About the author

Magdalena Maczynska is Professor of English and World Literatures at Marymount Manhattan College. Her areas of research include climate fiction, contemporary urban fiction, post-secular fiction, and teaching pedagogy. She has received two Mellon innovative teaching grants to develop her “Narrating Climate Change” course, which she has taught at MMC’s Manhattan and Bedford Hills Correctional Facility campuses. Her scholarly and pedagogical work on climate fiction has been published in Frame, ISLE, Journal of Modern Literature, and Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy.

Additional resources

• Link (onbeing.org) to Sharon Olds’s reading of “Ode to Dirt”

Chapter overview

This chapter offers a customizable lesson plan for incorporating poetry into climate education across disciplines, focusing on "Ode to Dirt" by Sharon Olds. I encourage educators to consider incorporating poetry into their lesson plans because of its ability to bridge intellectual, emotional, and sensory experience. "Ode to Dirt" in particular invites conversation about what we value vs. what we relegate to the background, allowing students to consider the unsung forms of being (and labor) in their own lives.

Excerpts from the chapter

Poetry provides a pathway to overcoming alienation in climate change courses (or in any field of study) by helping students and professors build community, make space for feelings, and develop habits of attention and connection. Too often treated as a frivolous add-on disconnected from on-the-ground struggles, poetry, as Audre Lorde and Juan Felipe Herrera remind us, is not a “luxury” but an inspiration for transformative action—and a form of action in its own right.

Poems can do much more than introduce or supplement content. Unburdened by the pragmatic rules of everyday language usage, poetry invites readers to make unexpected connections between the sensory and the intellectual, the local and the cosmic, the human and the larger-than-human. This freedom to traverse category boundaries opens unexpected venues of conversation, inviting students to connect with course material in personal, idiosyncratic ways. Poetry adds a much-needed affective dimension to academic discussions of climate-related subjects.

Poetry unlocks new ways of perceiving the familiar. It opens oblique entries into complex subjects. It invites the integration of thought and feeling. It nourishes attention and vulnerability. College students often see poetry as intimidating or irrelevant—but helping them experience poems as living documents applicable to contemporary lives can yield surprising moments of dialogue, openness, and creativity. Making room for poems like “Ode to Dirt” (especially in academic fields that don’t typically accommodate emotion or play) is one way to provide an affectively engaged, community-centered learning experience that counters the multiple alienations experienced by students in a climate change classroom.

Contact details

Magdalena is interested in speaking to live audiences. You can contact her via this email.

Transcript

My name is Magdalena Maczynska, and I am a literature professor, a climate educator, and a pedagogy expert. And I was especially thrilled to be invited to be part of the Climate Educators’ Toolkit, because this chapter brings together my three areas of interest and expertise. In my chapter, I encourage climate educators to consider using poetry in their work. Poems can be really powerful and easily portable tools for climate educators, because they have the power to activate the intellect, emotions, senses, memories—they bring that kind of whole person experience that we want to cultivate in our climate justice education spaces.

Even if you are not a humanist, if you are a scientist, if you are a community activist that has no background in literary studies, it doesn't matter. Poetry speaks to us all, and a well-chosen poem has the power to open your students in a way that maybe a more scholarly or factual set of materials will not. Poems are also great for community building: reading them together can create, again, that kind of “transporting into a different space” with your group.

In my chapter I offer a lesson plan that is very flexible and customizable. You can use it as is, you can just pick one piece or two pieces, reshuffle it—depending on your context and on your educational setup.

One of the activities I wanted to share in this video is the erasure poem, which is one of my favorite tools for introducing people to poetry. The idea of the erasure poem is that learners receive the original text of the poem (here I am working with Sharon Olds' “Ode to Dirt”) and then are asked to erase, cross out anything they want to erase, and only leave out whatever spoke to them, whatever drew their attention. So I have an example here of an erasure poem that I created based on Sharon Olds’ “Ode to Dirt”. This activity is great because it allows every learner to pull out of the original text whatever is drawing their attention. “Ode to Dirt” has so many different important themes: it speaks of food ecosystems, and it speaks of ecosystemic connections; it has a planetary perspective; it talks about labor. So every reader can draw out whatever piece speaks to them, and that can be a wonderful beginning of a conversation.

So, to wrap up this video, I'm going to share with you my very short erasure poem built out of Sharon Old's wonderful ode. So here it is:  “Ode to Dirt: I thought that you were only the background / a character who looked so different from me / But now I can see our intricate equation together.”