This collection presents essays on current developments in ecocriticism and the pedagogical practice of teaching English at all levels. They cover discussions of the nexus between the sciences and the humanities and suggest ways to teaching environments in the context of historical and transdisciplinary encounters with ecology, nature, and animals.

Roman Bartosch teaches English literatures at the University of Cologne. He has published on postcolonial and posthumanist theory and in his research focuses on literary theories, especially new formalism, reception aesthetics and hermeneutics. His book on ecocriticism and postcolonial fiction was released in 2013. Sieglinde Grimm has taught at the University of Cologne (1992 to 2001), the University of Prague (1996), at Cambridge University (1998) and at the University of Frankfurt (2002 to 2003). From 2006 to 2009, she has taught at a Gymnasium in Bonn. She is now Professor of German at the University of Cologne and works on German literature of the 18th century (Hölderlin), and on literary Modernism (Kafka and Rilke) as well as on pedagogy, intercultural learning and cultural ecology from a didactical perspective.

Contents: Roman Bartosch/Sieglinde Grimm: Teaching Environments: How «Green» Can – and Should – A Classroom Be? – Uwe Küchler: Where Foreign Language Education Meets, Clashes and Grapples with the Environment – Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer: Ants, Bees, Bugs, and Spiders: Insects in Children’s Literature – Roman Bartosch: Teaching a Poetics of Failure? The Benefit of Not-Understanding the Other, Posthumanism, and the Works of Shaun Tan and Wolf Erlbruch – Janice Bland: Ecocritical Sensitivity with Multimodal Texts in the EFL/ESL Literature Classroom – Kylie Crane: When Pigs Cry – Teaching the Gaze, Materialities, and Environmental Ethics with – Adrian Rainbow: Pedagogy and the Power of the Ecoliterary Text – Celestine Caruso: Scientific Encounters in Literature – How the «Two Cultures» Can Profit from Each Other In and Outside the Classroom – Haiko Wandhoff: The Fall of Man and the Corruption of Nature: A Medievalist Perspective – Dominik Ohrem: «A Deathless Love for the Natural and the Free»: Nature, Masculinity and Whiteness in 19th-Century America – Sieglinde Grimm: Teaching Cultural Ecology from German Romanticism to the Present: E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gottfried Keller, and W.G. Sebald – Roman Bartosch/Greg Garrard: The Function of Criticism. A Response to William Major and Andrew McMurry’s Editorial – William Major/Andrew McMurry: Response of William Major and Andrew McMurry – Pamela Swanigan: The Case Against Agenda – Sieglinde Grimm: Ecodidactics? A German Perspective.