- Vermillion, United States
Paul Formisano
University of South Dakota, Department of English, Faculty Member
- I am an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Writing at the University of South Dakota. My research and teaching in the environmental humanities represents a confluence of literary and rhetorical studies, water law and poli... moreI am an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Writing at the University of South Dakota. My research and teaching in the environmental humanities represents a confluence of literary and rhetorical studies, water law and policy, and watershed science to examine the West’s water and land politics. At the core of this analysis is an examination of the region's historically underrepresented voices. My current book project, Tributary Voices: Literary and Rhetorical Explorations of the Colorado River, engages present anxieties about the American Southwest’s persistent drought and the lack of scholarship about literary and rhetorical representations of the Colorado River. This project reclaims a number of the Colorado River Basin’s lesser-known perspectives and the ways in which they engage mainstream narratives of the river’s destiny. Through this interdisciplinary approach, I examine 20th and 21st-century texts and their intersections of science and art, wilderness and civilization, indigenous and Hispano water cultures, and U.S.-Mexican conservation efforts to reimagine our relationship with the river.
My research has appeared in such venues as The Journal of Ecocriticism, Western American Literature, Landscapes, and Iperstoria while a forthcoming chapter in Making Waves: Water in Contemporary Literature and Film will be published by the University of Nevada Press in 2019. I have collaborated with colleagues in our Sustainability Studies, Anthropology, and Political Science departments to publish an article in the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education. Likewise, I am working with a colleague in environmental studies to produce an anthology on the global literature of dams. The Charles Redd Center for Western Studies has funded by research on Navajo Dam's impact on northern New Mexico's Hispano communities and a NSF InTeGrate Grant supported my English 201 Sustainable Rivers course to bolster science and sustainability education across the curriculum. In Summer 2018, I was a NEH Summer Institute Scholar in the "Hoover Dam and the Shaping of the American West" program.edit
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This essay examines Craig Childs’s use of paradox as a key rhetorical device to represent the deserts of the American Southwest as depicted primarily in The Secret Knowledge of Water (2000). To understand how Childs employs this device, I... more
This essay examines Craig Childs’s use of paradox as a key rhetorical device to represent the deserts of the American Southwest as depicted primarily in The Secret Knowledge of Water (2000). To understand how Childs employs this device, I draw upon the pragmatic rhetorical tradition and ecocriticism’s materialist turn to show how scientific and poetic discourses as well as the desert’s agency create a physical and philosophical contact zone, one where the reader confronts the borders that mark epistemological systems, divisions between the human and the nonhuman, and the discursive and disciplinary strategies and positions used to evoke the mystery and wonder of these regions. Reading The Secret Knowledge of Water through these lenses encourages us to rethink our relationships with aridity and the vast spectrum of matter (human and nonhuman alike) shaped by this reality with the broader goal of identifying how we might more effectively imagine and enact bioregional habitation.
Research Interests:
Considered against the backdrop of California's pastoral obsession to realize Eden, Frank Norris's The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) reveals how his respective brand of American naturalism interprets the changes to California's... more
Considered against the backdrop of California's pastoral obsession to realize Eden, Frank Norris's The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) reveals how his respective brand of American naturalism interprets the changes to California's physical space during the 1880s. Through his preoccupation with the pervasive discourse of force-theory that dominated late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century thought and his penchant for drama and romance, The Octopus becomes much more than an epic tale of struggle between the railroad and the wheat ranchers. Rather it explains the various layers of conquest and imperialist discourse within the text which both promote and explain the drastic reengineering of California's land and water resources during this period. By reading Norris's deterministic program through an ecocritical lens, we see how the novel sheds light on California's past, present, and future environmental transformations revealing a Golden State that is more of a tarnished ideal rather than the earthily paradise so many longed to find.
Research Interests:
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the student learning outcomes (SLOs) for a sustainability major, evaluate faculty incorporation of the SLOs into the courses in the sustainability major curriculum and measure student... more
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the student learning outcomes (SLOs) for a sustainability
major, evaluate faculty incorporation of the SLOs into the courses in the sustainability major curriculum and
measure student performance on the SLOs from entry into the major to the senior capstone course.
Design/methodology/approach – Through an iterative approach with a faculty advisory committee,
SLOs were developed for the sustainability major. Curriculum mapping followed by evaluation of course
syllabi were used to determine the extent to which each course addressed the SLOs. Student performance on
most SLOs was measured through student assessment in an introductory and capstone course to evaluate the
change in performance over time.
Findings – The core courses of the sustainability major were more likely to address the SLOs of the major
than that of the elective courses. Where measured, student performance on the SLOs increased from the
introductory course to the capstone course. Sustainability majors participated in an average of almost ten
experiential learning opportunities focused on sustainability.
Originality/value – This research provides a longitudinal assessment of student learning in an
undergraduate sustainability major. Because undergraduate sustainability degrees are generally new, this
research can serve as a base upon which to continue to improve sustainability curriculum design.
Keywords Curriculum development, Undergraduate education, Sustainability pedagogy,
Student assessment, Student learning outcomes
major, evaluate faculty incorporation of the SLOs into the courses in the sustainability major curriculum and
measure student performance on the SLOs from entry into the major to the senior capstone course.
Design/methodology/approach – Through an iterative approach with a faculty advisory committee,
SLOs were developed for the sustainability major. Curriculum mapping followed by evaluation of course
syllabi were used to determine the extent to which each course addressed the SLOs. Student performance on
most SLOs was measured through student assessment in an introductory and capstone course to evaluate the
change in performance over time.
Findings – The core courses of the sustainability major were more likely to address the SLOs of the major
than that of the elective courses. Where measured, student performance on the SLOs increased from the
introductory course to the capstone course. Sustainability majors participated in an average of almost ten
experiential learning opportunities focused on sustainability.
Originality/value – This research provides a longitudinal assessment of student learning in an
undergraduate sustainability major. Because undergraduate sustainability degrees are generally new, this
research can serve as a base upon which to continue to improve sustainability curriculum design.
Keywords Curriculum development, Undergraduate education, Sustainability pedagogy,
Student assessment, Student learning outcomes