Listening to Animals for a Change: On Teaching Animal Poetry from a Critical Rhetorical Perspective

• This chapter discusses how poetry can be used in teaching ecological sustainability issues. It argues that rhetorical criticism offers perspectives, theories, and methods that are rewarding to use when teaching poems that in various ways thematize urgent problems in our world. Specifically, it discusses how poetry with animal motifs can be studied from a critical rhetorical perspective to provide intellectual as well as emotional knowledge about animals, and the relationship between animals, humans and the ecological crisis. Furthermore, the chapter argues that rhetorical criticism in itself fulfills important functions in education for sustainable learning, as it trains students in critical thinking and provides them with necessary tools to become active democratic citizens.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Animal poetry

Pedagogy

Education

Environmental studies

Sustainability

Rhetorical criticism

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)