Educating Across Scales for Multispecies World Building Through Radical Care Practices (Poster 6)

• In Event: Speculative Science Education Toward Socioecological Care

Abstract

Objectives
Given the disproportionate impacts of the climate crisis and environmental degradation, there is a need to disrupt the logics of whiteness, anthropocentrism, and extractivism in human-nature relations. This necessitates figuring out how to promote onto-epistemic transformation of public understanding of multispecies kinship and caring (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) grounded in ethico-political responsibilities of interdependence (Bang & Marin, 2015; Whyte, 2017). We explore whether these cultural transformations can unfold at broad geographic scale through networks engaging in solidarity-based designs for social and multispecies justice (Ishimaru & Bang, 2022). We relate the design of specific learning environments fostering socio-ecological caring (e.g., elementary science investigations, pre-service methods instruction) to the capacity building and infrastructuring of two state-level network improvement communities focused on climate justice teacher education.

Theoretical Framework
Fourth generation cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) provides a productive framing for our work studying “coalescing cycles of expansive learning in a heterogeneous coalition of activities facing a critical societal challenge” (Engeström & Sanino, 2020, p. 12). To realize “radical expansion of social relations,” processes of dialogue, trust, and collaboration across diverse activity systems by various actors are crucial. To work at broad scale, we strategically align with educational standards implementation efforts by materially infrastructuring professional learning, assessment, and instruction in these networks (Author, 2019)—with a focus on fostering ecological caring and the development of multispecies protector identities (Author & Colleague, 2019).

Methods & Data Sources
Our design-based implementation research (Penuel et al., 2011) operates collectively and in specific learning environments. We have engaged in this multiscalar work in partnership with educational practitioners and leaders for five years. We studied the expansion of social relations and cultural learning pathways of educational leaders, teachers, students, and researchers over time (Author et al., 2012) using: co-design discussions and ethnographic interviews (~50 hours); classroom observations (~4 hours); fieldnotes and classroom artifacts (~30 hours), and public artifacts. We developed thematic memos through inductive and iterative analytic strategies to investigate patterns and points of contrast in the data (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016).

Findings
We present findings across interlinked units of analysis. In terms of expansions in children’s ecological caring, many youth took up new, volitional individual protector actions outside of the school context where collective and interdisciplinary sensemaking was cultivated.

Expansions in teacher's ecological caring occurred through collaboration with researchers in the co-design of lesson sequences. Teachers developed caring stances toward the living, entangled world and efforts to develop meaningful connections to Indigenous ways of knowing.

Expansions in educational leader's ecological caring were evident in their growing portfolios of activities supporting ecological caring from Indigenous sovereignty and intersectional environmental perspectives (e.g., a distributed network of professional learning communities focused on climate justice). Also, transformations of pre-service teacher learning experiences resulted from developing capacity for and engagement in co-design centered on multispecies caring.

Scholarly Significance
Understanding how to cultivate climate justice education across broad scales is imperative. This work develops a conceptual framework for how to trans-locally promote meaningful enactments of socioecological caring practices through education.

Authors

• Philip L. Bell, University of Washington

• Kelsie Fowler, University of Washington

• Nancy Price, University of Washington

• Taiji Nelson, University of Washington

• Deb L. Morrison, University of Washington