Whenever we team teach, two or more concept systems overlap. The joy of interdisciplinary teaching stems from the synergy of sharing and battling over paradigms and structures which support our own set of assumptions. Students seldom get to see the adjustments they have to make when they take individual courses, taught in isolation, unlinked or unsequenced. Even when I am teaching two related courses, I find myself adjusting concept maps and paradigms from one to the other (as it were, team teaching with myself). Occasionally, when four or five students take both these related courses in the same term, I find myself automatically serving their needs by mentioning the readings of one course in the other. Almost all my general education courses are environmental and hence are growing more and more interrelated to me. But what about my students?

The fact is that general education has its own ecology and students need help in this integration process. They need to be challenged to construct their own concept maps and worldviews to bridge the canyons between general education courses. For this reason, I usually require a major project or paper assignment which calls for such a broad construct at the end. For example, my course in environmental ethics is called A Bill of Earth Rights because the students work toward their own d/ecologue which they must illustrate from the readings and their own cases or experience.

Project Description

For this fellowship I propose to bring concept-mapping technology to the assistance of my students and to lead the way by my own example. I am starting at this date to launch a website with all my own environmental, literary, and biological paradigms. Thus, in the manner of Raymond Williams and Evelyn Fox Keller, I intend to provide the key concepts of the variety of disciplines I rely upon in teaching my environmental literature, ethics, and nature writing courses. I am following here the pedagogical direction of Joseph Novak and his recent workshops at Rollins.

The technology for this project needs little discussion. Obviously, hypertext is ideal for showing the ecology of mind; and I will be looking to provide the best software packages such as Inspiration and Visio to help students create flow charts and diagrams to present their own worldviews They can, of course, simply use Windows '95/NT and WORD, tools readily available here at Rollins, to create hypertext versions of their own, borrowing or adapting any links from my webpage of interrelated courses and topics.

Assessment

In order to assess the value of this experiment, I intend to run three different sections of the same ENG 270 Environmental Literature course. In section one I will allow students to do the capstone project with or without the help of technology. So one group will be working by intuition and listening to comprehend the materials and invent their own philosophies. This is a placebo I expect at least a third will gladly choose. The rest will do the same course and project, but with the aid of my explicit hypertext dictionary of related concepts and the draftsmanship of the computer. All students in section two will use the technology and none in section three. Besides comparing the quality of their final products, I am interested in determining which groups will carry the process forward in their next general education courses. That can be studied by tracking their later progress and by a system of self-reporting after two or more terms.

Background Narrative:
"Mentally I am a Walt Whitman" Ezra Pound

In 1976, while I was minding my own medieval business (teaching Chaucer and the like), Norton sent me a free copy of Leaves of Grass. It changed my life and mind. Somehow I was reading it for the first time and it seemed to say all and more of what I always have known and believed. It put new energy into my general education courses. Soon I was actively involved in developing our Environmental Studies Program and teaching regularly a course called Environmental Literature with Whitman as webmaster. The heart of this course has always been a nature-writing Journal, integrating songs of childhood, the self in its native haunts, responses to the literature, and important questions of value concerning the environment.

Twenty years later the ES program is now a department with the third largest enrollment. My course has spread to other Rollins teachers and to a handful of local high schools through a pre-college program called FLIC. Every year I workshop with these teachers to keep them abreast of the rapid growth of ecocritical resources and ideas. We especially concentrate on Florida literature and field trips. Thus, in the past ten years I have reached more than a thousand high school students with Whitman's imagination.

This past year our Environmental Studies Department has begun an initiative to link field study of newly acquired greenways in Central Florida to both Rollins and FLIC courses. We are following the mandate of Emerson that general education should involve nature, books, and action. Needless to say, the webpage concept-mapping project will be of value for all these constituencies.

Sabbatical Textbook Project

Last fall for the first time I devoted a sabbatical to my general education teaching instead of medieval literary scholarship I started to create my own textbook for environmental literature. Most of the paradigms of the new field of ecocriticism are so far based on Thoreau and the nature essay I think that Whitman makes a better model. Here is a quick overview of my sabbatical activities:

• I wanted this textbook to mix photosynthesis and poetry. So I took Biology 120 and spent considerable research time reading Ernst Mayr, Evelyn Fox Keller, and others to refine a set of basic concepts in biology with a view to integrating them with Aristotle's key concepts of literary analysis
• Following the lead of some major Whitman scholars, I studied Whitman's debt to nineteenth-century science in his poetry and thinking, especially Humboldt, Chambers, Liebig, and Youmans. Herein one can find the roots of late nineteenth century thinking on metabolism, animal chemistry, thermodynamics, glaciation, photosynthesis, geological history, and evolution-key concepts for all the authors.
• In Whitman's notebooks and manuscripts that preceded the first edition of Leaves of Grass I found corroboration for Whitman's development of a unique environmental imagination. Through content analysis I have reduced this material to a set of primary concepts: equality, immortality, body, the species self, magnanimal (spiritual + animal), and poetry. Over the past ten years, I have given a half dozen papers on a number of these topics at a variety of conferences.
• I also have started to write some of my own nature essays on subjects surrounding our local Wekiva River, my favorite Florida haunt.

The variety of these enterprises is too great for the conventional introduction to literature textbook. My solution is to use electronic publishing with the following materials:

• the syllabus of actual readings with useful annotations and colorful illustrations
• the set of literary terms (taken from Aristotle but modified by ecology) to correspond to the current paradigm of ecocriticism
• the basic questions and issues of the course
• the scientific and biological concepts represented in the literature
• the connections between this course and others to which it is closely related:
• ENG 206 The Poetry of Earth (nature poetry from Whitman to Swenson)
• ENG 233 A Bill of Earth Rights--also taught as RCC 100 Earthkind
• ENG 273 The Whole Earth Album: Nature Writing and Photography
• RCC 100 Biorhythms: Science and Nature Writing
• ENG 203 Introduction to Literary Study (English core course I often teach)
• BIO 120-121 General Biology (biology core course)
• ENV 189 The Environmental Crisis (ES core course which I have taught)
• my own scholarly and theoretical essays
• the connections between course issues and our local Florida habitats
• samples of nature writing (my own and the best from my best students)

Fellowship Schedule

My plan for the current school year is to finish and revise my sabbatical materials and learn as much as I can about html and webpage production through local workshops. My tenure for the fellowship would then be the summer of 1998, putting me in position to apply the technology to my environmental literature courses for 1998-99. Next fall, I also plan to teach a graduate course called An Emerging Sense of Place in collaboration with Professor Joseph Siry our history of science expert (and webpage wizard). We will be setting the history of science and literature side by side and the course will lead from the larger national scene to the local Florida writers and ecological issues.