Editor’s Column

We are delighted that Resilience’s first year of publication culminates in a special issue on pedagogy. We initially imagined Resilience’s work as pedagogical and hoped that Resilience could make students of us all by providing a place for scholars and activists in different disciplines to share their environmental commitments with one another and to discuss how the arts and humanities, defined in the broadest possible way, could imagine, transform, and disseminate those commitments, making them part of new systems of knowledge and practice.

But we were amazed at what we received when we sought work about pedagogy and environmentalism for this issue. Not only did colleagues generously share with us their work in specific courses by giving us glossed versions of their syllabi; they offered us ruminations on how their disciplines were changing as a result of increased interdisciplinarity and the turn toward environmentalism. Many of our contributors speculate about how their own research and pedagogy might participate in this change; and as you will see, many of our submissions describe the difficult, ephemeral practice of day-to-day teaching, detailing not only the knowledge that emerges when a class or a project is successful but the knowledge that emerges when our best-laid teaching plans suddenly seem to go off course in unpredicted but no less rich directions. Contributors shared with us deeply personal and essayistic accounts of the key texts and events that shaped their thinking, as well as demonstrating in the form of the essay itself why it matters that we return to those texts and ideas. We also include interviews with scholars and teachers working on a very different scale: our guest coeditor, Paula Salvio, interviewed Tom Kelley, chief sustainability officer at the University of New Hampshire, who discusses the administrative challenges involved in increasing the reach of sustainable practices; and Jonathan Tomkin, who designed and teaches a mooc through Coursera, discussed with us how matters of time and scale in pedagogy and in environmental thinking work together.

But what we most appreciate about the contributors to this issue is how they model the ongoing experience of learning in their work itself, how they model the ways we learn to see and unsee objects and ideas, how we are jarred out of habits of thinking when we think with others, how we create and share new histories and new futures when we believe our work should take account of the unheard lessons that neglected voices can provide. Unsurprisingly, most of the work in this issue is collaborative, and nearly all demands collaborative thinking (across histories, nations, disciplines, and events), from our portfolio of writers who responded to our query about the texts that shaped their environmental thinking and scholarship to the book review section in which scholars meditate on the generative impact of Ursula Heise’s work.

We hope that you enjoy the multitude of ways to imagine pedagogy this issue provides as much as we do.