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Cynthia Bateman

December 15, 2010

Make Them Squirm in Their Places: The Role of a Pedagogy of Discomfort in

Ecocomposition

Conflict creates the condition for transformation. —Ira Shor

To acknowledge the complexity of another’s existence is not to deny my own.

–Minnie Bruce Pratt

I recently watched Disney/Pixar’s 1998 smash hit, A Bug’s Life, and couldn’t help

but see the faces of my first-year writing students when anxiety-ridden Princess Atta

mumbled, “They come; they eat; they leave,” over and over in an attempt to calm herself.

Awaiting the annual invasion of hungry grasshoppers, Princess Atta thought of the pests

as nothing more than empty vessels who mindlessly invaded her ant colony, devoured

piles of harvested seeds, and then flew away temporarily full but never really satisfied.

The fledging princess reminded me of myself awaiting the arrival of my first class of

writing students. As a new teaching assistant, I was not sure how to engage the room full

of bodies who parked themselves in front of me; I wasn’t sure I wanted to engage them.

In a way, I, like Princess Atta, just wanted them to come to class, soak up the information

I threw at them, and go home. No conflicts. No confrontations.

I think most teachers fear the angry student and dread the tearful one. No teacher

says her goal is to have a boring classroom, and yet that is what most of our pedagogies

aspire towards. As educators, we feel comfortable with students who do not speak their

minds. We cautiously keep some topics off limits, strategically dodging the hard

questions concerning race, class, gender, and environment. Sure, we’ll talk about the

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Civil War or the Civil Rights movement, maybe throw in a conversation about

homelessness, but we will do it superficially at best. We will not ask students how they

participate in oppressing one another. We will not confront the clearly misogynistic

student about the origins of his anti-female views. We will not challenge the white,

middle-class student who declares all homeless people are either drunks or drug addicts.

No ruffling of the feathers, that is our motto.

In a writing class, such an apathetic pedagogy lends itself to assignments like the

dreaded “What I Did Over the Summer” personal narrative or other similar writing

projects that ask the student to look no further than a mirror and write about what he sees

reflected in it. These are the types of assignments students expect from a first-year

writing class. These are the assignments that serve to silence our students, to fulfill our

requirements as writing instructors while maintaining calm waters in the classroom. Ira

Shor writes that after years in transfer-of-knowledge classrooms, students become non-

participants. They become silent because “…they no longer expect education to include

the joy of learning, moments of passion or inspiration or comedy, or even that education

will speak to the real conditions of their lives…” (122). Bored, detached, and isolated, a

writing curriculum that mirrors the kind I suggest above breeds apathetic students; and,

apathetic students grow up to be apathetic citizens.

My goals in this essay are threefold. First, I argue that a writing course designed

around a study of ecocomposition, that is, a study of the relationships between

environments and the discourse produced by those relationships, offers educators an

opportunity to break free from typical, one-sided writing assignments that alienate

students and disenfranchise educators. Second, I argue that the way to best teach

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ecocomposition studies is a pedagogy of discomfort—a method of teaching that not only

embraces emotion but capitalizes on it. Last, I suggest that by teaching students to

appreciate how they interact with their environments—both living and non-living, human

and non-human—through discourse, writing classes may not only produce more socially

conscious writers but more socially conscious citizens as well.

The Challenge of Ecocomposition

World and human beings do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant

interaction. —Paulo Freire

In her essay, “The Ecology of Writing,” Marilyn Cooper discusses a pattern in

composition studies towards teaching the “solitary writer” (183). Through cognitive

process-oriented writing assignments, a student is isolated from the social world. His task

is to work alone; his goal is to produce a text. Cooper writes that this isolation from the

social world “…leads him to see ideas and goals as originating primarily within himself

and directed at an unknown and largely hostile other” (184). The student may be

successful in completing his task of producing a text but he will most likely remain

unengaged with his product—his finished work another item to check off of his busy to-

do list. He will neither be affected by his writing nor will his writing be effective in

revealing to him his position in the world.

One of the goals of ecocomposition is to explore how writers interact to form

systems, to investigate the ways in which the structure and content of writing are

constantly changing. Students may start off believing that they write in a vacuum, but

Cooper explains, “One does not even begin to have ideas about a topic, even a relatively

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simple one, until a considerable body of already structured observations and experiences

has been mastered” (188). Ecocomposition seeks to redefine writing as a search for

identity. Weisser writes, “…certainly much of our identity emerges as a result of our

connections with other humans. But we also experience ourselves as being in

relationships with particular environments…We are essentially grounded in, and bonded

to a non-human world” (86). By instructing students to examine how they negotiate their

relationships through discourse, instructors can encourage students to investigate how

their identities are shaped by their surrounding worlds (Weisser, 81). Such an

investigation forces students to engage their writing, to question why and how they

construct not only the physical space of their work but the ideas and opinions that fill that

space.

One of the benefits of ecocomposition is that it offers students and teachers the

opportunity to explore all sorts of environments. Certainly, there is a trend in

ecocomposition to focus on natural spaces but any space, be it real or imagined, is open

to exploration. For example, students may be asked to endeavor into the ways in which

discourse, their own and others, constructs the spaces—physical, social, and political—of

their own college campus or of their childhood homes. Dobrin and Weisser write that

ecocomposition highlights the impact of the spaces in which discourse occurs, suggesting

that “…most inquiries into these relationships do not fully account for the degrees to

which discourse is affected by the locations in which it originates and terminates” (9).

Take, for instance, the “What I Did Over the Summer” essay. In response to that

assignment, most students will produce a narrative text that serves no further purpose

than to regurgitate the highlights of a vacation in Hawaii or a trip to Europe. What Dobrin

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and Weisser suggest is that we challenge our students not to relay “facts” about the world

as they know it but to look deeper into how their constructed worldviews of place allow

them to see one aspect of place while remaining blind to another. Ecocompostion pushes

students to understand the social nature of language and texts, not just as they are

interpreted after the fact but in their very production (Cooper, 184).

Rather than a narrative relaying events about a vacation, a more ecological

assignment would be one that asks the student to describe the environment he visited in

vivid detail. For instance, if he stayed at a beach resort, an ecological assignment might

ask him to describe the resort, his room, the beach, the area surrounding the beach, the

employees of the resort, and the other vacationers he saw. Such an assignment might

expect the student to include what kinds of foods were available, whether he left the

resort (and what he did and saw if this is the case), and how he traveled around the resort

area. The idea behind this assignment is that as the student mentally explores this place

he visited, the place becomes less of somewhere he went and more of something he took

part in. The resulting piece of writing serves not as a reflection of his trip but as a catalyst

for further exploration. For example, a follow-up assignment might ask the student to

research the history of the place he visited—the resort, the native inhabitants, the history

of the land itself. An educator might ask the student discourse-related questions like what

word the indigenous population assigns this place the student knows as “resort”? How

might the meaning the locals assign the resort differ from the meaning the student assigns

it, and why?

Of course, the underlying idea behind ecocomposition is that by coming to know

themselves as constructed by their environments and as constructors of their

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environments, students will come to have a greater understanding of their own ecological

identities. Weisser writes, “Our current conceptions of identity are pre-ecological; we

have not yet recognized that the whole spectrum of the non-human physical environment

is embedded in each of our identities” (81). By “pre-ecological,” Weisser means human

centered, that is, we only understand the world and ourselves in the world from our

human perspectives. The hope of ecocomposition is that as students recognize their

connections to various ecologies, not only do their conceptions of self become extended

and inclusive but their actual identities do as well (Weisser, 88). For students, this

recognition is the difference between merely writing to fulfill a requirement and writing

to wander through a journey of retrospection that seeks connections more than it demands

conclusions.

Because of its emphasis on exploring, through words, a writer’s relationships with

various environments, ecocomposition challenges students to foster an awareness of the

world beyond the human (Plevin, 147). By examining how environments are constructed,

students must examine how they, themselves, construct. They must ask themselves what

factors contribute to the creation of their personal worldviews. They must trace the

origins of their ideas and beliefs if they are to come to understand how and why they hold

specific views and interact in specific environments. Plevin writes that a move to

ecocomposition is able to “…reduce, even critically disrupt, the archetypal binaries of

culture/nature, male/female, and even human/nonhuman” (148). But such a disruption

does not come without strong emotion. If educators are to be successful in teaching an

ecocomposition course, we must be willing to embrace such emotion, that is, we must be

willing to allow discomfort—both our own and our students—into our classrooms.

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In Support of A Pedagogy of Discomfort

Beyond good and evil lies the possibility, at least in educational transactions, to inhabit

an ambiguous sense of self, and this may be deeply discomforting.”—Megan Boler

In her essay, “Safe Space Oddity: Revisiting Critical Pedagogy,” Melissa

Redmond writes about an experience she had while working as a teaching assistant in a

graduate level social work class. Redmond reports on an incident that occurred between

her students when they disagreed about an issue regarding race and feminism. Rather

than allow the students’ dialogue to play out on its own or guide the students along a path

of dissection to trace the roots of the ideas they had, Redmond ignored the interaction by

allowing a guest lecturer to continue her presentation. Redmond admits that the situation

made her uncomfortable. She writes, “…I just wanted it all to stop. Knowing that this

subject matter is often difficult for students to engage with did not help me. I was

uncomfortable with the discordance between students, and I cringed away from conflict”

(9).

Looking back, Redmond recognized that the best thing she could have done for

her students was pause the guest presentation and call attention to the conflict that arose

between the students. She writes, “As an educator, I missed the opportunity to

reproblematize the specifics of that classroom encounter” (12). Had she embraced her

own discomfort and challenged the students to trace the genealogies of the emotions that

fueled their opinions, Redmond may have been able to transform an awkward moment in

her classroom into a truly teachable one—one in which the students came to view

themselves as part of a system that shapes their feelings and ideas. Speaking ecologically,

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Redmond missed an opportunity to allow the webbed nature of the world to reveal itself,

to plunge her students out of their isolated identities and situate them in constructed

knowledges.

What Redmond lacked in her classroom was a pedagogy of discomfort. Boler

describes a pedagogy of discomfort as a mode of inquiry and invitation that emphasizes a

historicized ethics and testimonial witnessing (200). She writes, “A pedagogy of

discomfort is about bodies, about particulars, about the ‘real’ material world we live in.

Beliefs are ‘embodied habits,’ dispositions to act in a certain way in a given context”

(196). Boler argues that by tracing the genealogies of particular emotional investments

one can come to recognize the emotional selectivity she refers to as “inscribed habits of

inattention” (186). Put simply, by tracing the origins of our emotions we can come to

understand how and why we develop certain opinions about certain environments.1 A

pedagogy of discomfort invites students to examine how their modes of seeing have been

shaped by their cultures, specifically the dominant culture of their time (Boler, 178) and

asks them to appreciate the situatedness of knowledges that arise from such modes. 2

An ecocomposition course is one that asks students to defy the typical

expectations of competition and separation that define a university education (Smithson,

16). As such, educators must be conscious of the possible discomfort that may develop in

students when pushed to explore their relationships with various environments. Indeed,

educators must demand that students experience such discomfort, for it is only within that

uncertain, uncharted territory that true growth may occur. Shor writes, “Negative

1 By environments I mean places, real and imagined, and all that occur within them.2 Donna Haraway describes situated knowledges as “…partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology” (191).

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consciousness has to surface, or be allowed to surface, or be provoked to surface, if the

teacher is to get authentic information at the levels of student thought. Racist and sexist

remarks have to be drawn out as legitimate objects of study, as authentic parts of student

consciousness. How can you study anything kept silent?” (183). As writers in an

ecocomposition course dissect the ways in which their discourse constructs, and is

constructed by, their environments, they will undoubtedly experience emotions regarding

their attachments to certain places, people, and positions. Asking students to not only

embrace those emotions but write about and trace them back through a web of

development may leave some students feeling vulnerable. A pedagogy of discomfort asks

educators to appreciate the necessity of such emotions and welcome them into their

classrooms.

In an ecocomposition course, students must be taught how to look at the world in

a way that reveals the relationships that construct it. To help accomplish this goal, Boler

offers the distinction between “spectating” and “witnessing”. Boler describes spectating

as the act of seeing through one’s own eyes. She argues that spectating “…signifies a

privilege, allowing oneself to inhabit a position of distance and separation, to remain in

the ‘anonymous’ spectating crowd and abdicate any possible responsibility” (184). In

regard to student essays, a student spectates when he writes about his summer vacation as

if he watched the vacation on film and then described his actions in the film.

Boler describes witnessing as an act that is “…always understood in relation to

others, and in relation to personal and cultural histories and material conditions. To honor

these complexities requires learning to develop genealogies of one’s positionalities and

emotional resistences” (178). Boler’s notion that to witness is to create a genealogy, a

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web, of personal experiences, beliefs, and emotions falls directly in line with

ecocomposition’s goal to study the relationships of discourse production. The witnessing

student seeks to understand the complexity of the vacation environment and recognizes

that his experience of that environment is not the experience to be recounted. The

witnessing student understands there exists no one truth of experience, no fixed certainty.

With this understanding often comes discomfort. In fact, the aim of a pedagogy of

discomfort is that students explore their beliefs and values, assessing when habit and

emotional selectivity have become rigid and “…to identify when and how our habits

harm ourselves and others” (Boler, 185). Boler argues that by learning to determine how

and when one spectates or bears witness, it becomes possible to “…inhabit a more

ambiguous sense of self not reduced to guilt or innocence. In this process, one

acknowledges profound interconnections with others, and how emotions, beliefs, and

actions are collaboratively co-implicated” (187). By teaching students to assess their roles

as spectators or witnesses and by challenging them to pursue the function of discourse in

establishing those roles, ecocomposition instructors can provide students with a platform

from which they can discover the interconnectivity of their lives.

One way to approach teaching ecocomposition using a pedagogy of discomfort is

by creating a culture of critical inquiry within a classroom. Boler suggests that educators

may start by asking students to participate in critical inquiry regarding the students’

values and beliefs. Students may be asked to examine their self-images in relation to how

they have learned to perceive others. Boler adds, “A central focus is to recognize how

emotions define how and what one chooses to see and not see” (176-177).

Ecocomposition asks students to consider their positions in environments, positions they

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are initially certain of but upon evaluation will inevitably come to doubt. Letting go of

pasts views or simply suspending them to entertain new ones if a difficult process for the

most experienced human being. Pratt writes, “Each of us carries around those growing-up

places, the institutions, a sort of backdrop, a stage-set. So often we act out the present

against a backdrop of the past, within a frame of perception that is so familiar, so safe

that it is terrifying to risk changing it even when we know our perceptions are distorted,

limited, constricted by that old view” (17). Students cannot be expected to relinquish

these views lightly. It is easier for students to question the assumptions of someone with

whom they disagree than it is to question their own (Plevin, 156).

One way in which ecocomposition instructors might endeavor to approach the

notion of getting students to dissect their own perceptions is by encouraging student

questions to lead the exploration and analyses (Gaard, 174). Educators will need to

carefully guide students towards the task of tracking their opinions and emotions, but

students can and should be allowed as much freedom as possible to move within the

quest. The role of the educator, then, is to ensure that students do not stall along the way,

choosing to spectate rather than witness the topics of their writings. Freire writes,

“Authentic education is not carried on by ‘A’ for ‘B’ or by ‘A’ about ‘B,’ but rather by

‘A’ with ‘B,’ mediated by the world—a world which impresses and challenges both

parties, giving rise to views or opinions about it. These views, impregnated with

anxieties, doubts, hopes, or hopelessness, imply significant themes on the basis of which

the program content of education can be built” (93). The way to prevent students from

stalling along their paths of interconnectivity is to keep them grounded in their emotions.

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Catherine Lutz describes emotions as “emergent products of social life” (5).

Emotions are so personal to us and yet they hold such social and cultural relevance. The

way in which we determine what an emotion means is structured by our cultural systems

—systems that are, themselves, structured by our discourse. Lutz writes that talk about

emotions is simultaneously talk about society—about power and politics, friendship and

marriage, moral and immoral (6). And while emotions are personal in that they are

situated within a person, they are social in that their effects are often triggered by an

external event. It is these events that ecocomposition seeks to investigate in detail. By

challenging students to understand how their emotions trigger events and are triggered by

events, ecological writing moves them towards recognizing how discourse works to

shape not only what they believe in but also how they feel about that belief.

The problem with using a pedagogy of discomfort to teach ecocomposition may,

in fact, be more teacher-centered than student-centered, though. Unlike Redmond who

shied away from the opportunity to confront alternate worldviews in her own class,

educators who successfully implement a pedagogy of discomfort will welcome it. It is the

educator who is willing to confront students regarding their positions and to question

students about the origins of particular emotions who will succeed in teaching students to

recognize the relationships that exist in the world and how those relationships are

constructed by discourse. By awakening students to the interconnectivity of their

environments, ecocomposition, when combined with a pedagogy of discomfort, seeks to

transform students from apathetic vessels waiting to be filled up by traditional banking

methods of education into socially conscious students.

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While often equated with a message of environmentalism, ecocomposition is not

only interested in the discourse of natural spaces or environmental causes. The benefits

that come with viewing the world as a series of ecological relationships transcend our

narrow conception of environmentalism. Martin writes, “An adequate theory of education

needs to go beyond a conception of persons as autonomous individuals not simply

because education ought to bind human beings to one another, but because it should bind

us to the natural order of which we are a part” (182). Ecocomposition seeks to do just

that. When combined with a pedagogy of discomfort, that is, a pedagogy that rejects a

notion of absolute binaries like right and wrong, black and white, good and evil,

ecocomposition pushes students to explore their own emotional biases as the foundation

for understanding the constructed and constructive natures of discourse.

Just as Princess Atta had to learn to embrace her fears of the hungry grasshoppers

in order to alter the course of her colony’s future, so must we, as educators, learn to

embrace emotion in our classrooms. Students come to class expecting to sit comfortably,

to reap the seeds of knowledge we have so dutifully harvested for them. But if we are to

truly educate them, if we are to inspire them, if we are to awaken them, we must first

make them squirm in their seats. We must throw at them what they are not expecting.

Yes, we must ask them to analyze. Yes, we must ask them to evaluate, but first we must

ask of them what no educator has asked—we must ask them to feel.

Works Cited

A Bug’s Life. Dir. John Lasseter. 1998. Walt Disney Pictures, 2003. DVD.

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Boler, Megan. Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Print.

Cooper, Marilyn M. “The Ecology of Writing.” College English 48 (1986): 181-197.

Print.

Dobrin, Sidney I., and Christian R. Weisser. Natural Discourse: Toward

Ecocomposition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Print.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York:

Continuum International Publishing, 2002. Print.

Gaard, Greta. “Ecofeminism and Ecocomposition: Pedagogies, Perspectives, and

Intersections.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Ed.

Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I. Dobrin. Albany: State University of New

York Press, 2001. 163-178. Print.

Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New

York: Routledge, 1991. Print.

Lutz, Catherine A. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll &

Their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

1988. Print.

Martin, Jane Roland. Changing the Educational Landscape: Philosophy, Women, and

Curriculum. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Plevin, Arlene. “The Liberatory Positioning of Place in Ecocomposition:

Reconsidering Paulo Freire.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical

Approaches. Ed. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I. Dobrin. Albany: State

University of New York Press, 2001. 147-162. Print.

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Pratt, Minnie Bruce. “Indentity: Skin/Blood/Heart.” Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist

Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism. Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1984.

Print.

Redmond, Melissa. “Safe Space Oddity: Revisiting Critical Pedagogy.” Journal of

Teaching In Social Work. 30 (2010): 1-14. Print.

Shor, Ira, and Paulo Freire. A Pedagogy For Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming

Education. South Hadley: Bergin & Garvey, 1987. Print.

Smithson, Isaiah. “Introduction: Investigating Gender, Power, and Pedagogy.” Gender

in the Classroom: Power and Pedagogy. Ed. Susan L. Gabriel and Isaiah

Smithson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Print.

Weisser, Christian R. “Ecocomposition and the Greening of Identity.”

Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Ed. Christian R.

Weisser and Sidney I. Dobrin. Albany: State University of New York Press,

2001. 81-95. Print.

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