“The first thing you need to do when planning a class,” explained David Concepcion of Ball State University in Indiana, “is to figure out your course objectives. What is it that you want the students to learn by the end of the semester?” For those of us designing classes on sustainability, the list of course objectives was varied and diverse. The students needed to learn the fundamentals of historical research and recognize how water use in the American Southwest reinforced social hierarchies. They needed to craft an argumentative essay and consider ethical action from the standpoint of a spotted owl. Course objectives, however, were not limited to the mastery of certain material or the development of specific skills. David included “change of affect” as an objective for many teachers. English teachers, he told us, often report they want their students to love the literature.
Once we had listed our various course objectives, David asked us to describe what the students actually do while in our class. “If every class has a reading assignment, then student behavior would be reading. If you lecture, then student behavior would be sitting and listening.” Having listed student behaviors, David asked us to review our course objectives. Were our objectives in alignment with the behavior we demanded from our students? For many of us, the answer was no. If one of our goals was to develop skills in persuasive argument, then having the students sit still and take notes was not an effective learning environment.
David’s presentation on learning-centered teaching and integrative course design came on week 2 of a summer institute on Sustainability and the Humanities. The week before, faculty from around the country bemoaned the attitude of their students. “I assign all sorts of articles on climate change but that doesn’t change their behavior,” said one frustrated teacher. “My students don’t care about the land, they care about their iPhone,” said another.
“Teaching,” explained David, “is about creating a series of experiences to get to those endpoints.” If the goal of your class is to foster an environmental ethic, he recommended creating activities that give the students an opportunity to consider those ideas on their own. “And be clear about your choices,” he insisted. “If one of your goals is a change in affect, let the students know that’s part of the course.”
For those of us bringing the effects of climate change into our curriculum, fear may seem like a reasonable affect to cultivate. Like the bumper sticker that says, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” teachers who look at global warming may decide that apathetic students are not doing their homework. And yet, how many of us would include on the syllabus, “one of the goals of this class is to raise your fears about the future of the planet?”
Teaching about sustainability, like teaching Women’s Studies or Native American History, invokes many more feelings than love. To think about land use and species extinction is to feel various shades of sadness and fear. When I first started teaching feminist theory I harbored a belief that the class was only successful if the women in the class became angry and the men became guilty. The first few times I taught the class I tried a couple of in-class exercises designed to expose patriarchal assumptions and produce the requisite emotions. Although the exercises were successful in generating a change in affect, I began to question whether anger and guilt were reasonable goals for the classroom. It was one thing to read a feminist theorist’s indignant criticism and another thing to willfully provoke that anger in my students.
And yet, most of us teach in the humanities because we ourselves have been deeply affected by these books. We teach Morrison and Montaigne because they fill us with love, and Catherine MacKinnon because she fills us with righteous indignation, and Bill McKibben because he gives us good reason to be afraid. We choose these texts because they make us feel more acutely our human condition. The pedagogical challenge, however, is to be honest about our goals for the class. If a change of affect is one of the three objectives (and the learning-centered teaching people will tell you really can’t have more than three), then we have to think deeply about how to align that emotional objective with the behavior cultivated in the class.
So along with developing skills in persuasive argument, and increasing familiarity with Hobbes and climate change, the third objective in my class next fall on Political Theory and the Ecological Crisis will be to make friends with fear. We might talk about things we used to be afraid of and what strategies we developed to get beyond the paralysis. We might share resources, poems or songs that we turn to when fear starts to overwhelm the senses. And we might look at those old dead guys, like Plato and Hobbes, to see how they used deep thinking to make room for the great fears of their time.
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