​​Designing Local, Case-Based Environmental Justice High School Science Lessons Toward More Just and Sustainable Futures (Poster 4)

• In Event: Speculative Science Education Toward Socioecological Care

Abstract

Purpose and significance
Environmental justice explores the disproportionate ways marginalized communities (low-income and/or communities of color) are exposed to and harmed by environmental hazards. Environmental injustice is crucial to understand, so that community members can hold industry and lawmakers accountable for protecting the health of communities, particularly those most at risk. Unfortunately, environmental justice is vastly underrepresented in formal education curricula and standards.
In partnership with a local environmental justice non-profit, we use data, stories, and successes emerging from the front lines of a local community experiencing environmental injustice to create case studies for high school students. We are interested in the perspective of students who are living in the community that is featured in the case study. Our project endeavors to build science curricula that helps students understand environmental injustice in context alongside community efforts to redress harms, while considering how to reimagine our cities and neighborhoods to minimize risk of industrial toxins for more just, sustainable, and healthy communities.

Study
We recognize that studying harmful impacts by industrial toxins on already marginalized communities is heavy and difficult. For this reason, our project combines justice-centered science pedagogy (Morales-Doyle, 2017), trauma-informed approaches, and critical place-based learning (Gruenewald, 2003; Dimick, 2016). For this presentation, we will consider how speculative futures (Garcia & Mirra, 2023) might provide avenues within this work toward imagining more just and livable futures for communities, including the human and more-than-human.
This study began as a curriculum creation project with a team of teachers, researchers, and environmental justice community organizers. In the 2022-23 school year, a teacher collaborator piloted the unit with multiple student cohorts. We take a participatory approach with the teachers and students with whom we are collaborating, opening our process as much as possible for their perspectives, direction, and input. We interviewed students who participated in the unit to understand their perspectives and responses to the unit. Our data sources include open-ended interviews with high school students who studied the pilot unit and students’ written work from the unit. We triangulate this data with the teacher’s observations during and from teaching the unit.
Our iterative analysis has resulted in ongoing unit redesign, as we have piloted the unit with three cohorts of students. From initial analysis, students report that though the content is emotionally-difficult, they are adamant about the need to learn about these concepts and express frustration that they knew so little about public health dangers in their own community. They also express appreciation for community action efforts that they have studied and engaged with as part of the unit. The need for this work became particularly clear as multiple students reported knowing peers with cancer, and one student in our class, whose family rents a home across the street from the case-study industry, is in remission from cancer. The very real and serious impacts on students’ lives emphasizes the necessity for this work in schools, along with the need for care and hope.

Author

• Sarah Stapleton, University of Oregon