English 100: Composing for Sustainability

This section of Composition I will focus on sustainability as part of an ACE cluster of courses that includes Ethnobotany and Hawaiian Studies. The course also includes a UH Writing Mentor who will be working with you closely during the semester to help you excel in writing and to help you compose an e-portfolio of your work in English 100 and other courses. As a sustainability course, we will use very little paper. All course materials will be stored on Laulima, and much of your writing will be posted to this site. You will be using a field journal for handwritten observations during the many out-of-classroom writing activities, and occasionally you will be sharing drafts in paper form (recycled, please, and printed in draft mode to save ink). Nearly every writing assignment will also include writing about your own writing, so that you can step back from it and appraise it, and so that you can compose a capstone reflective commentary linking together these entries in your e-portfolio at the end of the semester. The course will not have a final exam, and this capstone commentary will take its place.

After an orientation to our course that includes a look at note-taking and the setting up of your e-portfolios, our major writing activities will begin with a focus on where we are coming from, geographically and genealogically, so that we can get to know each other and establish relationships. (Lehua and I will be participating in this writing activity, too, and in some of the following ones.) During this phase you will learn a special approach to reading and responding to the writing of others, and we will document our respective carbon footprints and our consumption habits. We will also read some selected writings on consumption habits from a systemic viewpoint and on "natural capital."  From there we will proceed to an orientation to the Hawaiian Collection in Hamilton library, and you will write a descriptive and historical account of some place in Hawai‘i.  During this unit we will study techniques for summarizing and for analyzing.

Your next contribution to your writing portfolio will be a mapping description of the UH campus, accompanied by a mental map (hand-drawn, and elaborated over time) of the kinds of thinking accomplished in different disciplines and different majors. (You will assume the role of fieldworker, choosing a course you'd like to visit to take notes and interviewing one of the participants -- students or instructor-- of that course.) During this phase, we will participate in workshops at Hamilton Library to learn techniques for effective, valuable, responsible information retrieval on the Internet. To complete this phase, you will work with your mentor on a report on some sustainability topic.

We will compile these reports into a composite web page representing our class efforts. From these efforts, we will proceed to outings in Honolulu—including site visits offered by the Board of Water Supply, City and County of Honolulu, the Tour de Trash, Kūka‘ō‘ō Heiau--and other sites that might become relevant through your work in ethnobotany and Hawaiian Studies. You will document each these outings in field journals, and compose a report to add to our class web site. At the same time, you will study possible careers that would enable you to make use of a sustainability-focused undergraduate experience at UH Mānoa.  Some of you will compose a futuristic creative writing depiction of your work as a sustainably-focused "knowledge worker"; some of you will add another field trip report; some others will report on some green industry or event in Hawai‘i. You will add your work to your e-portfolio and we will compile a class web site that will demonstrate to the world that the "Mānoa Experience" is unique indeed. No required textbooks; everything will be available online or in the library.