Although we’re in the deepest of deep summer, at least going by the Canadian post-secondary calendar, you’re probably already thinking about next year’s courses. You might have had to write course outlines for your department’s website, or submit your fall textbook orders to your university’s bookstore already.
Here at NiCHE, we’d like to learn more about the present state of Canadian and North American environmental history teaching in post-secondary institutions. To that end, we’d like to ask our readers for their help.
Have you recently taught a course on Canadian or North American environmental history?
If so, would you be willing to archive a copy of the syllabus on our Teaching Materials page? This act of scholarly generosity is especially appreciated by those preparing to teach environmental history courses for the first time. (And it’s all the more significant now that the H-Environment syllabus bank no longer exists.)
Are you preparing to teach a new and exciting course on Canadian or North American environmental history? Or a non-EH course infused with environmental content?
We’d like to preview a handful of courses in a forthcoming post on The Otter ~ La Loutre. If you’d be willing to tell us a little bit about your course, please get in touch!
Do you have favourite resources (textbooks, databases, films, etc) that you use when teaching Canadian or North American environmental history?
We’re continually updating our Teaching Materials page, and we’d love to hear what resources you’ve found useful in your own courses.
Please contact us or leave a comment below if you can help us out with any of the above. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!
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I’ve used Neil Forkey’s short textbook, Canadians and the Natural Environment to the Twenty-First Century in a couple of EH courses (4th-year seminar and a graduate seminar). It is a wonderful book to assign early in a seminar course because it can be read in less that a week and it kickstarts broad discussion about narrative and nation in environmental history.
You can listen to an interview we recorded with Forkey about his book on a previous episode of Nature’s Past here:
http://niche-canada.org/2012/11/27/natures-past-episode-33-histories-of-canadian-environmental-issues-part-iii-the-canadian-environmental-movement-i/
I think the NiCHE community has heard enough from me on this, but next year I’m team-teaching a class with a professor in Film & Media Studies called “West, Nature, Cowboys, Myth.” I suspect the students think we’ll just be watching classic westerns, but the class is really about the environmental pasts of the western interior, their political symbolism, our visual consumption of places, and implications for sustainability. Ranching and ranch lands are the main focus, but we’re also dealing with water, oil and gas, and agriculture.
That said: we ARE reading a sliver of Nothing Too Good for a Cowboy.
Also: CBC archives. We got a lot of mileage out of analyzing the nationalist/megaproject/antinature language in this, for example: http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/duffs-ditch-is-completed
A class on Canadian/American moments of environmental conflict & cooperation would be great to have …
I’d be happy to throw my syllabus on the pile and VERY interested to read others. I’m going to be spending a lot of time this winter trying to nail down an outline for a popular presentation of “EnvHist 101 for high/home schoolers,” so I’m very curious what others think important enough to cover, especially in intro classes.