Riding the affective roller coaster : literature teachers explore their role in an international ecopedagogical project

This paper examines how a team of international educators from Norway, Pakistan and the UK collaboratively explored their roles as literature teachers through an ecopedagogy project. The researchers, who are all university teachers, replicated a cross-curricular undergraduate teaching module on environmental education through poetry. One team member taught the module while the others adopted the role of students. Key activities included engaging with Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Moose” and conducting a local observational walk leading to creative writing. The research design was inspired by a collaborative autoethnographic approach (CAE), drawing a dataset that includes individual reflective journals written after each teaching session and a collective post-teaching discussion. The findings focus on how the project provided opportunities to investigate theoretical questions about engaging with literature, ecocriticism, as well as to explore the role of literature within ecopedagogy. The discussion highlights the importance of affect in developing environmental consciousness and the relevance of context in the implementation of ecopedagogy: exploring our roles as literature teachers within a secure environment showed us the importance of considering the emotional lives of both students and teachers, in higher education and at other levels, when teaching about the environment.