Leveraging Place for Critical Sustainability Education: The Promise of Participatory Action Research (original) (raw)
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Place‐based civic science—collective environmental action and solidarity for eco‐resilience
Child and Adolescent Mental Health
Background: Educating children and young people (CYP) from marginalized communities about environmental crises poses a unique dilemma as educators strive to prepare them to deal with the climate crisis without compounding the stressors and fear of an unlivable future many already face. We explored how place-based civic science (PBCS) can provide opportunities to engage youth in environmental understanding and action through teamwork in which youth feel that they belong to a group larger than themselves and gain a sense of hope from working with others toward shared goals. We argue that combining PCBS pedagogies of collective action and collaborative learning spaces can help to buffer against distress as CYP grapple with global environmental crises. Methods: We drew from qualitative responses (student reflections and public presentations) of 486 6-12th graders (majority students of color) on what they learned from participating in PBCS projects. Projects involved egalitarian partnerships between adults from environmental organizations, teachers and student teams studying and acting together to mitigate problems and presenting their efforts in public venues. Results: Students' qualitative responses revealed an identification with their team and its goal forged through the work, respect for their voice, belief in their capacity and confidence to take collective action and even enjoyment of working together to address community concerns. Conclusions: PBCS through collective learning/action in student teams and nonhierarchical intergenerational partnerships, and connections that CYP forge with organizations in the broader community, can help to build CYP's agency and efficacy while addressing "emotionally heavy" issues such as climate change. Key Practitioner Message • CYP are capable of dealing with environmental problems as long as they see that they can be effective in collective action with fellow stakeholders and that a better environmental future is possible. • Education that combines learning about environmental problems, with giving young people the chance to build skills and participate in concrete collective actions that address these issues can help CYP to feel they do not have to solve these problems on their own. • Team building and relationships are an important base for exploring climate change issues, science, and activism, so that students feel safe to explore these issues on their own terms as well as empowered to act in ways that they find culturally relevant. • There is little research on the mental health effects of climate change on Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) young people, and future research should proceed cautiously in light of the potential compounding effects of eco-anxiety added to the challenges these youth face on a daily basis.
Sustainability, 2018
PAR-based UREs are undergraduate research experiences (UREs)—built into university-community partnerships—that apply principles of participatory action research (PAR) towards addressing community-defined challenges. In this paper, we advance PAR-based UREs as an action-oriented framework through which higher education institutions can simultaneously enact and advance the United Nations sustainable development agenda, while cultivating student development. We draw upon interdisciplinary scholarship on sustainable development and PAR, as well as empirical findings from a pilot program, to accomplish dual goals. First, through the lens of six Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) clusters, we explore the synergies between undergraduate PAR engagement and sustainable development, explaining how PAR-based UREs can prefigure and facilitate SDG achievement by promoting cross-sector collaboration and supporting diverse stakeholder engagement through community-driven research and action. Second, within each SDG cluster, we offer complementary reflections and recommendations around the design and implementation of PAR-based UREs towards advancing students’ skills and abilities as: (1) Community Collaborators (and Learners); (2) Community-Engaged Researchers; (3) (Interdisciplinary) Scholars; (4) Agents of Change; (5) (Sustainable) Co-Innovators; and (6) Institutional Representatives. Finally, we discuss the critical role of higher education institutions in minimizing structural barriers to PAR-based URE implementation, given their prefigurative and practical potential for both SDG achievement and student development.
Understanding Sustainability Education: A Community-Based Experience
Revista Brasileira De Pesquisa Em Educacao Em Ciencias, 2014
Sustainability education policies are widely focused on modern technologies, green profits, and development projects in many Indigenous communities. However, there has been minimal attention given to critical areas such as: Indigenous world views, spiritual and relational practices, culture, lands, and revitalization. This imbalance, combined with the destruction and lack of recognition to Indigenous knowledge (systems), suggests that Indigenous environmental education policies are still in a state of adolescence as a field of academic inquiry. The present study examines how an Indigenous community understands sustainability and analyzes these understandings in relation to the literature on the politics of nature as well as Indigenous and postcolonial studies. This research followed a relational Participatory Action Research (PAR) research approach with a focus on the researchers' relational accountabilities and obligations to study participants and site.
Learners and practitioners can find themselves overwhelmed by the anxieties that arise from being immersed in the troubling discourses about sustainability. Constant exposure to the negative news about the triple crunch of unsustainability – biodiversity loss, the overexploitation of natural resources and climate change – combined with a confusing and contested debate about how to respond, threaten to stultify individual motivation to act to transform the situation for the better. This is the context for this dissertation, which initially explores the controversies and complexities around the sustainability agenda through an examination of the key critical literature as a way of gaining a better understanding of the issues and the way organisations are responding. The leadership of pro-sustainability change is also explored, discussing the role of communities, social movements and alternative sources of knowledge, as well as engaging with philosophical and ethical conversations. A participatory pedagogy in the spirit of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire is proposed as a mechanism for learners and practitioners to guide their pro-sustainability interventions. The history of this pedagogic approach is explored in relation to its relevance to the current debate. The dissertation aims to study the relationship between participatory pedagogy as an educational approach, and the leadership of a community pro-sustainability initiative. This is achieved by evaluating the author’s experience of participatory pedagogy in a higher education setting alongside his concurrent practice in implementing a community development project. This qualitative study represents a reflective ethnography using three forms of participant observation as the means to collect a rich source of empirical material, the analysis of which is then discussed and interpreted to address the project objectives. The key findings suggest that the participatory pedagogic approach has the potential to awaken conscientização – critical consciousness – in the learner, providing the foundation for generating a coherent personal stance towards sustainability. Such a stance engenders the confidence and mindset to lead pro-sustainability initiatives, the effective delivery of which are guided by an understanding of the appropriate approaches and roles to deploy in participatory practice. A visualisation of the relationship between these elements is offered for further critique.
The social lab classroom: wrestling with-and learning from- sustainability challenges
Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy, 2016
Unlike the traditional disciplinary approach to research and problem-solving still common in higher education, this article explicates and recommends an interdisciplinary, holistic pedagogical approach that takes seriously the interconnectedness of our wicked social sustainability challenges (e.g., poverty, global climate change, food access, among others). We argue that educators can better prepare students to tackle such wicked problems by requiring they engage with locally based problems connected to large-scale systemic challenges. By discussing the design and outcomes of the course “Wicked Problems of Sustainability” from both the students’ and instructor’s perspectives, we seek to extend and enhance effective pedagogical strategies. As a laboratory for sustainability education and innovation we have developed a transdisciplinary, community-engaged, upper-division undergraduate course that engages students in participatory research on the inextricably linked dimensions of social sustainability. Collaborating with community partners to work across networks, disciplines, and institutions, students have the opportunity to ameliorate real problems in the local community. In doing so, the course confronts students and the instructor with a series of robust challenges from intensive collaborations, to logistical and time-management dilemmas, to real-world execution issues. This article details the obstacles associated with messy inquiry, participatory research, and community engagement and provides recommendations for overcoming them.
2019
Based on a critical literature review, the article argues that transformative learning (TL) that fosters a shift in consciousness towards a more ecological approach is an inherently place-based phenomenon. In this article we build a place-based approach to TL based on a literature review. Our theoretical framework is grounded in three key themes which emerge from the literature: (re-) connection, (self-)compassion and creativity. (Re-)connection involves all processes that evoke an experience of the interconnected nature of all life. (Self-)compassion, acting to alleviate suffering or doing the least harm, naturally follows a sense of interconnection. Creativity is the materialisation of a sense of interconnection and compassion or the means through which these can be experienced. This theoretical framework can be used empirically to research the extent to which people involved in place-based sustainability initiatives develop an ecological consciousness. Empirical research can then be used to further develop and anchor this framework, and seek the kind of practices that can evoke experiences of connection, cultivate the human ability for compassion and give space for creative living.
2015
In this paper, we document our efforts, as activist scholars, to cultivate among our liberal arts students a critical environmental justice consciousness through engaging with community organizations. We detail our efforts to make the classroom a space in which to engage environmental justice beyond a narrow and short-term focus on the disproportionate impact of environmental harms in low-income and minority communities to a more expansive and consistent attention to histories of inequality and processes of marginalization. We argue that community engaged partnerships afford opportunities for educators to combine theory with practice and disrupt students’ assumptions about what or who constitutes the environment. Our socially privileged students, in gaining a better understanding of structural/historic privilege and how their own positionality implicates them in environmental injustice, have been able to re-evaluate and reframe their political and theoretical commitments and carve o...
Integrating Shared Action Learning into Higher Education for Sustainability
2013
It is widely acknowledged that the sustainability challenges facing the world require new approaches to teaching and learning. At the community level, however, sustainability priorities are context specific, so prescriptions of what and how to teach for sustainability are limiting. In higher education, one innovative approach to sustainability education that acknowledges the limits of conventional coursework involves courses based on "shared action learning" - a process in which students, faculty, and community sponsors share learning experiences while working on sustainability projects for a specific community. Shared Action Learning can be applied in any community context near or far from campus ranging from the very local campus community to distant settlements across the globe. This paper describes the processes, opportunities and challenges of shared action learning through five stages: (1) project impetus, (2) contextual research and project planning, (3) community e...