Youth Rewriting Nature Master Scripts

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: Decolonizing and Historicizing Narratives of Place

Abstract

This research examines narratives of nature common to environmental education through a Critical Race Theory lens, and in particular as white-ethnocentric master scripts that subordinate, omit, or erase narratives of nature shaped by communities of color. Through this research I ask the question: when young people of diverse racial, ethnic and cultural identities are encouraged to deconstruct dominant understandings of nature, how do they re-construct narratives of nature and in what ways are those reconstructions polycultural? In collaboration with 7th and 8th grade students at a charter school in northern Arizona, we worked to deconstruct nature master scrips and through creative counter-storytelling, reconstruct narratives about the natural world centering themselves, their lived experiences, cultures and their communities.

Author

• Tallie R Segel, Concordia University - Montreal