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Some of the most meaningful activities can turn into disasters. Take peer review, for example. It’s meant to be a positive experience where sharing your writing with your peers brings thoughtful feedback and criticism that makes the other students think more carefully about their own writing. My students in first year writing recently did their first peer review for the Opinion Editorial. I had them first do a rush write, basically a timed free write for a few minutes, on their past experiences with peer review and what they hoped to both give and get out of the experience that day. As I started them on the activity of peer review with a detailed guide to follow, I read some of their responses. They included things like, “Peer reviews have always been a waste of time for me as I never get valuable feedback;” “Too many peers are unsure of what to actually fix or they are too timid to critique the paper;” “I’ve never done peer review, in high school only one teacher out of 4 used it and no one really got the point of why they did it;” and “I don’t trust my peers because I’ve written something that they don’t understand and my teacher gets it but they don’t. Its because I’m a good writer.” However honest and true these responses may be, they reflect that students have the wrong idea about peer review and also about writing in general, it seems to me.

Last week I attended the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations in New York City. This is the 60th session the commission has been working towards empowering women and girls in achieving sustainable development goals. I was able to sit in on several different panels and learn a great deal about the worldwide response to achieving the goal of gender equality and helping women and girls gain an equal status. This may seem unfathomable from an American perspective, but hearing from African, South American, and European women broadened my perspective on just how great the need is to empower women and girls so that as a global community we can achieve sustainable development.

At Brigham Young University, freshmen are required to take Writing and Rhetoric, a class taught most often by enthusiastic graduate students (like me). The focus is on teaching students that they are already writers, despite what some may have told them otherwise in the past. We use a text called Mindful Writing written by Brian Jackson. In the first chapter, Brian makes two important points that are important for young students to realize. The first is that they are already writers. Many of my students have struggled with this, they tell me they’ve never gotten good grades on essays in the past so they are worried that the same pattern will continue. Others simply don’t care. For both of these types of students, and others, I like to emphasize Brian’s second point, which is that writers get better at writing by writing. Or in other words, writing is iterative, it takes practice. I think these principles, and others taught in Writing and Rhetoric, can be applied to effectively teaching reflective outdoor writing to students.

Teaching/Learning disconnect

I am new to the blog, but because of my background and interest in outdoor and reflective writing, I was brought on board, mostly for my own learning. I earned a master’s degree from a unique program at a university called Bath Spa in England that specializes in literature, landscape and environment. In the lush greenery of Wiltshire and Somerset counties, I encountered chequered pastures, historic market towns, and prehistoric sites. My education was focused on the British tradition of writing about landscape, tracing a history of reflecting on how the terrain and climate of Great Britain has shaped writers’ ideas about national and individual identity for the last several centuries. I wrote on poets like John Clare, England’s true naturalist, whose known world, the 20-mile radius where he grew up, was material enough to write hundreds and hundreds of poems about the myriad of experiences in the tiniest of bird’s nest or to the borderland of his home, what he called world’s end. Jane Austen’s characters often went through strange changes when they traveled from the country to the city or vice versa. Like heroine Fanny of Mansfield Park who was bounded by the country house of her cousins, superior to her in class and education, she hardly ventured alone out of doors while there. Yet, at home in her seaside town, quite oppositely, Fanny’s sense of self was without fear or hesitation as her class or experience were not in question.

One of the consequences of serious writing by students is that they reexamine their own values. In her book, The Passionate Accurate Story (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1990), Carol Bly lays out a series of procedures and exercises which can aid in creating values-centered stories. She first has readers articulate what is important to them before they try to write stories which will test those values. The following is adapted from her exercise:

Keeping a journal is essential for remembering outdoor experience, but also for processing what happened. It is a vehicle for meditating on what experience means. Veteran outdoor writers also keep journals: Stephen Trimble in his introduction to Words from the Land, writes that natural history writers work in the field and then work at their computer. Without a journal, a writer soon loses the details and impressions of the outdoor experience.

The following post was written by Catherine Curtis, and was first delivered as a paper at the Associated Writing Programs Conference 2012 in a panel entitled "Wilderness Writing: Theory and Practice."

Leslie Norris, Welsh poet and teacher and long-time resident poet at my university, often described activities his primary school teacher designed to open the children’s minds to sensory experience. Norris’s teacher had students cut a small square from a piece of paper and use the frame to look at objects inside or outside the classroom. Gazing through this window, students learned to focus their attention. Another time, during a windstorm, this teacher took the students outside to hold their arms one-by-one around a large tree in front of the school house. Cheeks against the bark, they each felt the wind humming through the leaves, twigs, and branches.

Outdoor writing students need to be trained to find material about their own lives that they will share with others in writing. Telling stories to friends is easy and natural, but when someone in authority says, “Today we’re going to write about ourselves,” students freeze up, forget that they have a life, and can’t think of a single story. Even on threat of death or a bad grade they are unable to open up.