A Critical Transdisciplinary Approach to Civic-Environmental Education

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 8

Abstract

This paper offers a methodological perspective on the critical-transdisciplinary framework, exploring how this approach can be enacted in the context of civic environmental education. I define civic environmental education broadly, to mean teaching and learning with the objective of co-creating and promoting knowledge and skills that students and educators can use to critically understand and shape the “natural” and built environments in which they live and learn. In this sense, this approach shares theoretical and methodological ground with approaches such as EcoJustice education (Martusewicz, Edmundson, & Lupinacci, 2011; Lupinacci & Happel-Parkins, 2016), eco-pedagogy (Kahn, 2010), and education for eco-literacy, (Capra, 2000; Bowers & Martusewicz, 2009) all of which incorporate elements of environmental education, critical pedagogy, and interdisciplinarity. The critical transdisciplinary framework, applied to civic environmental education, builds upon these approaches. It demands that teacher-learners together conduct explicit interrogation of the limiting assumptions embedded in traditional approaches to inquiry, foreground the lived experiences of students, and encourage student agency. My discussion will specifically focus on experiences of co-planning and co-teaching in a garden-based summer civic-environmental program for urban public high school students. I will highlight examples of how the framework has been enacted and in this setting, the opportunities and constraints this work has entailed in relation to various disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and the ways teachers and learners have engaging within these via the critical transdisciplinary framework.

Author

• Pieranna Pieroni, Brooklyn College