Troubling Abstraction

Troubling Abstraction

New Forms of Environmental Writing

Surveying a wide range of contemporary poetry, fiction, and memoir by women writers, this book explores our most pressing environmental concerns and shows how these texts find innovative new ways to respond to our environmental crisis. Arguing for the centrality of individual encounter and fragmentary form in 21st-century literature, as well as themes of attention, care, and loss, Baker highlights the ways that fragmentary texts can be seen as a mode of resistance. These texts provide new ways to consider the role of individual agency and enmeshment in a more-than-human world. The author proposes a new model of 'gleaning' to encompass ideas of collection, assemblage, and relinquishment and draws on theoretical perspectives such as ecofeminism, new materialism and posthumanism. Examining works by writers including Sara Baume, Ali Smith, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Bhanu Kapil and Kathleen Jamie, Baker provides important new insights into understanding our planetary predicament.

The Trouble with English and How to Address It

This essential book will help English teachers to address the challenges and opportunities in creating a powerful, knowledge-rich, concept-led curriculum, which draws on lived experience and engages with cognitive science and other educational research. It explores persistent problems in the teaching of English, why we have struggled to address them and how we can go about creating a curriculum which enables all pupils to achieve. Written by experienced English teachers and teacher educators, the book empowers teachers to reclaim their subject as one which has the power to change lives, and to deliver it with passion and authenticity. The Trouble with English and How to Address It contains: A detailed exploration of the challenges English teachers face in designing and delivering a rigorous, coherent, sequenced curriculum An overview of the implications of cognitive science research for the teaching of English Approaches to building a powerful, knowledge-rich curriculum which encompasses concepts, contexts and content in English Suggestions for how to use curriculum design and implementation as a training opportunity in departments Practical strategies for English teachers which provide the link between cognitive science research and their classroom practice To equip leaders and classroom teachers with everything they might need to improve their provision, this book provides a forensic account of what to change, why and how, moving from the big picture into fine details about what we might see in a highly successful English classroom.