Reading In and Through Nature: An Outdoor Pedagogy for Reading Literature - Richard Novack

Abstract

As a high school English teacher who some- times takes his students outside, I have come to appreciate the locations in which my students engage in literacy activities. I utilize locations in open-air outdoor set- tings as pedagogical resources for reading instruction. When I bring outdoor locations into my class activities, I offer op- portunities for students not only to enhance their acquisition of verbal literacies but also “to observe nature with insight, a merger of landscape and mindscape” (Orr, 1992, p. 86). In what follows, I would like to suggest that English educators can both read in nature and read through nature to not only foster an “ecological literacy” (Orr, 1992, p. 86) in our stu- dents, but also to support students’ verbal literacies. To read in nature, I move the classroom outdoors. My students and I will hastily retreat from the enclosure of cin- der blocks and florescent lighting to the expansive openness of fresh air and sunshine. There are several types of reading activities that occupy such class sessions. After the winter’s first snow, we might scurry outside to read Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” witnessing, touching, and inhaling the crisp excitement of new snow. On a bright and refreshing spring day when the smell of freshly cut grass is pungent, we might “loafe” on the lawn and read cantos 5 and 6 from Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” On the last day of school when the evenings radiate with energy, I sometimes inaugurate the summer with an outdoor reading of Agee’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” and a session of cloud-watch- ing. Such reading experiences are more than just fun class activities; they are semiotic (Kress, 2003), embodied experi- ences. The body reacts to the environment as much as if not more than the written word.

When reading through nature, a reader’s past experi- ences engage in the reading process (Rosenblatt, 1938/1995; Rosenblatt, 1981; Iser, 1974) of both literature and land- scape. When readers approach a text as when they approach a textured landscape, they bring with them their sociocultural 62 laJM, spring 2014 background. Emerson writes, “At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts” (Emerson, 1876). However, from a perspec- tive of sociocultural literacy (Gee, 2001), we cannot just drop our “knapsack of custom.” As when a backpacker carries with her the weight of her past adventures, so too reading is a journey through text in which the reader’s baggage of experience and ideology are part of the process of mean- ing making. When asking students to read through nature, I consider how outdoor experiences both affect and resemble the reading process. I ask students to unpack the process of both reading literature and reading the book of nature in order to foster an awareness of their reading habits. English educators can engage students in outdoor ac- tivities in nature as part of reading instruction. As I explain below, reading in nature offers unique affordances, while reading through nature can deepen students’ close reading practices.

Source: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2015&context=lajm