Educator Reflective Practice as a Foundation for Environmental Justice and World Building (Poster 1)

• In Event: Climate Teacher Education as Spaces for Holding Climate Precarity, Hope, Community, and Youths’ Flourishing Futures

Abstract

Introduction and Objectives
There are increasing calls for expansive science education to address the inherent disparities in canonized methods of instruction and practice (Madkins & McKinney de Royston, 2019; Mensah, 2011, 2013; Tan & Barton, 2012). Informal education programs are uniquely positioned to heed these calls, particularly programs in which learning is embedded in meaningful activity (Rogoff et al., 2016). More specifically, informal environmental learning programs can be key sites for remediating conceptions of intersectional environmental education, desettling science, and foregrounding interpretive power (Bang et al., 2012; Rosebery et al., 2015; Thomas, 2022). In this study, we explore how preservice environmental educators in an environmental non-profit learn about, teach, and embody transformative possibilities in education for climate justice.

Theoretical Framework
We recognize that transformative learning happens in meaningful activity, and is socially, culturally, and contextually mediated (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003). We draw on expansive learning theory to trace learning in a series of designed activities (Engeström & Sannino, 2010). A key component of expansive learning theory is the idea of a germ cell, or an abstraction, that becomes concretized in “movement” through learning activities as learners ascend from the abstract to the concrete (Engeström, 2020). In our program, we ask students to complete two course assignments – a “philosophy of education” and a “rhizome” (Bang et al., 2020) - that facilitate this process of interrogation and instructional planning. We start with the educator as the core site of world building and justice-centered instruction.

Context & Methods
The context of this study is a praxis-oriented environmental education graduate program affiliated with a large research university in the pacific northwest (Freire, 1970). Graduate students take academic courses for their Masters in education with the affiliate university, while simultaneously engaging in a teaching practicum in which they design and implement environmental and science curricula for 4th-6th grade students. Data for this analysis comes from class assignments from two classes: Social, Cultural, and Philosophical Foundations of Education, and Teaching and Learning.

In these courses, graduate students examine social systems of education, engage with sociocultural theories of learning, and interrogate their own intersectional identities and positionality. We ask them to explore emotional configurations (Curnow & Vea, 2020) for connecting to broader systems of joy, community, relations, power, privilege, and oppression. These can be difficult concepts for students to grasp as these systems are self-protecting and function in ways that obscure their impacts on individuals and communities, and this can be especially true for members of dominant communities whose lived experiences may remain unchallenged due to their raced and powered experiences within teaching and learning environments.

Findings & Scholarly Significance
Emergent findings showed these assignments both helped graduate students toggle between their individual experiences or intersectional identities and their positionality (Crenshaw, 1991; Warf, 2010). These assignments are a pedagogical approach that teacher educators can use to push future educators to recognize the impacts of systems of joy, connectedness, relations, power, privilege, and oppression on their lives and on the lives of the students they will teach.

Authors

• Déana A Scipio, IslandWood

• Priya Pugh, IslandWood

• Renee Comesotti, Islandwood