“Human/Nature: An Exploration of Place, Stories, and Climate Futurism” is a combined format 3-week summer institute sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. With in-person and virtual convenings for 25 English teachers of grades 6-12, the institute will be held virtually from April 10 to June 10, 2023, in-person from June 12-23, 2023, on SSU’s campus as well as through field trips to various locations in northern California, and again virtually from July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024.
The institute will guide participants in an in-depth inquiry into climate futurism alongside literary scholars, teacher-artists, naturalists, and media literacy scholars. Climate futurism is defined here as storytelling that uses climate science as a catalyst to imagine possible climate futures. Storytelling is essential to the humanities, but it also bridges other disciplines like the sciences and helps people imagine alternative outcomes to complex problems.
This institute starts with cli-fi, or climate-related science fiction and speculative fiction, and integrates the Freirean ideal of reading the word and the world as a text in the spirit of taking action. Teachers can work alongside students to use literature as an entry into future-casting, or world-building based on research and investigation, imagining climate futures where people have agency, and the planet has hope — even when confronted with seemingly impossible paradoxes. Lil Milagro Hernandez, a Bay Area youth activist, recently argued that the dystopian elements of our present lives, rife with climate anxiety, necessitate space for young people to dream — and work towards — a better future.
Our Human/Nature institute seeks to infuse critical readings from the cli-fi dystopian genre with a 21st-century approach that includes digital and media literacies and tends toward a proactive impulse or the urge to inspire action for positive change. The institute's objective is to explore climate futurism through literature from a youth-centered perspective and to find high-interest literature, real-world texts, and tools for digital content creation to incorporate interdisciplinary ideas into their English curriculum. Field experiences provide opportunities to make connections between field-based science strategies, such as observation, discovery, and inquiry, with storytelling.
The institute starts with Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and young adult literature in the genre of “cli-fi,” or climate fiction, and dystopian science fiction, such as M.T. Anderson’s Feed and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, to frame field experiences and leads to the development of curricular “Action Plans” for teachers’ use in their own classrooms. For dissemination, participants, with the support of the institute faculty and peers, will curate interdisciplinary resources for other secondary teachers and their own students around a wide range of themes related to climate futurism.
The following questions have animated the design of the institute:
How can we engage educators’ passions, expertise, and deep knowledge of their students around climate futures?
How can cli-fi open students to imagining alternative futures from a variety of perspectives?
In what ways can students take informed action, drawing from literature but also concrete, real-world texts?
I am especially excited about the dynamic team Troy, Erick, Claudia, and I have assembled to guide the Institute's experiences. I encourage you to explore the Faculty page to learn more about the incredible experts, scholars, teachers, naturalists, writers, and artists ready to take part in the learning community.
Looking forward with enthusiasm,
—
Dr. Fawn Canady
Associate Professor of Adolescent and Digital Literacies