Plevin asserts that place “is productive in ways that categories of race, gender, and class have no been, and it offers an opportunity to revisit Paulo Freire, extending his educational concepts and theories of teaching interaction. For many writing students, place becomes an integral part of what I will call an ‘ecocomposition course,’ on that evolves naturally from their own writing, their own concerns” (147). Basically, Plevin states that students will automatically being writing about place when they write about what is important to them. Using their writing, students and the teacher can analyze the students’ language and look for ways the students are writing in ways that subjugate and silence nature; this encourages students to blur the link between self and place. As students stop subjugating nature and begin listening to nature’s voice, they will stop subjugating other people and, ultimately, gain more agency over themselves. This pedagogy “enable[s] them to recognize their role in oppressively positioning others as objects while broadening their notion of what an ‘other’ can be” (149).
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Keller agrees with Dobrin and Drew that “we must divest ourselves of the notion that ecocomposition necessarily deals with nature” (194); though, ironically, he writes about a class in which he specifically deals with nature. His purpose is this chapter is to describe the course and “analyze a specific cultural and rhetorical situation that shall provide a new way of understanding – and hopefully teaching – the ecology of the writerly voice in the composition classroom” (194). Keller argues that “an individual’s voice/self is never entirely fixed and stable, determined completely by the will of the individual herself, but one’s voice/self is not, on the other hand, entirely subject to the effects of all its discursive encounters…This notion of voice/self also implies that people have recourse, at times, to agency – some ability, that is, to resist discourses that attempt to impose change and oppression” (200-1). Keller breaks voice down “into three interrelated components” (201):
He notes that “voice is also contingent upon other factors: namely, audience and place” (202). |
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