14 In-flight behaviour Teaching climate change literature in first-year intro English Greg Garrard What I did and why I did it The climate fiction course I taught at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Okanagan in 2014–15 was a first-year service course that would cater mainly to non-English majors. I wanted this most crucial of topics to reach the largest possi- ble number of students, and I wanted to use the course to demonstrate the value and significance of humanities-based approaches to a subject that is overwhelm- ingly discussed in terms of science, engineering and governmental politics. I had a class of 35 students, which meant I gave only a few formal lectures and spent a lot of time practising close textual analysis. The next version of this course will be a large section of 150 students, so I will be giving a lot more formal lectures and allo- cating reading and writing practice to the Graduate Teaching Assistants. My choice of literary and other texts could, I hoped, enrich students’ knowledge and understanding of climate change, while teaching evaluation questionnaires (TEQs) could provide a rudimentary sense of whether or not the objectives of the class had been achieved. However, students normally complete TEQs in a rapid, unconsidered fashion, and some research suggests such questionnaires really only measure the likeability of the teacher and the students’ estimate of their expected grade for the course (see Clayson, Frost and Sheffet; Clayson and Sheffet), so I also included an essay prompt that implicitly asked for reflection on the value of the course: “‘Literature has little to contribute to progressive climate politics.’ Do you agree?” Quotations from students below appear under their real names, are drawn verbatim from both TEQs and essays, and are used with permission. It is worth noting, though, that the addressee of these statements, quapedagogical researcher, was also grading the students’ essays, making them questionable as sources of reli- able evaluation (Garrard, “Problems and Prospects in Ecocritical Pedagogy” 236) The responses gathered by means of a learning-focused essay question suggested that formal assessment is underused as a means of obtaining more reasoned and thoughtful pedagogical reflections from students than TEQs. The 13-week course justified its ‘service’ designation by incorporating substan- tial elements of composition. The course texts included Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth; selected stories from Helen Simpson’s In-Flight Entertainment; Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (the title of which we perennially confused with