What the heck is Nature Writing?
My book is: Benjamin,
A. (2007). But I’m Not a Reading
Teacher: Strategies for Literacy
Instruction in the Content Areas. Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education.
Black font indicates what the author says.
Red font indicates my comments.
You’ll
notice that today’s blog post is all in red font. As promised yesterday, I looked up “nature
writing,” and am blogging on it today rather than discussing the book listed
above. Thanks Lori and Diane for your
comments on my blog post yesterday. You
were very helpful.
According
to Wikipedia, “Nature writing often
draws heavily on scientific information and facts about the natural world; at
the same time, it is frequently written in the first person and incorporates
personal observations of and philosophical reflections upon nature. […] include natural history essays, rambles,
essays of solitude or escape, and travel and adventure writing.” A website that came up in my query was http://naturewriting.com/, an online
magazine that has essays, blogs, book recommendations and poetry. It lists authors like Muir and Thoreau. If Benjamin had added those authors to her
discussion, I wouldn’t gotten the point yesterday!!! Ah well, now I know about this cool website.
The books listed on this website chronicle naturalist’s
explorations, autobiographical accounts, and interestingly, novels and short
stories.
I’m going on a wild tangent, so hang on. Way back in my undergraduate days (and I’m
not going to say how many decades ago that was) I took a creative writing class
for short stories, and wrote an account of two people that got lost in a
Carlsbad-like cavern. I wrote about
bats, cave ice, stalactites, stalagmites, underground lakes, carnivorous beetles,
albino crickets, blind fish, and on and on.
I loved it. In fact, I still have
it. Writing fiction, and marrying it
with my knowledge of biology and geology was incredible! It was wildly creative, but imbued with
facts. Why can’t we do this in a science
classroom?
I’ve always thought that writing was a force
like no other – extremely creative. What
if we harness that creativity and interject science, just like I did in my
short story? Might be worth trying to
get a little interest growing. I think
writing fiction with science facts would be a fun project, and appeal to those put
off by the drier textbooks. The teacher
could even list facts and vocabulary that needed to be included.
This would support what Emig said, that
writing can be used as a mode to learn. There
could be other writing to learn exercises, like having a sentence or two
prompt, then students have to create the rest of the paragraph, using the science
vocabulary provided. Creative writing
might not appeal to everyone, but it might be engaging for some.
Wow, that was fun! I loved this tangent, and the ideas that came
sprouting forth! I promise, back to the
book tomorrow. Thanks, Amy Benjamin, for making me look up “nature
writing.”
I really liked how you were not only able to take what we are learnging and apply it to how you can teach our students but how you were able to see how that works, to see how you can make it work for students. I think with a lot of ideas in education that I see their value, want to implement them, but it is in the translation into my personal classroom that it become difficult if not impossible, I like that you saw something and made it work for you, it seems, that now, it will be easier to help your students to participate in this writing to learn.
ReplyDeleteSo that's nature writing. I like it! We inadvertently did a nature writing assignment last semester when our students finished their work much faster than we anticipated. We asked them to write a very short story depicting an encounter between predator and prey, from the point of view of the prey. They loved and gave us some good, and gruesome (!) stuff.
ReplyDeleteThank You for the definition and it sounds interesting. It is funny that some things we do or have done in class actually have a specific name.
ReplyDeleteI love that you found a voice for yourself in fiction by writing about your knowledge of biology. Have you ever read _Prodigal Summer _by Barbara Kingsolver? She writes beautifully about nature with a great plot! I had a great English teacher tell me that I could never go wrong if I just wrote about things that I knew well. Turns out the things I know about are really scattered, and I don't know many subjects deeply, but I have noticed that if you are willing to research something, you can write about it convincingly. And I agree, it would be really fun to have science students try to write fiction about some of their favorite science topics! Imagine that--having fun and learning at the same time!!
ReplyDeleteI loved the color red but found it a little hard to read. I also always felt like red means bad in learning lol. I like how yous said writing was like a force no other. I agree that writing can be so powerful we see it everyday in speeches. Nobody comes up and starts talking about something they have not written and written again and than when they think there done keep writing. When the speech is than read out loud it can be so powerful. I'm talking about no reading to learn but reading to change somebody minds like in politics
ReplyDeleteI loved the color red but found it a little hard to read. I also always felt like red means bad in learning lol. I like how yous said writing was like a force no other. I agree that writing can be so powerful we see it everyday in speeches. Nobody comes up and starts talking about something they have not written and written again and than when they think there done keep writing. When the speech is than read out loud it can be so powerful. I'm talking about no reading to learn but reading to change somebody minds like in politics
ReplyDeleteI loved this blog. It helps me to see how writing fiction can help our students. I'm now thinking of math fiction and how that could be done during the year. Great post.
ReplyDelete