Reimaging Environmental Education: Urban Youths’ Perceptions and Investigations of Their Communities

• In Event: Critical Imagination: Creativity, Curiosity, and Critical Pedagogy in Diverse Teaching-Learning Contexts

Abstract

Entrenched in an era of education reform that is continually espousing a dominant set of values, schools have become detached from their communities and the lived experiences of their students. This impedes schools’ attempts to create citizens with a critical understanding of the world they live in. Environmental education as it is taught within a traditional paradigm has contributed to this disconnect. With an emphasis on global issues, historical, social, political, and economic causes of environmental injustice are obscured. A place-based science education challenges this dominant ideology and provides an alternative where students can ask questions about their local communities and critically discuss what they are experiencing. The focus of this study is on exploring how a critical pedagogy of place in an urban science classroom can reveal the ways young people define, identify, and relate with their communities. By collectively generating research themes, students addressed questions around community identity, access, and diversity.

A critical pedagogy of place encourages educators to advocate for a pedagogy that “relates directly to student experience of the world, and that improves the quality of life for people and communities” (Gruenewald, 2003b, 7). My adaptation of a critical pedagogy of place is framed within a socioecological justice framework described by Furman and Gruenewald (2004). A socioecological framework reveals how modern developed economies have created environmental problems that impact both humans and nonhumans, and these are inseparable. Environmental problems are experienced as social injustices and are disproportionately felt depending on race, class, and other social groups.

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as pedagogical praxis and research methodology “provides young people with opportunities to study social problems affecting their lives and then determine actions to rectify these problems” (Cammarota and Fine, 2008, 2). Students generated critical research themes that address an issue of direct importance to their lived experiences and documented these themes through Photovoice, a process by which people can identify, represent, and enhance their community through a specific photographic technique (Wang & Burris, 1997). The underlying causes of these situations are addressed through the sharing of photos where students critically discuss the issues most salient to them, why these issues exist, and who is most impacted by them.

Students generated blogs and participated in online and in-class discussions using their images, wrote personal narratives and created small group presentations. Throughout the research, questions emerged about geography, demographics, and history of New York City and specifically their communities. Many students expressed feeling not represented by history or the data that they are exposed to in popular dialogue. Issues of globalization, consumption, gentrification, and privatization of public spaces emerged as most salient to the students’ experiences.

This work is part of a larger conversation about how we think about environmental education and reimagining this discipline to address issues that are relevant to young people in their local environments. As education reforms continue us on a path of standardization, a critical pedagogy of place that incorporates participatory research challenges the assumptions about education and the right to research.

Authors

• Marissa Bellino, The Graduate Center - CUNY

• Christopher Caraballo, High School for Environmental Studies

• Kaitlyn Figueroa, High School for Environmental Studies