Spring 2026      Volume 54, Number 2

Ecowriting for Sustainable Futures: Future Crafting
By Rebecca Woodard and Kristine M. Schutz

Document: Column  

Introductory Paragraph:  Our column this year explores various examples of ecowriting, or writing about the natural world (Share, 2024). As in the last issue focused on nature drawing, we encourage you to think expansively about writing as multimodal composition that can use multiple modes (e.g., linguistic, visual, audio, spatial, gestural) to convey meaning. The compositions shared in this piece, for example, expand beyond verbocentric modes to utilize both drawing and collage.  In this issue’s column, we share work by Tonya Wile, a secondary English teacher and climate literacy advocate based in upstate New York, on future crafting, a process that blends imagination, storytelling, and art-making to envision possible futures and then work toward shaping them. Tonya is also a teacher consultant for the Capital District Writing Project (CDWP), a National Writing Project site. Some examples of future crafting that she has done include art-based visioning exercises to explore personal and/or collective futures and collaborative future-building exercises that further imagine our collective community. Through these kinds of future crafting, Tonya has helped pre- and inservice teachers to explore broad questions like “What kind of world do we want to live in?” and “What steps can we take to get there?”

DOI:   https://doi.org/10.33600/IRCJ.54.2.2026.45

Page Numbers:   45-49