Coming to and Designing for Relationality as Environmental Justice in Social Studies Education (Poster 3)

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

Abstract

Purpose
Our collective of community and university-based educators and researchers came together to redesign a social studies methods course to center environmental justice. In this paper, we describe our process of developing a collective understanding of and response to environmental (in)justice from our lived and felt experiences as Black, Indigenous, Queer, women, and gender non-conforming people and what this process might look like for teacher candidates. Our work centers Black and Indigenous experiences and epistemologies and the need to consider relationality as integral to how we think about our relationships with and responsibilities to the environment.

Theoretical Framework
Aligned with our collective’s understanding of environmental justice, relationality acknowledges the interconnectedness and interdependence of all lifeforms on earth (Deloria Jr., 1988). Key to this process is building accountable relationships with each other, our ancestors, future generations, and our more-than-human kin, including land, water, animals, etc. (Wilson, 2008). Further, relationality entails a process where communities are able to self determine their needs as knowledgeable experts on their own lives and environments (Brayboy et al., 2012). Connecting relationality to research, Black feminist scholar Cynthia Dillard uses the metaphor “research as a responsibility” to describe endarkened feminist epistemology, illuminating the responsibility that researchers have to be “answerable and obligated to the very persons and communities being engaged in inquiry” (2000, p. 663).

Methods
Our collaborative work included eight design meetings/circles lasting two to four hours. To prepare for each meeting we read/viewed multimedia resources on environmental and climate racism and (in)justice. We started each design circle meeting with a semi-structured agenda to allow for shifts and changes based on input from everyone in our collective. Our community partners often took the lead and engaged the collective in grounding activities, time to reflect on and share our lived and felt experiences learning with and from the environment, and we often ended with what was sitting with each of us from our time together.

Results
Through the design circles our collective theorized a grounded definition of environmental (in)justice informed by our lived and felt experiences. As a result we developed a more relational understanding of environmental justice rooted in relationships with people and more than human kin. Next we imagined what it would look like to engage teacher candidates in a similar process, allowing time and space to reflect on their own relationship with the environment, to grieve the loss of our planet, and commit to a more relational approach to teaching and embodying environmental justice education in social studies teaching and their everyday lives.

Scholarly Significance
So often university-based educators and researchers have rigid plans and timelines that inhibit true design work. Our experiential knowledge and our commitment to engage in “research as a responsibility”, acknowledging “multiple ways of knowing and doing research” (Dillard, 2000, p. 663) called us to slow down. Through this process we came to see and feel land and water as kin and in turn this shifted our approach to working with teacher educators.

Authors

• Shanee A. Washington, University of Washington

• Fernell Miller, The Root of Us

• Molly V. Shea, University of Washington

• Laurel Lakoundji

• Shayla R. Chatto, University of Washington