Living Literature

Ironically it was during his course on nineteenth-century American transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau when Bob Burkholder first developed his very modern idea of enhancing his literature class with field experiences.

“I'd noticed over the years that students were changing,” says Burkholder, an associate professor of English. “They were much more screen-oriented and inward, less connected to the environment than ever. Unless they are in an outdoor-type major, they get very little exposure to public green spaces.”

Robert Burkholder associate professor of English

Burkholder's thoughts on this crystallized while attending a conference at the government's Fish and Wildlife Training Center near Shepherdstown, West Virginia. It was there he met a University of Nevada professor who, besides teaching in a high-profile environmental literature program, takes his students into the Sierra mountains for a 10-days to hike and read. Inspired to create a similar type of experience, Burkholder began the Penn State Wilderness Literature Field Institute, in conjunction with Penn State Outreach, in the summer of 2000. The Institute was the first course in what has become the Adventure Literature Series, an entire program of experience-based literature courses aimed at both intellectual and physical education.

“The idea was to have regular class room study for a few days of the term,” Burkholder says, “and then take the literature and the discussion onto the trail, where we combine understanding literary texts with the experience of wild nature.”

The Wilderness Literature Field Institute has seen a few different incarnations since it began, and now focuses on a six-day hike in the Dolly Sods, a wilderness area in northern West Virginia. The trip includes hiking three to eight miles a day with 40-to-55-pound backpacks, white water rafting, and rock climbing. During the trip, students read, discuss, and interpret a wide variety of environmental writings, from Thoreau to Mary Oliver. Students receive credit in both English and Kinesiology.

“The issue is how we can develop a deeper understanding of the human-nature relationship,” explains Burkholder. “One of the ways students express themselves is through a daily journal of their experiences.”

Thanks the popularity of the Wilderness Literature Field Institute, in 2001 Burkholder offered a more ambitious experience, taking students who had read a variety of texts on the Colorado River on the two-hundred mile journey down that River through the Grand Canyon. Although a “trip of a lifetime,” he found that the course was too expensive for most students.

To remedy that problem, in 2004 he developed a new outdoor literature course, “The Beach: Cultural Artifact/Environmental Reality,” to add to his Adventure Literature Series. The beach in question is Capers Island, a South Carolina State Heritage Site, just north of Charleston, S.C., where students spend seven days kayaking along the Atlantic Coast, in the Francis Marion National Forest and Cape Romaine National Wildlife Refuge, learning about the cultural and environmental importance of the swamps, beaches, and marshes in the area. Along with a visit to an antebellum rice plantation and Native American archaeological sites, students go to the uninhabited Bull Island, which boasts red wolves, alligators, and an incredible diversity of wildlife. Authors such as Penn State graduate Diane Ackerman, Rachel Carson, Loren Eiseley, and Barry Lopez are among the writers read during the course, which also includes a service component, working with the Clearwater Conservancy to help clean up the local watershed.

“The course has been full every year since it's been offered,” says Burkholder. “Usually we get about fifteen students, which is a perfect size, both for the planned activities and for seminar-style classes.” Student journal excerpts can be read here.

Thanks to the popularity of “The Beach,” Burkholder developed a new course for fall 2006, “Sailing the Chesapeake Bay: Natural and Cultural Landscapes (ENGL 297A),” which combines classroom study of the history, ecology, and cultural significance of the Bay and its watershed. By canoe, students also explore the Susquehanna and Juniata Rivers in Central Pennsylvania, and partake in a sailing trip on a Bay skipjack, a rare and historic wooden sailing boat that was once prominent in the oyster industry. In the course, students read novelist James Michener, nature writers William Warner and Tom Horton, and Eastern Shore writers John Barth and Gilbert Byron.

The course also includes a service component completed in partnership with the watershed advocacy group, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Students have done bank plantings along a tributary of the Susquehanna in Lancaster County.

The classes vary a bit in their format. The Chesapeake and The Beach courses spend the entire semester in the classroom before heading out. The Wilderness Literature class has meetings both in the classroom at University Park and on site. All of the courses have been popular and students invariably count them among their most memorable Penn State experiences.

In case anyone thinks these courses are not academically rigorous, think again. Although each one varies a bit in format, they are all seminars, and the demands are commensurate with those in other seminars. Students share the teaching load by preparing and delivering reports and by discussing the assigned readings.  

“The ultimate goal of the intellectual and physical requirements of each course is to have the student learn to live a bit more deeply in their place,” says Burkholder. “I want them to understand the natural world as much more than a setting for their adventures.”

Burkholder plans to continue to refine and expand the current offerings of the Adventure Literature Series, involving students and graduate students more in the planning and teaching of his experience-based program.

Service Project with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation for ENGL 297A

 

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