Justice Fractals: “Why” Statements, Rhizomes, and Philosophies of Education in an Environmental Education Program (Poster 5)

• In Event: Speculative Science Education Toward Socioecological Care

Abstract

Introduction and Framing
Within the field of environmental education western models of socioecological relations have dominated and privileged settled expectations within historically and predominantly white institutions. We are investing in our pre-service environmental educators (graduate students) as educators for joy and justice and view speculative education as a relational approach to privilege their leadership and thriving as they imagine and craft just socioecological possibilities. We seek to deepen graduate students' justice-centered orientations and practices through engagement with three pedagogical tools that we have created within our program to articulate their ontological, epistemological, and axiological commitments as educators (Bang et al., 2016). Normative horizons (Garcia & Mirra, 2023) offer a framework to illuminate the entanglement of time scales that define and determine the identities and actions of our students in the broader context of teaching and learning about complex socioecological systems.

Context, Data, and Methods
This study takes place in a praxis-oriented environmental education graduate program affiliated with a large research university in the pacific northwest (e.g. Friere, 1970). We ask each student to engage with three pedagogical tools during orientation and in their courses: a “why statement”, a rhizome, and a philosophy of education. The “why” statement prompted students to connect their personal motivations, community commitments, and visions for themselves as members of a democratic and professional learning community. The "rhizome" was an orienting framework that prompted students to articulate orienting and actionable commitments as educators (Bang et al., 2020; Engeström and Sannino, 2010). The philosophy of education was the culminating project in the foundations of education course where grads embedded intersectional identities and positionality statements into their articulations of their teaching and learning commitments.
Data for this analysis come from two years of graduate student course work, and reflection sessions held towards the end of the year in which they discussed and responded to explicit prompts linking these tools as a set of shared inquiry into themselves as educators. We conducted thematic analysis with multiple rounds of deductive and inductive coding of artifacts (Braun & Clark, 2006; Saldaña and Omasta, 2018) along the following dimensions: intersectional identities, positionality, commitments, and pedagogical approaches.

Results and Implications
The normative horizon articulates an identified direction for the work of justice-centered sociological care, while the metaphor of fractals provides a lens into the multiplicity of scale as graduate students articulate their core commitments (Houlden & Veletsianos, 2022). Our students hold the multiplicity of past, present, and future identities with their commitments as educators. We found that in this process, the tools allowed grads to unpack and unlearn their own experiences with schooling while imagining and enacting pedagogical commitments towards joy and justice.
Implications of this work have compelled us to reimagine our own orientation to this graduate program that centers justice and intersectional environmental education. Our graduate program is not only a praxis space where theory and practice intersect, but also a place of being/becoming where students stand in multiple vantage points to a normative horizon.

Authors

• Déana A Scipio, IslandWood

• Priya Pugh, IslandWood

• Michela Dimond, IslandWood