Dr Gregory Garrard

National Teaching Fellow 2006 Institution at the time of award : Bath Spa University Dr Greg Garrard is the FCCS Sustainability Professor at the University of British Columbia and a founding member and former Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK & Ireland). He was previously a Senior Teaching Fellow in the CETL Publishing Lab, and a lecturer in English Literature at Bath Spa University. The Lab is devoted to enhancing employability and the use of technology in the subject. His particular field of expertise is writing and environmentalism. He has been at the forefront of the development of this aspect of English Studies in the UK, as demonstrated by his leading role in a major English Subject Centre project on Education for Sustainable Development. Greg is also Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK) and author of Ecocriticism (Routledge 2004), a student introduction to his field. He confesses: "My career as an undergraduate tutor began in a coffee bar, where I was given a room booking, a list of set texts and students and left to get on with it. I was a bad teacher, untrained, over-prepared in the wrong ways, and quite unconvinced of my suitability to the role. At first I grew a beard to compensate." Apart from research into Education for Sustainable Development (see http://www.asle.org.uk/learning/index.html) Greg's pedagogical interests have centred on curriculum and assessment. He has experimented with methods designed to encourage student engagement with written feedback, such as giving work back ungraded and insisting students come to tutorials to "find out and discuss" their grades. Students on his Margaret Atwood module have to lead an assessed seminar on a set text. On his Reading Animals module, he has had students produce hybrid creative/ critical responses to set texts, and on his Poetry module students have had to memorise poems for recitation and devise a personal anthology of poetry on a chosen theme. His current project, dubbed Poetik, aims to develop a sophisticated online application to promote learning, teaching and assessment of poetry, especially rhythm and meter. At the same time, he is collecting essays on Education for Sustainable Development in English for an edited collection called Teaching Ecocriticism .