivers. As shown in this example, metaphor is typically more subtle than simile or analogy. Whereas similes or analogies tend to call attention to themselves, a metaphor tends to pass almost without notice. In the quote above, for example, Muir is not asking the readers to make a conscious comparison between rivers and choruses. Rather, the chorus-related words are woven inconspicuously into his descriptions of the river.

Scholars have struggled to understand metaphor since the dawn of rhetorical studies. Nevertheless, most scholars agree about what metaphors do. Metaphors, as Kenneth Burke suggests, are used to maintain or change perspective (503). They urge us to see things in a particular way. For example, as Lakoff and Johnson demonstrate in Metaphors We Live By, a metaphor like ‘thought is light’ structures how Westerners understand the thinking process (3). “He enlightened me.” “Suddenly, I could see what she was talking about.” “His ideas were a bit murky.” These deep-seated cultural metaphors shape the way we conceptualize and discourse about reality. Once identified, these cultural metaphors can often be used effectively in nature writing. For example, using the cultural metaphor ‘time is a stream,’ one could write, “Time slowed down to a trickle, as I watched the rainbow trout swish quietly up stream.” Playing with the ‘thought is light’ metaphor, one might say, “It was only when I turned off my lantern that I really understood what Parsons Lake meant to me.” These uses of metaphor consciously play with deep-seated metaphors that shape Western thought and culture.

A second use of metaphor in nature writing is to change the readers’ perspective. Here is Abbey using personification, a specialized form of metaphor, to change the readers’ perspective about a juniper tree:

A female, this ancient grandmother of a tree may be three hundred years old; growing very slowly, the juniper seldom attains a height greater than fifteen or twenty feet even in favorable locations. My juniper, though still fruitful and full of vigor, is at the same time partly dead: one half of the divided trunk holds skyward a sapless claw, a branch without leaf or bark, baked in the sun and scoured by the wind to a silver finish, where magpies an ravens like to roost when I am not too close.

I’ve had this tree under surveillance ever since my arrival at Arches, hoping to learn something from it, to discover the significance in its form, to make a connection through its life with whatever falls beyond (27).

Novel metaphors like ‘a tree is a grandmother’ set metaphorical perspectives that run throughout a text. In this quote from Abbey, for example, the metaphor is being used to invent a perspective from which we can view all trees differently. In Abbey’s work, old trees are alive and noble, much like grandmothers, and if we observe them closely, we can learn the secrets of life.

By creating novel metaphors, nature writers can challenge the readers’ established perspectives about reality. For example, nature writers seem to invariably take on the ‘time is money’ metaphor that dominates Western culture. Exposing this metaphor as a falsehood, they show us that time is not spent, cannot be saved, cannot be lost. Another common cultural metaphor which is regularly challenged in nature writing is the ‘nature is a machine’ perspective that guides much of Western science, technology, and medicine. Nature writers regularly urge their readers not to see nature as a mechanical, manageable entity working according to predictable laws. In doing so, they urge people to view nature differently, change their perspective. By definition, metaphors are patently false (e.g. time is not money, nature is not a machine), so these tropes provide a fertile ground on which to challenge common assumptions and understandings of nature.

Writing with Sound

The ability to write with sound may be the true distinguishing quality of a great nature writer. Nature writers help their readers listen to nature. To add an aural quality to prose, they often use four sound techniques—onomatopoeia, rhythm, alliteration, and assonance.

Onomatopoeia

An onomatopoeia is a word whose sound imitates the thing it is trying to describe. For instance, the sounds of a “crackling fire” or a “murmuring river” are echoed in the words themselves. Here is Thoreau’s description of the pond in Walden:

The bullfrogs trump to the usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled (153).

Words like trump, usher, rippling, fluttering, and ruffled all create a tone for this description that goes beyond seeing. We can actually hear the lake in this description.

Abbey’s Desert Solitaire is another text that heavily uses onomatopoeia. Here is a short list of words drawn from the pages of Desert Solitaire:

crackle, rustle, scuffle, brittle, whispers, slithers, hisses, mutter, thunder, crawled, sliding, roar, whistling, ticking, cough, babble, mumble, rattle, sizzle, bawling, yawning, gasp, splash, scratching, clattered, buzzing, humble.

These kinds of words add a dimension of sound to nature writing that the readers can actually hear. All of us hear a little voice in our heads when we read silently. That little voice evinces these words, sounds them out. When read out loud, these words capture the sounds of nature for the readers.

Rhythm

Similarly, rhythm is also an important part of nature writing. To the native English speaker, language sounds smoothest when it is predominantly written in iambic prose (Eastman 190, 192). Iambic prose tends to alternate unstressed with stressed syllables, creating a gentle cadence in the minds of the readers. For example, here are a few iambic lines from Thoreau:

In those driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection (156).

Of course, as this example shows, the whole sentence or paragraph need not be iambic to establish a natural rhythm. Rather, the dominance of iambic prose will calm the tone and make the writing sound soothing to the readers. Iambic verse establishes a heartbeat for the text.

On the other hand, when nature writers want to develop a sense of discord or tension, they break out of this iambic pattern. Here is Abbey in a more agitated moment, where the rhythm matches his agitation.

This being the case, why is the Park Service generally, so anxious to accommodate that other crowd, the indolent millions born on wheels and suckled on gasoline, who expect and demand paved highways to lead them in comfort, ease and safety into every nook and corner of the national parks? (49)

The rhythm here is erratic and somewhat unpredictable. This passage includes a mixture of differently stressed words (iambs, trochees, anapests, dactyls, and spondees) that create an irregular heartbeat in the text. Due to his use of rhythm, readers not only read about Abbey’s frustration, they experience his anger in his erratic prose.

Another way to use rhythm in writing is to pay attention to sentence length. In De Oratore, Cicero suggests that a harmonious rhythm is attained by using sentences that are the length of one breath (243). Contemporary nature writers tend to follow this advice, adjusting sentence length to fit the nature of the scene. When they want to increase the pace, they shorten the sentences, sometimes even using fragments. Short and fragmented sentences add intensity by making the readers feel like they are breathing faster with the writer. Longer sentences, on the other hand, slow down the pace of the text. They are best used when the writer is observing a still landscape or trying to describe a peaceful moment.

Alliteration and Assonance

Use of alliteration and assonance can also elevate writing to the level of the grand style. Alliteration is the recurrence of consonant sounds, usually in neighboring words, while assonance refers to the recurrence vowel sounds. The close repetition of specific sounds in prose tends to intensify the phrases, creating an aural theme that the readers can hear (Eastman 195). Here is an example of alliteration from Dillard:

It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff. (33)

The ‘s’ sound in this passage binds the text together, giving it a consistent tone for the readers. The recurrence of ‘s’ words also intensifies the prose by setting a theme that the readers can hear. Here is an example of assonance, also from Dillard:

A male English sparrow, his mouth stuffed, was hopping in and out of an old nest in a bare tree, and sloshing around in its bottom. A robin on red alert in the grass, trailing half a worm from its bill, bobbed three steps and straightened up, performing unawares the universal robin trick. (113)

The “o” sound is repeated here in proximate words, such as hopping, sloshing, bottom, robin, and bobbed. Assonance is more subtle than alliteration, because vowels lack the sharper quality of consonants. But both of these techniques can be used effectively to weave the text together with concordant sound.

To this point, we have mainly dwelled on the characteristics of grand style and its use in nature writing. The grand style offers a welcome addition to the plain academic prose that is commonly stressed in composition classrooms. Unfortunately, in many writing classrooms, anything beyond plain style is seen as a luxury—something to be reserved exclusively for advanced students or English majors. And yet, style is what attracts young students to writing. After all, today’s students are highly visual and aural people, making the use of tropes especially interesting to them. They enjoy playing with the visual and aural imagery available through these techniques. Learning about the grand style often awakens their interest in writing by appealing to their senses, unlike the plainness of academic prose, which rarely captures their imagination.

Bringing Nature Writing into the Composition Classroom—Taking Writing Back Outside

Writing about nature usually means situating yourself in landscape and place, learning to find your place within social and natural communities. Situated learning is in concert with this understanding of nature writing. Situated learning has received a great amount of attention recently (Berkenkotter, Huckin, and Ackerman; Blakeslee, Freedman and Adam; Russell). Though these theorists focus on ‘social’ contexts, we suggest that natural contexts also provide ideal situations in which students can write. The basic premise of situated learning is that students learn best by being immersed in the activities, communities, and contexts in which they want to participate. Or, simply put, people learn best by doing. Nature writing offers a special challenge to situated learning, urging us to expand our understanding of how students learn to write. Until now, theorists of situated learning have concentrated on the ‘social’ contexts in which people communicate. Consequently, most of their theories put an emphasis on interactions among people in academic and non-academic contexts. But what if we expand the definition of situatedness to include the environment? What if students were taught to work within both social and natural contexts?

To answer this question, let us consider the basics of situated learning theory and then discuss how it can be extended beyond the social realm. Situated learning, also referred to as “activity theory,” is essentially interpretive, or hermeneutic (Kent 3). By hermeneutic, we mean that writers/interpreters are always situated in an evolving context in which they act and interact. Four key elements play an important role in situated learning: activity, interactivity, mentorship, and context:

Activity. In situated learning theories, knowledge is not something to be contained or held in the gray matter. It is not something to be transmitted from teacher to student like a commodity. Rather, knowledge is defined as a person’s ability to maneuver and perform within specific contexts. The emphasis here is pragmatic in nature. To know something is to know how to do it. In other words, people need to be actively engaged with the things and abilities about which they want to learn and understand. Thus, activity is the basis for learning and developing knowledge.

Interactivity. Students need to learn how to interpret, act, and react to the evolving contexts around them. The relationship between individuals and their contexts is hermeneutic in nature. By hermeneutic, we mean that individuals are continuously interpreting and responding to the changing social and natural landscape in which they are situated.

Mentorship. The third element in situated learning is the importance of mentorship in learning. Situated learning suggests that education is best provided under the guidance of experienced practitioners (Blakeslee 126). Initially, authority is granted to the experienced practitioners, with student working under their guidance. As the apprentices gain ability, they take on more autonomy, gaining more authority as they are more able to engage in the activities of the community.

Context. The final element is the importance of context to learning. Students need to be immersed in the social and cultural contexts in which their learning will be used. As participants, they need to learn how to interpret the exigencies of these contexts, and then they need to learn how to use their powers of expression to shape these exigencies to their communication needs.

Teaching nature writing extends our understanding of situatedness by acknowledging that human activity is also shaped by place and landscape. Indeed, one of the shortcomings of situated learning theory to this point is that its theorists have exclusively emphasized social contexts, not paying attention to the natural contexts that shape the activities of people. But place and landscape are essential to understanding how people act and interact. For instance, those of us who live in the mountainous West know that our landscape shapes our activities much differently than would the landscapes of the Northwest, Midwest, or East. Indeed, just as individuals are shaped by their society and culture, their societies and cultures are shaped by the natural landscapes in which they are situated.

In many cases, our relationship to landscape and to place is overlooked or neglected in our modern lifestyles. However, as concerns about the environment become more paramount, our relationships to place and to the natural world will shift and grow. Ideally, we will “envision ourselves less as autonomous individuals than as collaborators who are not only dependent upon but also literally connected to our local environments in complex ways” (Owens1). We can assist our students to perceive their own relationships to place, to recognize that our emotional landscapes are shaped by our physical landscapes, and to see that the environment and the natural world are at the core of who and what we are.

Situated learning is, in many ways, a foundation for ecocomposition. According to Dobrin and Weisser, “ecocomposition inquires as to what effects discourse has in mapping, constructing, shaping, defining, and understanding nature, place, and environment; and, in turn, what effects nature, place, and environment have on discourse” (9). Ecocomposition recognizes that writing is located in place and environment, and looks to foster the relationship between the written and natural worlds. Dobrin and Weisser even suggest that writing is itself an ecological activity as it involves “connections, interactions, and relationships” (146). As a cross-disciplinary field of study, ecocomposition encourages a holistic and ecological view toward the natural world as well as the educational world in which we live and work.

How can we bring into writing courses an understanding of ourselves as part of an environment? How can we encourage students to become part of a writing community that interacts with the natural world? Your first step is to cultivate your students’ relationship with the natural world and the environment around them. As their mentor, teach them how to observe closely, how to pay attention to their relationship with nature, and how to reconceptualize their relationship with nature. You can use writing to reawaken their active and interactive relationship with the outdoors, each other, and the communities in which they live. By showing students the world outside the classroom, we can help them see that writing about nature is an ecological activity. To foster this awareness, several writing techniques can be used that are already common in many composition classrooms.

Journaling . Nature writers, from Thoreau to Dillard, have used journals extensively to observe and reflect on their experiences with nature. Keeping a journal draws students into active relationships with their social and natural contexts (Murray 378; Foster 174; Hillocks 94). As we all know, it is one thing to experience something, but writing about it requires a higher level of engagement, a higher level of interactivity. Take your students out on campus, and ask them to write down their observations in a journal. Ask them to reflect on the ways in which their landscape shapes them as individuals and members of a society. Also, devise assignments that require them to seek out natural environments in which they can write. Of course, your students don’t need to hike into the desert or a find stream bank at which to write. Even the most urban settings offer a rich interplay between humans and nature. In these settings, encourage your students to observe using all their senses. Ann Zwinger has said that—

Nature writing is preserving a time and a place as a fly is preserved in amber, with every bristle and hair and wing vein intact [ . . . as you observe] you consciously call on all six senses; you have a way of ticking them off in your mind: What does it smell like? What does it look like? (Nabhan and Zwinger 78)

Teaching students to hone their observation skills, through their senses, will translate into writing that is more vivid, more meaningful. When using all their senses, students will see, hear, feel, smell, and even taste the things they would have otherwise missed.In addition, journaling can help to foster what Roorda refers to as “a drama of solitude” or “a tale of absorption” (10), leading to an increased awareness not just of the world around us, but of ourselves.

Mentoring Through Reading. A common mantra among writing teachers is that good readers make good writers. Fortunately, the field of nature writing is replete with great writers, whose works students enjoy reading. Nature writers from Thoreau to Abbey to Williams are provocative and interesting to students, forming the basis of high-level class discussions on a variety of issues, not all of them environmentally-centered. These works also provide a basis for solid mentoring. Through close reading, students can be taught to pay close attention to how writers use language to describe, persuade, and inspire the readers. From this basic understanding, you can then work in tandem with these authors’ texts, actively engaging students in a mentoring relationship. As their mentor, by highlighting the stylistic techniques evident in these works, you can help students identify what distinguishes effective writing from ineffective writing. Granted, few of us are ‘expert’ nature writers, but that is not all too important. What is important is the mentoring relationship we establish with our students. By adopting the role of mentor, we can use good reading as the foundation for shaping and strengthening their writing skills.

Playing with Tropes. You can develop classroom activities in which students learn to write visually and aurally with tropes. Start out by giving students a list of nature-related words. Or, better yet, ask them to draw some words from their journals. Then, ask them to use similes and analogies to describe or illustrate the items on their list of words. Further, selecting one or more of their favorite similes and analogies, have them freewrite through the various lenses these tropes provide. For example, a simile like “a pasture is like an old man” could serve as a freewriting lens through which students creatively explore their views on pastures and old men. Indeed, by playing with visual tropes, students gain a more inclusive visual understanding of the concepts they are writing about. To teach students to write with sound, you can use the same techniques with onomatopoeia, alliteration, and assonance. Ask students to identify words that aurally reflect the meanings of the words on their lists. Tell them that the sounds of these words are less important than their meaning. Usually, students find that word choice can often match sound with meaning in ways that enhance their description of a natural concept.

Thinking and Rethinking Metaphors. If metaphors do indeed shape our understanding and interpretations of reality, including nature, students can be taught to identify, use, and change the metaphors on which our views of nature are constructed. For example, students could study metaphors like ‘nature is a machine’ or ‘natural resources’ or ‘sustainable agriculture’ to understand how these metaphors shape human interactions with nature. One activity that works well is to push the limits of a metaphor. For example, if nature is indeed a machine, should we treat it like we might treat any other machine, perhaps like a car? Do we drive it, maintain it, restore it, and ultimately scrap it when it is beyond hope? Pushing the limits of a metaphor is a good way to view the limits of our own understanding of nature. Another activity is to create new metaphors, and use them as invention tools for writing. For instance, have students redefine a local forest as a ‘living body.’ The trees and plants become lungs, the animals and their paths become a circular system, the insects and parasites become a digestive system. Using metaphors as invention tools is a way to enhance creativity, while encouraging students to interpret reality from different perspectives.

Shifting Perspective from Part to Whole. Finally, one of the basic concepts of hermeneutics, out of which much of situated learning is taken, is the relationship from part to whole and whole to part. These relationships essentially play with the figure-ground relationships that define much of our interactions with nature. In some sense, the part and the whole are mutually exclusive. For example, imagine you are observing a deer in a mountain meadow. The closer you concentrate on the deer, the less you are aware of its landscape. On the other hand, the more you pay attention to its landscape, the less aware you are of the deer. It is this mutually exclusive relationship between figure and ground, part and whole, that defines much of our relationship to the outdoors. Students can learn to make such figure-ground observations about nature. For example, how is the deer part of a mountain meadow? And how is the mountain meadow part of the deer? Students can be also be shown that the more we concentrate on human needs, the less we pay attention to the landscapes in which humans live. On the other hand, the more attention we pay to n