Expansive Relationality: Multiple Pedagogies Toward Justice and Care for Teaching With Lands and Waters

• In Event: Connection With More-Than-Human Participants in Science Learning

Abstract

Introduction & Framing
Environmental science education is a critical site for remediating human relations with the more--than human (MTH) world towards more just and equitable futures. In this paper, we explore the learning and development of informal environmental educators within a praxis-oriented graduate program designed for intersectional environmental education (Freire, 1970; Thomas, 2022). We focus on a series of scaffolded learning activities (storylines) in which graduate students designed, enacted, and iterated upon the lessons with the goal of remediating nature|culture relations (Medin & Bang, 2014). Drawing on relational epistemologies (e.g. Cajete, 2000; author et al., 2019), a central aim of the storyline was for graduate students to develop orientations and tools for teaching with lands and waters. More specifically, storylines foregrounded relationality and community-building as pivotal to not only learning about socioecological systems, but to deepen educators’ understandings of the ontological, epistemological, and axiological dimensions of environmental science education (Bang & Marin, 2015).

Context & Data
This study takes place in a graduate program affiliated with a large research university in the pacific northwest. In the practicum component of this program, graduate students connect theory to practice as they design and implement outdoor environmental education learning experiences for 4th-6th grade students. This paper focuses on graduate student participation in a justice centered ambitious science teaching (JuST) design-based research project (author et al., under review). Expanding upon our work on perspective storytelling (authors, 2022), this paper also looks at other elements in the JuST storyline - namely “Meet-A-Tree" and “Each One Teach One”. All three of these activities center relations between youth and MTHs while locating the human participants in the lands and waters within a specific place and time (e.g. Tzou et al., 2022). Data for this analysis comes from focus group discussions, student-made artifacts, and iterative curriculum design sessions.

Methods & Findings
We used thematic analysis with a combination of apriori and grounded theory codes to analyze the data (Ravitch & Carl, 2021). Ongoing analysis of data collected during the professional learning community meetings in the 2023 cohort demonstrated the linguistic shifts (e.g. what became who to describe plants) that supported the recognition of the personhood and agency of MTH as critical members of the learning community (McDaid Barry et al., 2023). These shifts were also relational and created new possibilities for friendships, personhood, and agency between human and MTH participants in these activities.

Scholarly Significance
This ongoing work allows us to animate the programmatic goals of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion goals, which push us to center community building at all levels of our programming. Canonical western environmental education has traditionally decentered animacy and agency for MTHs and natural kinds which stems from a cartesian approach to dualisms as a philosophical foundation. This work reconnects mind|body and nature|culture pushing beyond binaries in our pursuit of justice projects within intersectional environmental education (Thomas, 2022; Vossoughi et al., 2021).

Authors

• Priya Pugh, IslandWood

• Déana A Scipio, IslandWood