What Is Education for Climate Equity and Climate Justice in Trump Country?

• In Event: Caring for Social-Ecological Systems through Science, Engineering, and Environmental Education: Models, Tensions, Affordances
  In Structured Poster Session: Caring for Social-Ecological Systems Through Science, Engineering, and Environmental Education: Models, Tensions, Affordances

Abstract

Purpose: This research examines the effects of neoliberal economic, social, and educational policy on achieving both climate change education and related ethical forms action in rural, politically conservative parts of the United States. We are interested in developing an educational politics of care for students who exist in communities culturally primed to reject climate change science.

Perspectives: We leverage theories of domination to examine relationships among place, land, and human communities. Specifically, we utilize scholarship on how settler colonialism and racial capitalism shapes rural identities (Estes, 2019; Grandin, 2019), race and gender studies scholarship on masculine lifeways in rural America (Kimmell, 2017; Ferber & Kimmell, 2000), and work from the critical sociology of education that examines the geographic influence of neoliberalism in environmental education settings (Hursh, Henderson, Greenwood, 2015; McKenzie, 2012). We combine these lenses to examine how neoliberalism works with other forms of power to configure rural areas as particular kinds of relational spaces (Massey, 2005).

Modes of Inquiry: By comparing detailed cases (Stake, 2013) of educational policy and practices in regional contexts in rural New York State and rural Kentucky, we examine the (in)adequacy of current climate change educational discourses and action for affecting substantive social and ecological change given the aforementioned systems of domination that influence these geographies. We draw on data from our own educational narratives and practices, as well as state-level educational policy texts and local-level pedagogical artifacts from existing climate change education programs in these regions.

Substantiated Conclusions: In the Adirondack Region of Upstate New York – a former site of primitive resource accumulation via extractive timbering and mining – white working-class residents now survive by catering to wealthier tourists and second-home owners as service-sector employees. In the historically coal-mining dependent mountain region of Eastern Kentucky, jobs that provided a living wage were most likely found in the mining industry. In both cases, resource dependence—both intimately tied by critical relationships to the carbon production cycle—shaped what came to be valued as good work. Also in both cases, valuing these industries as pathways toward a ‘good’ life begin to conflict with assumptions of the neoliberal economic order and its increasingly metropolitan and coastal home. This process has occurred along gender lines too, as “manly” extractive industry jobs have been replaced by “womanly” service sector employment opportunities, producing a crisis of both political economy and of masculinity.

Scholarly Significance: We examine the inherent challenges in teaching climate change in areas that are often hostile to enacting such messages due to perceived threats to social and cultural identity. Pathways to overcome such challenges are discussed relative to our own pedagogical practices as faculty members working in these geographies. We conclude by placing our work in conversation with Arendt (1954) who argued that educators should create opportunities that bridge a sometimes troubling past with the renewal of a commonly held future. We extend this ethic of educational care to think beyond the systems of domination currently shaping rural America.

Authors

• David E. Long, Morehead State University

• Joseph A. Henderson, Paul Smith's College

• Kevin W. Meuwissen, University of Rochester