Breaking Ground in Ecocomposition: Exploring Relationships between Discourse and Environment

Abstract

n the last twenty-five years, theorists and researchers in the social sciences and humanities have embraced the systematic exploration of social relations and culture as integral to the study of the construction of knowledge. Likewise, in composition studies, the social dimensions of language have dominated scholarly conversations concerning the construction of knowledge. In the 1970s and 1980s many composition theorists and researchers began to focus on the social nature of writing and to suggest that the correlation between social experience and writing ability is palpable. This orientation had widespread implications for composition theory, and brought with it, for example, new ways of thinking about an individual's identity (very often, the student in a writing class) and how identity is