Empowering students to confront environmental injustice: Dialogue, theory, empathy, and partnership (original) (raw)
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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...
Social justice education is undertheorized in science education. Given the wide range of goals and purposes proposed within both social justice education and social justice science education scholarship, these fields require reconciliation. In this paper, I suggest a student empowerment framework for conceptualizing teaching and learning social justice science education in classroom settings. I utilize this framework to analyze the case study of a high school environmental science classroom in the United States where the teacher and students created environmental action projects that were relevant to their community. I examine how social, political, and academic empowerment were or were not enacted within the classroom and argue for educators to give heed to all three simultaneously to mediate student empowerment while working toward social justice science education.
Environmental Education Research, 2019
In this article, I advocate for critical environmental education that is responsive to power inequities and use standpoint theory to help explain why environmental education has been slow to become raceconscious/responsive. Standpoint theory provides theoretical support for the multiplicity of stories and views surrounding the environment and environmental issues with respect to continuing racial divisions within the US. I argue that environmental perspectives of people of color in the US are sociohistorically situated and inattention to them has led to the growth of and tension between different paths in environmental movements within the US. I conclude with a consideration of implications and recommendations for the research and practice of environmental education.
2013
A tremendous amount of work goes into writing a dissertation. I've logged countless hours in libraries or sequestered in my office with books stacked up to my waist and multiple cups of green tea occupying my desk. However, writing a work of such size is never a singular process. Many people form an important web through both my life and this work and as such, have greatly shaped it's progression. My luxury of digging into the world of environmental education would be impossible, first of all, without the generous support I received from Louisiana State University, and the tremendous dedication of a few very special people. First, I would like to thank Dr. Fredrich Weil for offering me some very enlightening conversation and opportunities for research, as well as wry Jewish wit. His path led me to pursue environmental research. This research focus would never have led to a series of successful publications without the constant support of my advisor, Dr. Sarah Becker. Her relentless pursuit of coaching me on the editing process, over time, taught me how to synthesize my research into a publishable format and to impress editoral boards with my innovative ideas and expressive description. Further, Sarah was my "voice of reason" during many difficult life moments during these past four years, both personally and professionally. Her insight, her daily struggle being a single mom and managing a career gave her a maturity that regularly inspired me to be a better person, to take the higher road and think in terms of the bigger picture when the daily grind of grad school poverty affected my spirit. I owe an important gratitude to Dr. Troy Blanchard and Dr. Susan Dumais for agreeing to be on my dissertation committee and for pointed moments of important theoretical insights related to the cultural side of environmental destruction and the focus on youth as a site of injustice which guided my research into these important areas. Additionally, I would also like to thank my graduate school collegue Don Asay for his collaboration and for being my friend these past four years. Finally, I must thank Dana Berkowitz for her classes in feminism and gender theory as well as her passion, ambition, and sharp critique. And last, but certainly not least, I must thank my athletic orange tabby Stand-by Mancat, for sitting in my lap, and being my compainion and sense of stability through countless hours of dissertation work and grad school life. Without these efforts this work would not be possible. iv
Environmental justice (EJ) issues and perspectives, which emphasize the disproportionate environmental hazards experienced by low-income communities and communities of color, are often excluded from higher education sustainability discourses and curriculum. Utilizing a national sample of 297 interdisciplinary environmental and sustainability (IES) degree programs, this study identifies program-level values and student racial/ethnic demographics, as well as institutional structural characteristics influencing the inclusion of EJ content in IES curriculum. The findings have important implications for IES curriculum and program development, and racial/ethnic and class dynamics in this emerging field.
Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices of Environmental Justice in Higher Education
2013
Research suggests that issues of environmental justice are not being routinely included in the curriculum of the K-12 classroom and that teachers in those grades do not feel prepared to teach it. Likewise, little has been written about the addition of these topics to higher education coursework, leaving the question of inclusion at this level of education as well. This apparent lacuna may point to at least one reason why K-12 teachers are neither knowledgeable about environmental justice nor prepared to teach it. To discover the current state of inclusion in higher education, a mixed methods study was conducted to determine the knowledge, attitudes and practices of those teaching in one segment of higher education-namely all BA/BS granting undergraduate programs of environmental science and/or environmental studies within the United States. The results from this study suggest that while those teaching in these departments can provide a general description of what environmental justice is, there is much confusion and little agreement about exactly what it encompasses, who it affects, its causes and its solutions. However, responses do indicate that a sizable number of those teaching in these departments believe that environmental justice is an important topic which students should know 10
Incorporating Environmental Justice into Youth Education
2021
Social Justice is a concept which is often glossed over or excluded from student education, particularly the issues associated with Environmental Justice. Discrimination, oppression, and poor environmental practices all coalesce into dangerously impactful issues, which can be combated by further education and exposure. This project seeks to spread awareness of Environmental Justice issues, provide educators with the tools to implement social justice education, and express the importance of such exposure to students. This interdisciplinary project utilizes the facilitation of a workshop with lessons, activities, and opportunities for participants to engage in discussions. The goal of the workshop was to describe the need of Environmental Justice education among adults, children, and educators, provide materials and various methods for educators to integrate such concepts into their curriculum, and emphasize the importance community plays in supporting social justice efforts. The find...
Reimagining Intersectionality in Environmental Education
We seek to understand how issues of intersectionality are addressed in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) literature, focusing on how gender is discussed in relation to other social identities such as class, race, sexuality, and ability. Our analysis draws from feminist and decolonizing frameworks, and uses intersectionality to examine how ESE literature addresses issues as interconnected. Intersectional analysis originates from Black feminist perspectives on how social identities/subjectivities collide and collude to reproduce systemic and unique forms of oppression. This paper contributes to this critical framework by incorporating considerations of Indigenous interconnectivity and landbased sovereignties. We begin this literature review by providing a background of intersectionality and interconnectivity from Black feminist and Indigenous knowledge systems, and describe how these frameworks inform our analysis. We then review existing ESE literature to critically examine how researchers have utilized feminist 1 Contact Naomi Mumbi Maina-Okori [naomi.maina@usask.ca, Sustainability