Cognitive Phenology: An Evolving Approach to the Challenges of Teaching Environmental Literature

As indicated by its title, this article discusses how the author’s research in narrative theory, cognition, and evolution have shaped his pedagogy in general and his course in environmental literature in particular. Built around a semester-long assignment involving several relatively unorthodox assignments—referred to as “challenges”—the environmental literature course at the center of the article invites and enables students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to think differently about core subjects and common texts. The article addresses the ways that the course—because of its reliance on methods and readings associated with cognitive studies—provides the students and the teacher with important opportunities to chart as phenologists might the changes in their thinking that result from reading the shared literary texts and engaging the various intellectual and physical challenges.