Published November 19, 2015
Dr. Jana M. Giles, associate professor of English at the University of Louisiana at
Monroe, has had her latest article, “Integrating Ecocriticsm into a New Graduate English
Course in a Southern Public Regional University,” published in Kudzu House 5:3 (Autumn
Equinox 2015): 64-94, in a cluster dedicated to teaching environmental humanities.
Giles first presented a version of this paper at the Modern Language Association Annual
Convention in Chicago in January 2014. Giles invited four former students from the
course, now alumni, Kirby Brasher, Adam Breitenbach, Alycia Hodges, and Valerie Upshaw,
to collaborate with her in reflecting on the course content and experience, which
she integrated into the essay.
The article recounts the experience of teaching an English MA graduate course in environmental
humanities for the first time at a public regional university in northeastern Louisiana
in 2012. Giles sets the economic, ecological, and demographic contexts of teaching
in this region before turning to describe the texts selected for the course and pedagogical
strategies undertaken.
Among the issues she raises is the looming natural, and national, disaster of coastal
erosion in Louisiana. She also engages in a dialogue with her former students, in
their own words, about their responses to the course, finding that while they appreciated
the literary texts and theory, their response to the possibility of activism regarding
our current environmental crises was muted and pessimistic. However, after the completion
of the course, several students went on to implement change both locally and internationally,
or reported that their attitude towards nature had been substantially modified. For
instance, Valerie Upshaw went on to serve in the Peace Corps as an Environmental Education
Volunteer in Nicaragua.
The paper concludes by considering the challenges to graduate education in literary
studies regarding the problem of environmental activism, and recommends that prospective
educators consider designing curricula which incite agency and engagement to mitigate
the sense of helplessness that can arise from such course material. Alison Lacivita,
editor of the journal's issue, writes in her introduction:
"This essay is remarkable not only because of Giles’ clear, informative writing, but
also because of the input from several of the students who were in that first 'Literature,
Environment, Ecocriticism' course. [….] This essay is not strictly a “how-to” of Giles’s
M.A. class, however; it is also a clever comment on the difficulties of actually operating
in an interdisciplinary fashion in many universities, an insightful exploration of
how the location of an educational institution impacts the way in which material must
be taught, and a complex inquiry into the role of activism in the classroom. I am
thrilled to be able to present her work to the readers of this volume of Kudzu."
The article is available online at the following link: quarterly.kudzuhouse.org/kudzuscholar/5.3/6.
Giles earned her B.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John's College, her M.A. in English
(Concentration in Creative Writing) from the University of New Mexico, and her Ph.D.
in English Literature from the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
She has taught in the English program at ULM since 2009.
