Abstract Although the collected essays in this special issue were not expressly intended to address the impact of the digital environment on current pedagogies, all the contributions demonstrate in one way or another how computer-based communication modifies the work of teachers and students. Using the key concepts of hybridity, spatiality, connectivity, and user response, this essay describes how the internet, as the dominant twenty-first-century medium for knowledge exchange, has become the filter through which medieval ideas are presented and received. Hybridity refers to a teaching approach that combines face-to-face with virtual, computer-mediated (and often asynchronous) methods, whereas an awareness of spatiality emerges from the advanced geo-location tools now used unthinkingly. Connectivity allows for the creation of virtual communities and communications among their members, while user response refers to the many ways that the digital world supports and even encourages input about computer-based ideas. Since the medieval and digital eras share many characteristics not found in cultures of print communication, making such connections, and thereby crumpling the timeline, can often be automatic and perhaps even unintentional for instructors. The methods described in all the contributions demonstrate the validity of medieval themes for the modern world, which in turn can be effective tools to reach learners beyond traditional academic settings.

Abstract Christy Tidwell reflects on the shift from teaching in person to teaching online asynchronous classes during COVID-19. This shift involved a combination of labor-based grading and using Discord as a central space for the class, both of which aimed to center and engage students and relationships with students rather than further automate the class. Tidwell concludes by commenting on ways that these tools and techniques remain useful even when returning to the in-person classroom.

AbstractThis article explores some pedagogical challenges and opportunities introduced by higher education's increased reliance on private learning management systems (LMS) during the COVID-19 pandemic. It theorizes LMS as an expression of neoliberalism and argues that critical literacy, as a method, should be done to (rather than simply through) LMS. Specifically, it examines two case studies of student interactions with the LMS during an asynchronous first-year writing course.

In the winter of 2022, I had planned a place-based literature course on Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design. A series of outings formed the backbone of the class: my aim was to have students connect to the place where they lived through experiences like standing atop the landfill to understand the afterlife of their waste and touring a colonial house to trace the violent foundations of the city's wealth. Instead, due to the omicron-variant surge, the course was largely conducted over Zoom and all but one outing became virtual. I found that a disorienting, nearly absurd sensation clouded the course when we discussed places that we should have been inhabiting together; instead of bridging the distance between the texts and the world, in the end, the course only accentuated that distance.Postcolonial/ecocritical place-based teaching is challenging for the precise reason that it is based on place and our places are changing now more than ever. And yet, as the kind of teaching the planet needs becomes more difficult, it also becomes more essential. In his foreword to Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, Graham Huggan asserts that “teaching is the most valuable thing we postcolonial/environmental scholars do” (xiv). Amid global health and ecological crises that perpetuate, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is a collection invaluable for its compilation of teaching ideas, resources, and commentary on the field of postcolonial environmentalism. But perhaps more importantly, it is invaluable for the sense of community it creates among educators who continue to dedicate themselves to a livable future.At its core, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media aims to show the analytical and pedagogical import of considering social and environmental injustices together through postcolonial ecocriticism. Editor Cajetan Iheka writes about the collection this way: “Taken together, the growing interest in postcolonial ecologies and the demand for a diversified curriculum addressing social concerns, including the climate crisis, makes this book a crucial contribution to the environmental humanities” (5). The majority of the essays are field-tested success stories of teaching postcolonial ecocriticism that offer a snapshot of the contributor's course. Most courses are literary, and while some are more typically environmental and others postcolonial, all experiment with the overlap of the two in exciting ways. The collection is particularly useful for teacher-scholars who know one side of the critical conversation—either postcolonialism or ecocriticism—and are wanting to bring the other to bear on their thinking and teaching.In recent years, postcolonialism has advanced the field of ecocriticism, a field long dominated by a Euro-American epistemology that put forth romanticized imaginings of pristine nature and prioritized wilderness conservation. While this hegemonic strand of environmentalism was challenged by scholars from a range of social and disciplinary perspectives, stoked in part by the US environmental justice movement in the 1990s, the conspicuous dearth of postcolonial analysis from ecocriticism remained. Due in part to the contributions of major critics like Graham Huggan, Rob Nixon, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, the second decade of the twenty-first century has come to mark what Iheka calls “the ecocritical turn in postcolonial studies,” characterized by increased critical attention to “the inextricability of colonial plundering from environmental conditions” (1). The recognition that colonialism and neocolonialism—and the world order they uphold—are dependent on land theft, resource extraction, and the degradation of Indigenous cosmologies with devastating consequences for people and the environment has fundamentally impacted both postcolonial and environmental studies, leading to the rise of postcolonial ecocriticism.This collection contributes to the critical project of postcolonial ecocriticism by emphasizing the practice of teaching it (even as you will also learn much about postcolonial ecocriticism itself from this impressive group of scholars invested in advancing and diversifying the field). Although there is now a number of major works that take up the study of postcolonial texts and environmental concerns, Iheka points out in his introduction that “none of them explores teaching postcolonial environmental texts” (3). Published in 2021, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is especially timely, as it responds to the growing demand by students that their education attend to past and present environmental and racial injustices. Uniquely positioned to expose these injustices, postcolonial ecocritical texts can help us teach the afterlives of colonialism that dually exploit local communities and environments.As you might expect from a collection that spans two fields, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is impressive in its scope and breadth: twenty-seven essays are organized into six sections. The geographic diversity of the literary and other cultural media analyzed in the book, and to a lesser extent the classrooms themselves, soundly positions the project in a global context. Together, the contributors draw on an “expanded sense of the postcolonial” (9) by including colonized spaces from the Global North in their discussions of the Global South. This approach is important, as it underscores shared systems of exploitation and solidarity outside region or nationhood. The collection also features canonical ecocritical and/or postcolonial texts like Indra Sinha's Animal's People and Ken Saro-Wiwa's Month and a Day alongside newer ones like Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, making it valuable to faculty who teach introductory and advanced literature courses. Finally, as the title emphasizes, the book examines media other than literature, and several key articles focus on teaching visuals, a crucial component of many environmental humanities courses.The first five essays, which constitute “Part I: Background and Theoretical Foundations,” showcase the intersections among postcolonial ecocriticism and other major theoretical frameworks, including environmental justice, Indigenous, queer, disability, and place studies. In the opening essay, Byron Caminero-Santangelo is motivated by “the unique contributions that postcolonial ecocriticism could make to transformative ways of imagining the world and to possibilities for action” (23). Arguing that environmental justice struggles in the Global South “are neither belated nor peripheral” (24), he shows instead that these struggles foreground fundamental elements of injustice, such as the role of multinational and transnational actors, too often ignored in US-centric conversations of environmental justice. Even as Caminero-Santangelo writes toward a global conceptualization of environmental justice, he acknowledges the equal importance of paying attention to specific and local circumstances. Throughout, the collection is animated by this “generative tension” (26) between the universal and the particular that centers the field of postcolonial ecocriticism.Together the contributors to section 1 unsettle the United States and Europe as epistemological strongholds in mainstream environmentalism. In “Finding Balance: Disability and the Ecocritical Lens,” Roanne L. Kantor describes the limitations in how disability is generally studied in the Global North. When disability is approached as socially constructed, in which “impairment happens offstage, such that its causes cannot be politicized or legally redressed” (55), it elides bodily harms inextricable from environmental hazards and disparities in medical care, as in Sinha's Animal's People and Rohinton Mistry's Fine Balance. Similarly, Brady Smith's “Place and Postcolonial Megacities: A Project-Based Approach” redresses the historic exclusion of urbanity in Euro-American literary traditions of “place” through a project-based course that examines how Okorafor's Lagoon complicates many students’ preconceived ideas of the environment.Pedagogy takes center stage in “Part II: Global Ecologies and Uneven Flows.” Each contributor shows how the study of postcolonial environmental literature necessarily shapes the structure and aims of their courses. Examples include creating opportunities for students “to discover their own power” through assignments like an open-ended field journal (81). In Margaret Anne Smith's “Decolonizing the Environmental Classroom: Increasing Student Agency through a Journal Assignment,” excerpts from these journals enable student voices to dominate that essay. Perhaps most radical, Elaine Savory describes a course that integrates lecturers from various environmental fields in the close reading of literary texts. Together, the essays in part 2 demonstrate how postcolonial ecocriticism is by definition interdisciplinary and intersectional because, as Savory puts it, “to think about the environment in postcolonial space is to think globally and locally at once, beyond disciplines and across time” (105).More localized considerations of postcolonial ecocriticism are featured in “Part III: Regional and Local Perspectives,” and Christina Gerhardt opens the section with a region that exemplifies climate injustice: the Pacific Islands. In her environmental humanities course, students explore the threat of sea level rise and the politics of representation as they view map collections and read Pacific Island literature, including Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner's Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter and Craig Santos Perez's From Unincorporated Territory [Hacha]. In choosing an island to represent in both essay and map form, students in the course are primed to think through ideological questions like who and what is centered in each representation and to what effect. Other essays develop these themes of positionality and audience. I particularly appreciate Salma Monani's honest appraisal of her pedagogical decision, as a woman of color in a majority-white classroom, to begin her introductory environmental course with “voices and situations familiar to [her] students” (132), even as the choice delays introducing Indigenous perspectives (Yurok, Hoopa, and Karuk) until a case study on water wars in the Klamath River Basin.While the third section brings together essays on a range of regions, from the Pacific Islands to the Caribbean to Latin America, it concludes with the challenges of using region as an organizing principle. There needs to be more attention on the Global East as colonizer and as colonized, Simon C. Estok insists, at the same time that teacher-scholars need to acknowledge the vast heterogeneity among East Asian nations. This work includes serious obstacles, not least of all because “teaching postcolonial East Asian ecocriticisms outside the region means teaching in a language and culture not of the region” (172). While most of ecocriticism is conducted in English, Estok includes untranslated Korean to highlight how “an inability to read something means an inability to receive the information contained in that writing” (172). Readers will find that Estok's essay resonates with critical linguistic conversations outside of this collection, including those on the politics of language in postcolonial writing, the traditional ecological knowledge embedded in Indigenous languages, and the need to diversify standard academic English in composition studies.“Part IV: The Lives of Animals” introduces the more-than-human community as an essential element of postcolonial environmental teaching. Although animal rights are often pitted against human rights—with one taking precedence over the other—essays by Jonathan Steinwand, Amit R. Baishya, and Jason Price eschew the hierarchal thinking that justifies environmental, racial, and (neo)colonial violence. Instead, both Steinwand and Baishya formulate courses that emphasize multispecies entanglement and, as Baishya defines, “the mutual constitutiveness of the human and the animal” (199). Price confronts the vexed animal studies debate on how to interpret cultural renditions of animals by teaching animist-realist African literature. Instead of reading animals as wholly outside symbolic meaning or not, Price helps students work toward “metaphoric-material approaches [that] successfully blend treatments of animals as literal and nonliteral without denying or backgrounding the animal” (221).Rhonda Knight and Mary Laffidy, a professor and a student, respectively, open the next section with a question that many of their co-contributors in the Global North grapple with: what scaffolding is required to help Western students engage responsibly with literature from other parts of the world? Their course focuses on speculative petro-fiction, in which new worlds are built on African and Caribbean cultures. Knight and Laffidy choose not to provide contextual resources directly but to create a multimodal assignment that guides students to fill in their own knowledge gaps. Students keep a reading journal and then rewrite parts of their journal for a public blog, building their capacity for research and communication in global digital contexts.The essays in “Part V: Extractive Ecologies, Environmental Justice, and Postcolonial Ecomedia” experiment with media that allow for new forms of storytelling. To understand art as a tool of empire and resistance, students compare hegemonic representations of the Caribbean with Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié’s exhibit Imagined Landscapes, in which bright colors are notably absent from his paintings and glitter reflects viewers’ faces, details that lead students to consider their own role in the exoticism and exploitation of the Caribbean landscape (Charly Verstraet). (This essay immediately made me want to learn more about the exhibit and to incorporate more art in my classes.) Another course describes the digital project Colonize Mars, “part choose-your-own adventure novel, part nonfiction account of Mars exploration past and future, and part video game” (273), created by Rachel Rochester (and now available to the public) for students to contend with interplanetary colonization and terraforming, as well as to envision alternative, sustainable futures.What will strike you over and over as you move through Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is the reminder that the stakes of our teaching are high. “Effective environmental pedagogy,” Rochester writes, “must expose the ideological miasma that normalizes colonial violence and its trail of environmental and social catastrophe while invigorating learners to identify alternative means of inhabiting the world” (274). The final section of the collection, “Part VI: Place-Based Approaches,” highlights pedagogical methods that engender these alternative means of inhabiting the world by rooting students in place. In “Ecocriticism in Nigeria: Toward a Transformative Pedagogy,” Sule Emmanuel Egya outlines the challenges and rewards of teaching ecocriticism in a country where the field remains relatively new and of incorporating place-based practices. Class trips to “ecological zones” around campus cultivate students’ concern for local environmental conditions alongside the desire to become agents of change. Additionally, in their significant contribution to the collection, Kristin Lucas and Gyllian Phillips contemplate how to resist a place-based pedagogy that reinforces settler colonialism by centering Indigenous texts that ask their settler students in Canada to engage with the continuance of colonization, as well as restorative human-land relations.Far from being provincial or parochial, the place-based courses shared in the last section illustrate the relevance of the local in studies of the global and offer expansive imaginings of what place-based education can be. For example, comparative learning is presented as place-based when images of oil spills in Ogoniland and writings by Saro-Wiwa lead students in Malaysia to make connections between the power structures that govern both postcolonial places in what Shalini Nadaswaran describes as a “text-to-world-to-self sequence” (324). In the final essay, Sarah Dimick and Cheryl Johnson follow a similar sequence in writing about students in a postcolonial literature course visiting a Chicago-based environmental justice organization. The experience is guided by pragmatics—bringing students to locales depicted in the literature would have required international travel—but also politics: “Without domestic context, students from relatively unpolluted areas of the United States who enroll in a postcolonial environmental literature course may inadvertently come to associate sacrifice zones . . . with distant geographies” (349). For faculty or administrators who need to be encouraged to include field trips in university courses, this concluding essay showcases the critical, reciprocal, and hopeful learning that can happen when students engage with environmental justice community work.While too often “place” is reserved for the rural and place-based teaching as excursions into “nature,” this collection integrates throughout pedagogical methods that invite the careful study of varied places, including urban and built environments. In her book that asserts the specificity of global connections, Anna Tsing (2005: 3) asks, “Where would one locate the global in order to study it?” We might read each essay in the collection as a response to that question. In fact, one of the most provocative moments in relation to place-based approaches appears outside the section labeled as such in “The Colonial Relation between Digitization and Migration in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West” when Sofia Ahlberg asks students to track their online activity, calculate its corresponding carbon footprint, and “imagine which part of the world their finger actually affects as they click and drag on their devices” (246). While it is difficult to find any serious shortcomings with this smart and capacious collection, brushes with the virtual world like this one made me wish that explicit discussion of online courses had been included, especially given the challenges of making local, material environments come to in virtual Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media will teacher-scholars in the fields of ecocriticism and postcolonialism to bring students to the place where the two to For an this collection, not only in the need for more postcolonial ecocritical teaching but also in the capacity to make to own course or the book, you will as you are in a of their and and, because course and are you will that it is more than to For the of the the contributors to this collection that you

AbstractThis essay argues that the emphasis on spoken contributions in English and other humanities courses can exclude disabled students. The COVID-19 pandemic's necessitation of online learning has forced instructors to offer students multiple entry points for conversation—not only through spoken dialogue but also text threads, anonymous polls, and communal annotation assignments. Instructors’ shifts in participation guidelines both before and at the height of the pandemic reveal faculty members’ adoption of a disability justice pedagogy that privileges flexibility. Drawing on these transformations, the author offers pragmatic suggestions for how to value course contributions beyond students’ capacity to voice their reflections aloud. The relinquishment of rigid academic expectations for participation makes space not just for students with disabilities but also for other minority populations, including women students, nonbinary students, first-generation students, and students of color who contribute their expertise in more capacious ways than the standard, discussion-based classroom allows. To conclude, the author considers how instructors might replicate accessible online tools—from Zoom chats to asynchronous platforms—in the return to face-to-face teaching. These new and primarily virtual forms of engagement reframe participation not as individual contributions to conversation, but as ongoing work intended for the purpose of community growth and collective care.

Gautam Basu Thakur is associate professor of English and director of the critical theory minor at Boise State University, where he teaches theoretical psychoanalysis, postcoloniality and globalization studies, and literature of the British Empire. His books include Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (2015), Lacan and the Nonhuman (coedited, 2018), Postcolonial Lack (2020), and Reading Lacan's Seminar VIII (coedited, 2020).Saradindu Bhattacharya teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His recent publications have been in the domains of trauma studies, young adult literature, and the pedagogy of English. He has been teaching cultural studies, Renaissance literature, and new literatures in English at the postgraduate level. Additionally, he has also taught elective courses on nation, media, and popular culture and on children's literature. He particularly enjoys teaching English poetry and reading dystopian fiction.Jolie Braun is curator of modern literature and manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries, where she oversees the modern literature and history collections and provides special collections-based instruction. Her research interests include women publishers and booksellers, zines, and self-publishing. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, American Periodicals, and Textual Cultures: Texts, Contents, and Interpretation.Craig Carey is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century American literature, book history, media theory, and game studies. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, and Arizona Quarterly, among others. He is currently working on a manuscript that explores the relationship between authors, archives, and invention in the age of realism.Moira A. Connelly is associate professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, TN. She has published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Her research interests include equity in collaborative writing, writing transfer, writing about writing, responding to the writing of multilingual students, community college teaching, and applying ideas from the academy to activist spaces.Jathan Day is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research explores how writing instructors’ organizational and design decisions in the Canvas LMS affect the ways their students write and learn.Cassandra Falke is professor of English literature at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where she teaches an introduction to literature, literary theory, romanticism, and contemporary fiction. She is the author of The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016) and Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–1848 (2013) as well as articles and book chapters on literary theory, phenomenology, romanticism, working-class writing, and liberal arts education. She has edited or coedited five collections and special issues.Paul Feigenbaum is associate professor in the Department of English at Florida International University and coeditor of the Community Literacy Journal. His research, teaching, and engagement interests include community literacy, public rhetoric, and the intersections between rhetoric and psychology. His scholarship has appeared in journals including College English, Reflections, and Composition Forum. His first book, Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism through Literacy Education, was published in 2015.Dustin Friedman is associate professor in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, DC. His fields of research and teaching are Victorian literature and culture, aestheticism and decadence, queer theory, the history and theory of aesthetics, and global nineteenth-century writing. He is the author of Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (2019). His writings have appeared in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (2019), the Journal of Modern Literature (2015), ELH (2013), Literature Compass (2010), and Studies in Romanticism (2009).Helena Gurfinkel is professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she teaches primarily critical theory and Victorian literature and culture. She is the author of Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy (2014; paperback 2017) and is currently writing a book on the Soviet television and film adaptations of the works of Oscar Wilde. She has published extensively in pedagogy, literary and film studies, gender studies, and critical theory. She is editor of PLL: Papers on Language and Literature.Sarah Hughes is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, where she also teaches in the English Department Writing Program. Her research explores how women use multimodal discourse—grammatically, narratively, and visually—to navigate online gaming ecologies.Andrew Moos is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on how writing instructors can and are using antiracist assessment and feedback practices in writing classrooms to empower students.Julie Sievers is founding director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Southwestern University, where she also teaches. At the time of this research, she was teaching literature and writing courses at St. Edward's University, where she also directed the Center for Teaching Excellence. Previously, she taught English and composition on the tenure-track at Denison University and in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published on literature, pedagogy, and faculty development in the William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Literature, the New England Quarterly, To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, and the Journal of Faculty Development. She is currently studying annotation pedagogy in the context of first-year seminar courses.Danielle Sutton is a PhD candidate in English studies at Illinois State University. She works at the intersections of life writing, children's literature, and memory studies and is especially interested in comics and verse memoirs of childhood. She lives in Normal, IL.Kathryn Van Zanen is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. Her research centers on ethical negotiation in writing and writing instruction, particularly among raised-evangelicals writing back to their home communities on social media.Crystal Zanders is a poet, educator, activist, and public speaker from Tennessee. As a Rackham Merit Fellow in the Joint PhD Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, her research focuses on Black teachers’ use of African American English in pre-integration classrooms in the South.

Public writing spaces, such as blogs and social media sites, are expanding quickly with new websites, web applications, and other interfaces constantly available to users. As these digital composing spaces continue to expand, it is important that writers are capable of operating within them, yet many composition students lack the rhetorical awareness to present effective arguments in multimodal digital interfaces. To address this issue, the author designed a project to introduce students to public writing while reflecting on the implications of the permanence of their writing, the searchability of these public spaces, and their responsibility as writers. This project began by asking students to reflect on their own online personae, be it through Facebook profiles, personal blogs, or online class forums. Utilizing websites like Yelp and YouTube offered students the opportunity to see how others present themselves online and the effectiveness of composers in these digital spaces. Taught in an online course format, this project demonstrates how writing can live outside of the traditional classroom space and contribute to the students’ community. For the writing teacher, it creates the occasion to delve into students’ understandings of ethics in online writing while illustrating the rhetorical components necessitated by composing in digital media.