Perspective Storytelling: Modeling Justice-Centered Environmental Education at the Intersection of Relations With More-Than-Human Kinds (Poster 6)

• In Event: Supporting Teacher Learning of Justice-Centered Ambitious Practice

Abstract

Learning in relationship with the natural world is a fundamental part of the human condition. As Indigenous scholars remind us, people of the global majority have lived in relationship with the natural world since time immemorial. However, western environmental education is a predominantly and historically white field. Broadening participation within this field entails both changes to who participates and what it means to participate in environmental education.

We are BIPOC women, learning scientists, and environmental educators working with graduate students in a 10-month praxis program bringing theory and practice together through a mentored practicum program. We bring a justice-centered, design-based approach to our work.

Our approach focuses on Intersectional environmentalism (Brown et al., 2022; Thomas, 2022) has been a positive step for our field. As educators, we must learn from intersectionality (Collins, 2019; Crenshaw, 1991) as a theoretical lens through which teachers can develop pedagogical practices and curricular approaches. Adapting our existing curriculum through an intersectionality lens calls upon us to navigate multiple epistemologies and to foreground nature culture relations (Bang & Marin, 2015). We lean on the practices enumerated by Darling-Hammond and Hammerness (2005) to guide our work with teachers.

This poster presents the ongoing curricular, pedagogical, and reflection work happening as we engage graduate students who are part of a 10-month residency program nested within a residential environmental education center in Justice-centered ambitious science teaching (JuST) practices. Graduate students teach fourth through sixth grade students about natural systems, more-than-human kinds, and their relationships with lands and waters, to come to see themselves as part of the natural world through the lenses of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI). We developed a model unit of lessons and activities to demonstrate JuST practices in environmental education and will be exploring the ways that graduate students learn from our model and develop personal frameworks for JuST practices. Our data will include interviews, lesson plans, artifacts, and recordings from our ongoing learning and reflection in our mentored professional learning communities.

Our goals are to understand the ways that graduate students develop and model personal frameworks for JuST practices within an environmental education environment. Given that graduate students in our program will do environmental education with youth participants at IslandWood we need to prepare them to do this work in just and equitable ways. We see the potential for these learnings to help us develop new ways of educator professional development that could be useful for training in other informal teaching and learning environments. We are invested in understanding the experiences and meaning-making practices that teachers who are engaging in intersectional environmental education bring to their work.

Authors

• Déana A Scipio, IslandWood
  Presenting Author

• Priya Pugh, IslandWood
  Presenting Author