Strength to Love: Reducing Health and Educational Disparities Through a Focus on STEM Education and Climate Justice Among Urban Youth

• In Event: Innovation Education: New Strategies for Social Transformation and Community Empowerment

Abstract

There is broad consensus that people who live in more socially and economically deprived communities under-achieve in school and are in worse health, on average, than those living in more prosperous areas. The paper explores the relationship between the communities in which people live and their health and educational outcomes. What is it about living in certain communities that leads to poor health and educational outcomes? How do community factors influence health and educational achievement? And what can be done to strengthen and improve them? This paper is designed to bring culturally relevant pedagogy a more systematic examination for developing pedagogical spaces of resistance and resiliency by examining the historic, economic, and demographic changes that occurred in communities surrounding the “Toxic Triangle” in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco, and their subsequent impact on teaching and learning in local high schools.

More specifically, this paper examines the impact of eco-apartheid, a highly structural and interlocking matrix of environmental racism and social domination and its influence on “opportunities to learn” available to students at local high schools in the area.

Using geographic information systems (GIS) analysis that utilized both historic census and school-level data, this paper provide a series of analytical maps that demonstrate the spatial relationship between demographic and economic changes within the “Toxic Triangle” and their influence on public schools. Using “Structural Racilization” Theory, this paper argues that the evolving relationship between schools and the communities within the “Toxic Triangle” was race-based in that environmental toxins became more densely populated as communities of color became more densely populated in the region, leading to less healthy environments for students to learn.

Rather than conceptualizing failing urban schools as desert of despair amid an otherwise healthy and just society, this paper demonstrates the multiple ways in which race, space, place, and waste, assures that some students are “left behind” by forces inside and outside of the schools’. Furthermore, through our initial phase of qualitative data collection and analysis, this paper explores the many ways in which these broader structural forces are overcome through an “eco-pedagogy” that emphasizes STEM education and the agency of students, educators, and parents in poor urban schools and working class communities.

The study highlights three points: 1) the importance of using spatial historical analyses to understand the legacies that inform the current conditions in schools, 2) the central significance of race and racism in comprehending the evolution of environmental conditions and “opportunities to learn,” across time and space, and 3) The importance of integrating culturally relevant pedagogy with environmental education in order to move beyond studying problems, prevention, and pathology to include the assets, agency, and aspirations of urban youth. This study offers both methodological and policy-oriented implications and seeks to bridge the field of environmental sociology, public health, critical youth studies, with STEM education.

Author

• A.A. Akom, San Francisco State University