English department member and Academy alum Norah Doss ’08 was one of 25 secondary school teachers selected to participate in the National Endowment of the Humanities’ Climate Futurism program for two weeks over the summer at Sonoma State University.
She and her fellow teachers, representing disciplines that included history, theater, and library science, explored CliFi — or climate fiction — through texts like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, short stories, and theoretical pieces. They also created art, worked through their readings in the theater, and conducted fieldwork at places like the Fairfield Osbourne Preserve, a nature reserve in Sonoma County, California.
“I have been a science fiction fan since I read Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin for sophomore summer reading,” says Norah. “Oftentimes, people view science fiction literature as non-academic, but I love how Le Guin talked about science fiction from an anthropological lens.”
Norah plans to teach two of the texts from the institute — MT Anderson’s FEED and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves. “I am also bringing back lots of innovative teaching practices.”
Working with academics from other institutions, including Indiana University, the University of Connecticut, UCLA, and Arizona State, was amazing, she says. “I learned so many relevant teaching strategies. We worked with an art teacher to make stop-motion films; I made a short about a California poppy blooming. We also got to write poetry while in the field, which was a wonderful experience to be by a creek, with newts and fish swimming by.”
Norah has always been interested in environmentalism and the outdoors, so this particular program seemed like a perfect fit.
Part of the charge of the NEH program is to disseminate what participants learned, so she hopes to use the curriculum she’s developing for her students to build reproducible units to present at the National Council for Teachers of English Conference in 2024 and publish it in journals like Climate Lit.
“The sub-genre of CliFi can definitely fit into other popular genres like dystopian fiction, which makes it a particularly high-interest genre for students. Climate fiction also allows environmentalism and future thinking to exist outside of STEM classrooms.”
