Abstract: This article describes a seven-week project in which writing students design digitally mediated, play-based activities (card games, board games, pop-up books, or similar) to encourage children to experience a sense of environmental enchantment: an attentive, empathetic connection with the more-than-human world. The project emerged after students in several writing courses lamented modern life’s quickening pace and a corresponding loss of pleasurable nature experience. The project gives students space to practice—and to practice encouraging in others—slower, more attentive ecological relations while strengthening media production skills aimed at non-academic audiences. In doing so, students produce projects that, in the words of virologist Jonas Salk, practice being “good ancestors” to future generations.
In 2007, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. Because the dictionary was limited to 10,000 entries, words like “blog,” “MP3 player,” and “broadband” were added while words like “acorn,” “dandelion,” and “heron” were removed, having been judged irrelevant to contemporary childhood experience (Flood 2015). Public outcry followed. Nature writer Robert MacFarlane (2015) suggested that what had been lost was “the power that certain terms possess to enchant our relations with nature” (p. 4). MacFarlane and artist Jackie Morris (2017) later produced The Lost Words, an illustrated children’s book that celebrated the deleted entries.
In 2020, I brought The Lost Words into a writing classroom at an urban community college in Minnesota. Many students responded to its watercolor images and gold-leaf text reverentially, recalling treasured childhood nature experiences. Clearly, the book appealed not only to young children or thirty-something professors. One student remarked, “I wish I could make something like this for my cousins. Oh well, I guess.” A year later, she emailed me a photo showing her sitting with two grinning children, The Lost Words open to the page for “heron.”
Subsequently, at both that college and the rural, private Minnesotan college where I currently teach, I met other students who lamented a lost connection with nature. Even environmental studies students in my classes described feeling unprepared to identify or appreciate species just outside the window. Various seniors over multiple semesters told me they felt uncomfortable explaining environmental ideas without using a five-paragraph formula or infographic template. The consensus? Life was overwhelming, with little time for pleasurable nature experience, and less still for honing media production skills needed to communicate such experience to non-academic audiences.
What had gone missing was enchantment, which May (2023) describes as an awareness of connection with the more-than-human world formed when people use “deliberate attention” (p. 7) to identify “quiet traces of fascination” around them (p. 202). Enchantment was what my students described knowing as children—and what they feared children today might not know. It was the thing that stirred when I held classes outdoors and students bent suddenly to inspect a leaf or turned to watch geese pass honking overhead. Maybe, I thought, a project that invited students to recover a shred of enchantment might be worthwhile, particularly if it enabled them to deepen their media skills to better encourage such experience in others—especially the young audiences they worried might grow up without such encounters.
My goal was that students might help themselves and others strengthen what Lopez (2010) describes as “a sense of allegiance with our chosen places, and along with that a sense of affirmation with our neighbors that the place we’ve chosen is beautiful, subtle, profound, and worthy of our lives” (p. xvi). Resilient earthly relations begin with a love of place, and a love of place begins with the art of noticing what can be loved. I have taught the resultant project in two courses: once in an abridged format for a first-year writing course, and twice in its full iteration in a Topics in Writing course about science communication, which follows a hybrid discussion/workshop model. The project invites students to develop the media literacies needed to craft a play-based activity, such as a card game, board game, nature walk, or pop-up book that teaches children to be curious about local nature—and maybe helps students develop their own more-than-human relations.
Around the time my students were describing their lost connections with nature and the pressures of modern life, I was grappling with my own pressures, having just found out that I was autistic—not a small thing to uncover after three decades of living. My understanding of autism had previously been shaped by “a brutal minefield of stereotypes: the savant, the obsessive, the socially distant autodidact” (Hendren 2020, p. 137). Now I was learning about autism from the inside, gathering a lifetime of inexplicable struggles into a narrative about myself that finally made sense. I began to understand that my neurology was such that light, sound, and touch created what May (2021), who is autistic, describes as “a current that surges around my body until I’m exhausted” (p. 9). A simple hallway chat with a colleague would unfold within a sensory deluge: buzzing fluorescent lights, scented carpet cleaner, nearby voices, my squeaky shoes. Moment to moment, I had to consciously pluck my coworker’s words from the chaos, aware that this process left gaps in the conversation. The bustling world was out of scale with how I was made. This self-understanding led me to think closely about what my students had described. Maybe my experience of overwhelm was more intense than theirs, but the sense that modern life was too much—well, we shared that.
Modern life is full of phenomena that stretch life to breaking; they can be personal or systemic, analog or digital. A full slate of courses and co-curriculars leaves a student so exhausted that they do not read a book for pleasure for years. Old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest are logged so heavily that Northern Spotted Owl populations plummet precipitously toward extinction. Meta, parent company of Instagram, starts training its large language models (LLMs) using users’ photos and posts, turning an archive of human joys and sorrows into a coolly utilitarian repository of data. In short, borrowing a term from anthropologist Anna Tsing (2012), the scaling up of the world tends to reduce living things—to pixelate them.
Pixels, writes Tsing (2012), are “uniform, separate, autonomous” (p. 508), allowing them to scale up endlessly “without rethinking basic elements” (p. 505). But Tsing warns that living things are not pixels and do not expand without distortion: projects dedicated to speed, scale, and expansion—from digital networks to colonialism, oil extraction to 60-hour work weeks—tend to leave a “mounting pile of ruin” behind (p. 506). As Le Guin (1989) writes in “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” technology is “an endless creative source,” but it cannot itself bring us closer to being “a society that has made a successful adaptation to its environment and has learned to live without destroying itself or the people next door” (p. 98). Technology is not ethics. Creating better societies, writes Le Guin, requires that we live “here, now, in this present”; if we do, we might “have some sense of our future as a people” (p. 85). As our inventive new technologies ask more of us, we will need alternatives to expansionist mindsets, ways to remind us to be attentive and present here, now, in our senses.
Such possibilities are written across the history of Writing Studies. Over forty years ago, Sommers (1980) concluded that effective writers made time to “exploit the lack of clarity, the differences of meaning, the dissonance” of writing (p. 386). Around that time, Flower and Hayes (1981) described writing as an opportunity for writers to “recreate their own goals in the light of what they learn,” a process that involves rumination rather than brutal efficiency (p. 381). Thirty years ago, drawing lessons from Nazi Germany, Katz (1992) issued a landmark warning to technical communicators that “when expediency becomes an end in itself…ethical problems arise” (p. 272). Much more recently, Cooper (2019) argued for an “enchantment ontology” that demands attention to “our intimate entanglement with other beings, things, and forces” through which we as writers emerge (p. 68).
And although there is presently understandable excitement that emergent technologies like LLMs might ease writing’s labor by “automating tasks such as brainstorming, drafting, and editing” (Ranade and Eyman 2024, p. 2), Vee (2023) reminds us that while LLMs will produce “good writing,” they will not necessarily produce “challenging, thoughtful, innovative humans, such as good writing instruction helps to nurture now” (p. 180). What good writing instruction offers is, to borrow Tsing’s (2012) words, “collaborative survival—the transformative social relations—that make life possible” (p. 523). When I revise, I practice the art of not doing anything too quickly, of thinking with others, of noticing the shape of my thoughts. Attentiveness, curiosity, reflection—these skills taught by writing instruction also underwrite collaborative survival. They are as applicable to the geography of our minds as to how we engage with our places.
For many people in Eurowestern societies, collaborative survival requires a healing of nature’s division from culture, two realms that have become isolated pixels. Nature’s media, like soil, water, or light, are not separate from technological media, but are in fact “the taken-for-granted base of our habits and habitat” (Peters 2015, p. 1). As McLuhan (1994) famously writes, “it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium” (p. 21).
An example: while doing research at my computer in Minnesota, I access a digitized nineteenth-century book about gannet colonies in northeastern Scotland. I click past the cloth cover, the endpapers, the first pages. I think first of my relations as being primarily with the book. Yet my relations are also with the particulate haze of Canadian forest fires outside my window; the way my autistic brain obsessively notices my pulse in my field of view; my screen, the wi-fi, a mess of hidden cables; a history of colonial displacement in Minnesota; Scottish archivists, scanners, servers, and libraries; book binders, printing presses (oh, yes—and writers!); gannets, nesting grounds, ancient migration routes; the deep-time upheavals of the earth itself. How far to cast the net of my relations is a choice. This project aims to help students begin to weave the net.
To support this rethinking, I invite students to read Cronon’s (1996) “The Trouble with Wilderness,” which punctures the wilderness myth, lays bare its colonial violence, and argues for a “full continuum” of nature that includes human life (p. 24). We also rewind to the early twentieth century by examining naturalist Anna Botsford Comstock’s (1911/1947) 900-page Handbook of Nature-Study, which the author assures her readers “does not contain more than any intelligent country child of twelve should know of his environment” (p. xi). From there, we trace how nature study dropped out of American curricula due to the pressure of wars, the depopulation of the countryside, and the rise of the hard sciences (Pyle 2016, pp. 148–149).
Of course, some readers of this essay do have developed relations with nature. Outside Eurowestern philosophy, indigenous traditions of all our relations have long offered a “complete ethical system” for being with one’s environment (Cordova 2004, p. 177). As Deloria, Jr. (1992) writes:
“We are all relatives” when taken as a methodological tool for obtaining knowledge means that we observe the natural by looking for relationships between various things in it. That is to say, everything in the natural world has relationships with every other thing and the total set of relationships makes up the natural world as we experience it. (p. 37)
Students encounter these ideas through Kimmerer’s (2015) Braiding Sweetgrass, which calls for descendants of settlers—like me—to work toward better relations, to “strive to become naturalized to place” (p. 214). Kimmerer positions the work of naturalization against the expansion-oriented habits of kudzu—that is, “taking over other people’s homes and growing without regard to limits” (pp. 214–215). Students also read from writers like adrienne maree brown (2017), whose idea of emergent strategy draws on Octavia Butler to suggest “ways for humans to practice being in right relationship to our home and each other” (p. 25). emphasize joyful climate care in which healing systemic injustices and forming community “is a requisite foundation for building a better world” (Johnson and Wilkinson 2020, xix–xx). Such texts help students work toward what Barnett (2022) calls “a rhetoric for earthly coexistence” in which human and nonhumans make worlds together and rhetoric strives to “unearth” ecological consequences surrounding discourse and technologies (p. 367). With these contexts in mind, students begin shaping their projects.
In Week 1, students practice deliberate attention. After reading about nature journaling, they walk around campus together, using an app to identify and log species encountered, providing data for local conservation. Afterwards, students practice independent nature observation, spending 30 minutes in one place recording every detail they notice, with the starter prompt, “I wonder why…”, drawing on John Muir Laws’ (2016) The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling. Many describe the session as therapeutic: “When time was up I didn’t want to leave,” one student said. During this stage, students identify an environmental question or fascination to propel their projects.
In Week 2, students define their audiences. Because this project arose out of student concern that, in a hurried world, children might lack pleasurable nature experience, I ask them to choose a child or children they know as the audience for their projects. I want them to practice, following Sobel (2007), helping children “love the earth before we ask them to save it” (p. 192). Students use the technical communication practice of audience profiling to define their audience’s needs, contexts, and experiences, and decide what medium might serve that audience best. Small groups work together to help each other hone these profiles into fully realized portraits. We also play a card game, Ecologies, in which players create food webs, sparking discussion about what makes a play activity enjoyable or unenjoyable, which shapes their subsequent rhetorical choices.
Week 3 invites students to develop those rhetorical choices by deciding what technoliteracies they need to accomplish their vision. Together, students analyze children’s nature illustrations from the seventeenth century to the present. This historical view helps students situate their work in media traditions, following Hayles’s (2012) call for “approaches that can locate digital work within print traditions, and print traditions within digital media, without obscuring or failing to account for the differences between them” (p. 7). Students also use McCloud’s (1993) Understanding Comics to break daunting project concepts into manageable components: purpose, form, aesthetics, structure, skills/materials, and polish (pp. 170-171). Students end the week by producing prototype sketches of their projects, which they informally peer review. All these activities are situated in a justice framework, which I build out with workflow principles from the Design Justice Network (2018).
In Weeks 4 and 5, students consider document design. Rather than design with templates, they design from scratch—testing page layouts, colors, and typefaces with help from Williams’ (2015) The Non-Designer’s Design Handbook, St. Clair’s (2017) The Secret Lives of Color, and Brumberger’s (2003) “The Rhetoric of Typography: The Persona of Typeface and Text,” respectively. In one activity, students reflect on the way typefaces suggest personalities, renaming fonts according to perceived character. Thus, during one iteration of the project, the bold and blocky Alfa Slab One typeface became Friendly Convenience Store, reflecting what students saw as its plain and honest character; meanwhile, the rough, hand-drawn Cabin Sketch font became 2000s Indie Film, evoking the made-from-scratch aesthetics of the era. Pedagogically, the activity helps students deepen technoliteracies and make informed rhetorical choices.
In Weeks 6 and 7, students peer review full project drafts using principles of human-centered design from Donald Norman’s (2013) The Design of Everyday Things. Subsequently, they revise as needed to bring their projects to completion. Then, the pay-off: students try out their activities together.
This project presents two challenges. Often, students must develop new technoliteracies to achieve their visions, so I must bring digital knowledge to the class—and be ready to learn alongside them. This is a chance for students to practice finding resources. YouTube tutorials are among the best means to help students engage with software like Adobe Illustrator or InDesign. However, this project could be conducted with different digital tools or could be entirely analog. While I discourage artificial intelligence for this project, with precise pedagogical framing AI may offer creative (as opposed to expediency-driven) possibilities.
Location also shapes this project. My college has woods, ponds, and savannah. Many students here grew up with expansive yards or had access to remote cabins. For them—and for me—wilderness’s romance is strong: it’s easy to attend to the squirrel in the woods but ignore the squirrel in the quad. At the urban campus where I also taught this project, however, students often described growing up with limited greenspace in which they did not perceive nature. Nature was always elsewhere. Both situations pose challenges, but the pedagogical pathway is the same: I invite students to become fascinated by hyperlocal environmental details. Together, we view the work of artists like landscape architect Matthew Tucker, whose photographs reveal plants erupting from concrete parking lots and suggest what is possible to notice and love about such places. Even the cracks of sidewalks are lifeworlds.
To help students reflect on their work (and help me assess it), I ask them to draft artist statements explaining their intended audiences, the ways the project encourages those audiences to connect with everyday nature, the challenges of production, and the technoliteracies they developed. These reflections are an invaluable means for me to understand three factors I weigh heavily in the grading: audience, purpose, and usability relative to a child audience—all factors I might not know without student explanation. (See grading checklist in Step 5 of the assignment for more detail.)
To me, student projects often embody what Jonas Salk (1992) calls being “good ancestors”—making a difference for another generation (p. 16). For example, two students collaborated to create a drawing book that helps children map a greenspace and name its landmarks; one sketched the concept by hand, and one translated those sketches into digital designs in Illustrator, which were then printed and bound. The students gave copies to one student’s young brother and to a child the other babysits, who used the book to name the neighborhood trees—and still refers to those trees by name when describing the goings-on of squirrels and robins. Both students agreed that this outcome made the project worthwhile.
Another student used InDesign to create a children’s alphabet book about marine ecology. The vibrant blue book had little flaps that lifted to reveal, say, a parrotfish behind a coral. She gave the book to her young cousin, who enjoyed it so much that she took it with her into the ocean, where the book perished.
One student illustrated flashcards about the bayou ecosystem, which she digitized and edited using InDesign. She gave the cards to her younger sister in Louisiana, who subsequently coerced her parents into buying an armful of nature books. She also found herself unexpectedly taking a summer job as a nature center guide, and ranked her project among her proudest college work.
What these outcomes suggest to me is that Writing Studies is a good vessel for rekindling the loving awareness of place upon which collaborative survival is based. Writing teachers are habitual guides toward attentiveness: we encourage process and recursion, rethinking and reimagining, noticing and listening. These are wonderfully transferable skills. Against the swift impulses of our expansionist age, writing pedagogy may offer some small restorative. Writing teachers are well-positioned to be guides toward a broader kind of attentiveness.
Collaborative survival is work available to everyone, and it begins everywhere. All kinds of people must bring their skills to the tasks that need doing. I view this project as a chance for students to deepen those skills, shoring up technoliteracies that invite others into the intergenerational project of climate care—and maybe even rekindling, in a small way, their own environmental enchantment.
As the distance grows between a tiny priesthood who know small parts of nature very well and a massive population who know next to nothing about the whole and not even the names of their neighbors, a right relationship with the world seems more and more elusive. Today, when children have all too many stimuli and all too few opportunities to experience bald wonder, many seem to lack any real interest in nature. Yet I believe, along with Carson and Wilson, that wonder is innate in the very young, waiting only to be ignited before the cheap tricks of modern life damp the fuse. Nothing can light the flame of fascination in a child like another living thing. It may be the naturalists who save us in the end, by bringing us all back down to earth.
—Robert Michael Pyle, “The Rise and Fall of Natural History”
For this project, please create a piece of interactive, play-oriented media that communicates an environmental or scientific idea of your choice to a child or children. The concept you choose should be something that interests you—the goal of the project is to not simply explain an idea, but impart to your audience a sense of enchantment, or a sense of affinity or connection with the more-than-human world.
Your creation can take any form you want, but should (1) have a strong visual or tactile component, (2) include some amount of text, which is tailored to suit a child audience, and (3) invite interactive play of some kind.
As we have discussed this semester, the work of our lifetimes will be to rethink the environment in ways that reassert our connectedness with the more-than-human world and recommit us to responsible place-making. Were going to need to know how to talk to people about the world so as to reawaken enchantment and the desire to care. This project offers a chance to practice those life skills.
In brief: Compile a set of nature notes (raw and unedited).
In order to help others appreciate and care for the environment, it’s important to understand what kinds of things might be appreciated. The best way to do this is to practice noticing the environment ourselves. We will do this through focused nature study.
In the United States, nature study used to be a standard element of education from childhood onward. Adults were expected to be able to identify local animals and plants with ease. Weve lost that ability, and we need to get it back. Finding interest in local nature can sustain us as we do difficult climate action in years to come.
For this practice activity, find a spot to sit, stand, or rest for about twenty minutes. This spot can be on campus or at a location of your choosing. Depending on the spot you choose, you may want to try to be as still as possible, which will invite birds and other animals to accept you as part of the landscape. This stillness may seem tedious, but think of it as an exercise in attention:
Start by noticing big things—weather, major landmarks, obvious sounds.
Once you have noticed these defining features, notice more specific phenomena—the way wind moves leaves, or very distant sounds. Take time to notice variations in color, texture, light, smell, etc.
Eventually, turn your attention to the ground and other highly specific surfaces. Notice specific blades or grass, insects, bits of soil.
As you observe, record notes, either in words or in sketches. Do not edit these things; keep your attention on what you see. When you feel you have exhausted your attention, return to the big things, and start again. At each stage, ask the question: “I wonder why…”
In brief: Write a short, informal reflection (less than a page; casual, email-type voice) to begin clarifying your environmental attention and project interests.
From your notes, pick at least one thing that caught your focus. Reflect briefly on the following questions to begin shaping a vision for what interests you and for your project.
What substances and beings does your subject interact with? List as many as possible.
What do you not know about your subject? What parts of its environmental connectedness are mysteries to you?
What does it feel like to think about the more-than-human world as a series of dense connections? Is this any different from how you think about the world on a daily basis?
Is there anything here that interests you enough to become a topic for your project? Has the experience led you to think of some part of some other environment that interests you? For whom might you make a project? What form could it take?
In brief: In an extended, informal reflection, sketch out the audience in more detail, the form the project will take, and what communication choices would help foster a sense of enchantment.
First, consider audience in more detail:
What subjects do they enjoy?
What activities or experiences excite them?
What motivates them to take part in an activity?
What bores them? What do they not like?
What environments are around them? What ecological relationships shape their life?
Then, consider the project’s form.
Scott McCloud’s (1993) Understanding Comics is a common resource used by artists to think through their design process. McCloud describes art as having six stages. What would each stage look like for your project? What would each contribute to effective communication and enchantment look like for each?
Idea/Purpose: The work’s content—the emotions, philosophies, and purposes of the work, for a given audience.
What do you want your game to teach? What kind of environmental experience would you like your audience to have? Remember that your goal should be to both educate and cultivate emotional connection, so consider what you want your audience to both learn and to feel.
Form: The work’s material nature—the general category of thing.
Here are some possibilities:
a board game
a card game
a printable activity (a science experiment, treasure hunt, etc.)
a read-along atlas, field guide, a fairy tale, or book with interactive elements (flaps that can be raised to reveal something, etc.)
some other kind of media that I haven’t named but you find interesting
Your creation should have a realistic context. For example, if you create an outdoor activity for family use, ensure that it is easily printable by a parent. Basically, what you design should be functional and fit for real life use.
Idiom: The school of art—the toolkit of styles and choices for expression.
To answer this, consider what kind of atmosphere you want to generate. Will you create media that is mysterious, light-hearted, comical, serious, or something else? Do you like a particular art style—collage, watercolor, etc.? Are there particular artists whose work inspires you?
Also consider writing style. Particularly if you are most used to academic writing, how will your writing need to read differently to distill complicated ideas for a child audience?
Structure: What to include in what order.
Consider the material parts of the project and the way content within them is ordered. How do you want to arrange elements? What colors will you use? How will text be organized, and how will text be integrated with visuals?
Craft: Methods of constructing the work—needed literacies, skills, problem-solving strategies, tools, etc.
Take a minute to inventory your skills. How will you be able to apply your skills to achieve a project that matches your imagination of it? What skills do you need to enhance? Are there things you want to achieve that you don’t currently have the tools for? (Let me know what learning resources or tools you need.)
Surface: Finishing touches and superficial details.
Consider what artful touches you wish to include. What little things would excite the child you are designing for?
At the end of Week 6, we will peer-review our work. Plan to bring your project with you in a complete, if rough, form. Together, plan to:
Briefly explain to a small group of classmates why you have chosen your subject, what you have created, and what questions you have about your work
Assess each other’s work according to a modified version of Norman’s design heuristics:
Visibility: Is it easy to see what the design does and how it works?
Feedback: Does the design let audiences know when they have completed an action?
Constraints: Does the design prevent errors and mistakes?
Affordances: Does the design help audiences use it correctly?
Mapping: Does the design offer satisfying responses to audiences actions?
Consistency: Does the design function so that the parts work predictably and are consistently designed?
Reflect together on what the overall audience experience was like. Identify next steps, and needed resources.
Please use this grading checklist to gauge the completeness of your project:
Deliverable has a form and idiom suited to children’s use and interest.
Deliverable is complete (full and thoughtfully produced).
Deliverable has structure, craft, and surface that is appropriate for the audience.
Deliverable has structure, craft, and surface that is enchanting for a young audience—that cultivates a sense of affinity with the world.
Deliverable finds a balance between clear, accurate information and strategic simplifications suited to the audience.
Font—typeface is handled so that it is appropriate in personality and not overly complicated (restricted to a small number of fonts, etc.)
The deliverable is visually easy for the target audience to understand.
The deliverable is textually easy for the target audience to understand.
Deliverable is usable in a real-life context.
Aesthetic unity—visual elements of the deliverable have overall continuity: they feel like they fit with each other aesthetically.
Honesty & attribution—if Creative Commons materials are used, this is appropriately noted as an addendum to the artist’s statement.
For all research sources used, please also include references. References do not need to be integrated into the project itself, which might feel unnatural.
In a short, conversational cover letter, describe your process of designing for a particular audience and what experience you wanted them to have.
Take me through the steps you took to reach the final product so I can appreciate what you did, including challenges and adjustments in your vision.
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