2020-21 English Composition, History, Language Place, People, and Story: Environmental Writing I and II. Each semester is $275, payable to the instructor, Eiren Cafall. 9:30-11 a.m., Fridays

Course Description: Place is as intimate to the human experience our own lives, and the best writing about nature regularly illuminates the connections between place, people, and story. In this course, students will sample nature writing that illuminates those connected relationships, as well as make their own work on the environment. Modern nature writing is a combination of our observations and the ideas that put those observations into context through the science, politics, and culture that surround them. In this course, students will be given a thorough overview of the history of nature writing, extending from the origins of world literature, the poetics of European and English literature about place, through the naturalist and conservationist writings of the 19th century, and finally to our modern understanding of writing about the complex interconnected stories of people and the ecosystems they inhabit and effect.

Fall 2020: Environmental Writing I, Early Literature through the 19th Century: The first semester of this course begins with the origins of nature writing in world literature, and extends through the works of naturalists, poets, and writers stretching into the 18th and 19th centuries. This extensive survey will give students an overview of the origins of modern nature writing as it came to be understood in the 20th and 21st centuries—the subject of Environmental Writing II in the spring. Weekly class discussions will engage students in conversation on the readings the written assignment topics. Students will create a one-page written assignment weekly to practice the art of short narrative, research, and persuasion, and work towards a culminating essay—due in spring semester—that may employ any form of creative non-fiction, from journalism to research papers. All written work will be critiqued and graded by the instructor for content, form, structure, and style. Proposals for the final paper in the spring will be due at the end of the fall semester. Tracing its roots to back to the origins of how people write about their relationship with the environment, we will begin in the influences on European comparative literature, myth, and the origins of modern English and American literature to discuss the deep roots of our relationship to writing people, place, and story. Some excerpts during this period will include The Epic of Gilgamesh and Inanna, nature mythology in the British Isles, Biblical passages, the Romantics, the origins of the sublime, and early works by European naturalists, including Alexander von Humboldt, and Charles Darwin. As the semester progresses, we will cover the emergence of an American understanding of place, and begin to focus largely on American literature, including the work of classic naturalist literature from Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, as well as works by underrepresented voices.

Fall Class Snapshots:

Week One: Why write about the environment?

Writing about nature is as old as human writing itself, but in a world where most of the Earth’s population lives in cities, why are we still turning to work about the outdoors? This week we’ll read Robert MacFarland on the importance of retaining nature language as a means to maintaining our relationship with nature itself. Readings: Robert MacFarland, excerpts from Landmarks, Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Sacred and the Superfund, from Braiding Sweetgrass.

  • Writing: Please turn in your first assignment! Complete a single page creative response to the summer reading, The Overstory. In this writing sample, find a topic, or idea, expressed in a quote from the text, that resonated deeply with you while reading. This can be anything, from a funny exchange to a profound understanding that changed your relationship to the text or to yourself, it can also be a scientific fact about trees that was used within the narrative. Allow yourself to write only a single page in response, but provide an introductory paragraph, a quote from the text, and give us a conclusion. This may be as creative as you wish!
  • Reading: Please have completed The Overstory, by Richard Powers during the summer, and come with “Chapter 1: The Word Hoard”, from Landmarks, by Robert MacFarlane and “The Sacred and the Superfund,” by Robin Wall Kimmerer from Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, completed as well.
  • Lecture/Discussion: How are our ideas of environment wedded to an assumption that urban places aren’t nature? How do we continue to focus on a natural world that is increasingly in peril, and is becoming a source of as much anxiety and grief as joy and wonder? What is your personal relationship to nature?

Week Thirteen: Environmental Writing and the Birth of the Conservation Movement

As modern nature writing evolved through the 19th and 20th centuries, it shifted from pure odes to wonder (especially at the emerging American National Park System) and became aligned with conservation movements. How did the emerging genre relate to other works of art, and how did people begin to use their work to turn attention to the developing impacts of colonialism and capitalism on our relationship with the natural world?

  • Writing: Complete a single page creative response to the week’s reading of John Muir. In this writing sample, find a topic, or idea, expressed in a quote from the text, allow yourself to write only a single page in response, but provide an introductory paragraph, a quote from the text, and give us a conclusion.
  • Reading: Please have completed two excerpts of reading by John Muir, from My First Summer in the Sierra, and “Hetch Hetchy Valley.” Copies can be found on Google docs.
  • Lecture/Discussion: How did the experience of commenting on nature change as power, relations changed in this historical time period? Lecture on the history of the preservation of place in the United States, with film excerpts from The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, by Ken Burns, and an introduction into the battles for conservation surrounding the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Northern California.

Spring 2021: Environmental Writing II, 20th and 21st Century: In the last two centuries, environmental writing has grown to include the work of such diverse authors, scientists, and advocates as Terry Tempest Williams, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Mary Oliver, Robert MacFarlane, Elizabeth Rush, Emily Rabeteau, Amitav Ghosh, Sarah Broome, and Wangari Maathai. In this semester, students will gain a wide overview of environmental writing, including research writing, persuasive essays, journalism, memoir, narrative nonfiction, and some fictional prose. Weekly class discussions will engage students in conversation on the readings the written assignment topics. Students will create a one-page written assignment weekly to practice the art of short narrative, research, and persuasion, and work towards a culminating essay that may employ any form of creative non-fiction, from journalism to research papers. All written work will be critiqued and graded by the instructor for content, form, structure, and style. Class will culminate in a final presentation, where students either read from or describe their long-form projects.

Spring Class Snapshots:

Week Four: Nature Writing and the Questions of Race and Class

In this week we’ll focus on voices not commonly mentioned in the discussion of developing nature writing, those belonging to women, indigenous people, and people of diverse racial, religious, class, and ethnic origins.  Readings: Cesar Chavez, Wrath of Grapes Boycott Speech, excerpt from Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, by Lauren Savoy.

  • Writing: Complete a single page creative response to the week’s reading of Chavez and Savoy. In this writing sample, find a topic, or idea, expressed in a quote from the text, allow yourself to write only a single page in response, but provide an introductory paragraph, a quote from the text, and give us a conclusion. Provide your first outline for your chosen final project as well as the introductory two pages of the text.
  • Reading: Please have completed Cesar Chavez, Wrath of Grapes Boycott Speech, and have the excerpt from Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, by Lauren Savoy completed as well.
  • Lecture/Discussion: How do missing voices change the course of an emerging environmental consciousness in America and the world? What do erasures in narrative set up in the process of disconnection from the land?

Week Ten: Environmental Writing and Philosophy

Many philosophers are working to discuss the nature of our current environmental crisis and the scale disruptions of viewing it from the perspective of one human life. Readings: Amitav Ghosh, excerpts from The Great Derangement, Timothy Moron, excerpts from Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World

  • Writing: Complete a single page creative response to the week’s reading of Ghosh and Morton. In this writing sample, find a topic, or idea, expressed in a quote from the text, allow yourself to write only a single page in response, but provide an introductory paragraph, a quote from the text, and give us a conclusion. Provide your first draft of your final project.
  • Reading: Please have completed Amitav Ghosh, excerpts from The Great Derangement, Timothy Moron, and have completed excerpts from Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World as well.
  • Lecture/Discussion: How can philosophers help us contextualize the enormity of the problem of environmental collapse? Can finding new ways of thinking about the environment, and nature as a whole, help us write about the world more thoroughly? How can we problematize the 30,000-foot view of writers who work on understanding as opposed to observation or action? What is the role of the philosopher in forming movements, either in a literary or activist sense?

Summer Advanced Reading: The Overstory, Richard Powers

Winter Advanced Reading: The Yellow House: A Memoir, Sarah Broome

Students will be asked to prepare for the course by reading one fiction and one nonfiction work of environmental literature produced in the last two years. The summer book, The Overstory, by Richard Powers, is a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. The Yellow House: A Memoir, by Sarah Broome, is a work of creative nonfiction that won the National Book Award in 2019. The first class of the fall semester will focus on the ideas and themes of The Overstory, the first class in spring will focus on the ideas and themes of The Yellow House.

Skill Building Over the Year:

During Fall 2020 students will work on these three important areas:

  • Expanding their understanding of the history of environmental writing with a weekly reading assignment. These assignments will be provided by the instructor via a google file or other method weekly along with the syllabus. These readings will be photocopied from textbooks or provided as links to students.
  • Responding to that reading in written form with a weekly one-page writing assignment discussing a topic from the reading. These will require students to practice in a single page, the rhetorical and essay-building practice of providing an introduction to their thoughts, evidence from the text, and a conclusion. These will be graded and returned the following week so students can track the progress of grading and also build skills. Students will be allowed to adjust grades if they choose to provide a rewrite of any of these weekly mini essays.
  • Expanding their abilities to engage in critical thinking and critique of writing and content in these readings, discussion about that week’s reading assignment. Each class will consist of a weekly lecture expanding on the topic in the week’s reading, either in the content of the material, or in a discussion of the literary form and techniques employed by the author. This will give the class a wide range of information, both into the history surrounding the world of John Muir, for example, and the founding of America’s National Parks, but also the expansion of the field of environmental justice journalism.
  • Begin to think about and research their topic area for their large Spring writing project. Students will end their Fall semester with a topic proposal and an initial reading list and/or viewing list for their project.

During Spring 2021 students will work on the above areas with the following exceptions:

  • Students will still be required to submit weekly mini essays, but these will be more freeform, encouraging students to explore and expand their creativity in nature writing. Students will receive feedback and grading of these weekly assignments. Their understanding of those readings will additionally be demonstrated via in-class discussions.
  • Students will also have regular milestone assignments to work towards completion of their longform project. These assignments will lead them through the drafting process for their chosen project, which can be drawn from a number of forms that students will have been introduced to during the first semester. These can include braided essays, narrative nonfiction, personal essays, researched paper, documentary poetics, journalism, or other forms of creative nonfiction pre-approved by the instructor.

The longform writing project will build throughout the two semesters:

  • The longform writing project is designed to be a work of creative nonfiction, one that evolves as the students study and read materials by other writers that also work in creative nonfiction.
  • Ideally, this would be a researched or reported essay, and can take the form of many of the classic types of creative nonfiction: braided essay, opinion piece, journalism, polemic, personal essay, etc. 
  • Because I’d like to support diverse learners, I will also consider longform work that complicates genres, including graphic novel style essays (we’ll be studying some of these), and even other forms of ecological writing such as ecopoetry.
  • Since the students and I will be working together in consultation to develop the project, both in terms of form and topic, the whole year will be spent building the project.
  • They’ll be introduced to concrete skills they will need for environmental writing that can also be used in other forms of creative nonfiction, such as researching, building an argument, finding evidence, interviewing subjects, etc.
  • They’ll also be developing an understanding of where their work fits into the world of environmental writing by reading widely within the history of environmentally focused work to have some context as they create their own pieces.
  • By the two weeks before winter break, students will have chosen both their topic and their form. 
  • The final piece will be due at the end of the second semester and would be something that might typically run in an outlet for environmental writing, and run between 2,000-5,000 words, or between 10-15 pages.
  • In order to practice and prepare for this longform piece, students will be producing short form work each week that will build writing skills in a similar way to a typical composition class in an English department.

State Standards addressed in 2020-2021 by this course at the high school level include:

Please note: If the class is offered online only for any semester due to the Covid-19 outbreak, I will work with the board at TLL to plan for online instruction that will combine a filmed lecture, live Q&A and individual meetings via instructor office hours. Ideally, this will break the typical in-class lecture into thirds, a third recorded time, a third Q&A and a third individual instruction time. More details will emerge as the planning for the autumn progresses.

Instructor Bio

Eiren Caffall is a writer, musician, teacher, and writing textbook author with 20 years of experience as a visiting teaching artist for Chicago arts education organizations. She has taught professional development for high school English teachers through The Chicago Humanities Festival, focusing on environmental writing. She is currently a working environmental writer, with publications in Al Jazeera, Literary Hub, Minding Nature, Entropy Magazine, Tikkun Daily, The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown, with a completed speculative fiction novel set in post-climate collapse New York City, and a book-length work of narrative nonfiction about global warming and extinction. She is the recipient of a Social Justice News Nexus Fellowship in environmental journalism with Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, a Frontline: Environmental Journalism residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in environmental reporting studying with Naomi Klein, a Tin House nonfiction scholarship, and residencies at The Millay Colony for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and Ragdale. She has created an award-winning nonfiction short film on environmental collapse and illness that has toured film festivals nationally and internationally. She has taught for Gallery37, Urban Gateways, the Old Town School of Folk Music, and the Chicago Humanities Festival program for high school educators, EdLab, focusing on environmental writing curriculum development. She worked as a textbook writer for Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, contributing to reading and writing textbooks, especially for grades 6-12, she was a writer and consultant for Chicago Public School’s The Chicago Guide to Teaching and Learning in the Arts, and created HMH’s proprietary website for the professional development website for educators training for the implementation of the Common Core in Language Arts grade 6-12. She was the director of Education for Lookingglass Theater Company. She is also a working musician with three record albums. She lives with her son and husband and cat and turtle in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood.

TLL’s Response to COVID-19

In response to the novel coronavirus Covid-19, Teen Learning Lab is preparing for all its classes to be online for the 2020-21 school year, with possible small-group meetings, if health authorities deem it safe. A TLL Task Force of Board Members, Instructors, Parents and Students formed in March 2020 to address a transition to online learning and to explore ways to make the most of digital learning while still creating and maintaining a strong student community. The Task Force will continue to meet of the summer to prepare for the beginning of TLL classes in September.

Registration for the 2020-21 Eco Project

Registration opens May 4, 2020. To register, please send an email to teenlearninglab@gmail.com requesting a link to our online registration form. We will contact you to set up an online meeting to review your immunization records. Due to privacy concerns, we cannot accept electronic copies of immunization records.

Refunds and discounts for TLL Registration: We understand that the economic shutdown is affecting many families. In response, TLL is changing its “no refund” policy for this and introducing a sibling discount. The Registration Fee for TLL is $125 for the first teen and $75 each for younger siblings. The Registration Deadline is delayed to July 1; paying the Registration Fee will “hold your seat” in next year’s program. Families have until Aug. 1 to withdraw from TLL and receive a full refund. We will continue to accept registrations up until the end of August, as long as classes are not full. If any family needs to arrange for a payment plan, please let us know.

Teacher Payments: At TLL, parents pay instructors directly, and this is separate from the Registration Fee. We ask that families pay their instructors in full. The Board approved delaying the Instructor payment from July 15 to Aug. 1. Families seeking a payment plan for class fees should contact the instructors directly. You will receive the Instructors’ Paypal information when you register.

Sample Class Plans: TLL will post here on our website examples from each instructor of what a sample week of their online class will look like, to help students and families determine whether TLL is a good fit. These descriptions will be posted the first week of May.

Your registration is not complete until a Board Member reviews proof of immunizations (for new students only), and we receive a $150 Registration Fee, which covers our rent and insurance. The Proof of Immunization and the Registration Fee is due by July 1, 2020. We will send class invoices on behalf of instructors in July. Payment to instructors is due Aug. 1. Please be timely in your payment!

Immunization Policy

Please note Teen Learning Lab’s Immunization Policy: Before registering, new students must show a TLL Board Member proof of immunizations for measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus. Teen Learning Lab does not accept religious/philosophical waivers.

Important Dates and 2020-21 Academic Calendar

We meet on Fridays, at Lakeside Church of Chicago, 3939 Howard, Skokie.

  • May 4, 2020: Registration for all students opens.
  • July 1, 2020: Registration forms, new student immunization forms, registration fee due. Please contact us if you need to arrange a payment plan.
  • Aug. 1, 2020: Payment in full to Instructors due. Please contact Instructors if you need to arrange a payment plan.
  • Aug. 1, 2020: Deadline to request a full refund of the Registration fee if a student chooses to withdraw.
  • Friday, Sept. 4, 2020 Mandatory Student and Parent Orientations, Online, times TBA
  • First Semester, 13 weeks: Sept. 11 to Dec. 11 (no class Nov. 27, week of Thanksgiving.)
  • Second Semester, 15 weeks: Jan. 15, 2021, to April 30 (no class April 2, Good Friday).

General Information about TLL

Teen Learning Lab of Greater Chicago Organization is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Our mission is to support homeschooling teens by organizing exceptional opportunities for deep learning, rigorous study, and group experiences in a wide variety of academic subjects.

Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar schools, Teen Learning Lab offers classes that cross the standard boundary lines of academic disciplines.

TEEN LEARNING LAB CLASSES AND YOUR HIGH SCHOOL TRANSCRIPT

As homeschoolers, you have the flexibility to tailor your education to your interests – and top colleges want to see how homeschoolers use their freedom to build unique, highly individualized transcripts. Teen Learning Lab classes will demonstrate on your transcript the heights of your intellectual curiosity and commitment to pursuing deep interests. Our diverse, multi-disciplinary courses will benefit your high school transcript, signaling to admissions officials that you are a student who goes beyond standard high school curriculum to seek intellectual challenges.