Mapping Integration, Cohesion, and Communities of Critical Climate Justice Across a Secondary Teacher Education Program (Poster 4)

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

Abstract

Problem
Climate change demands a rapid shift in how we learn about, and steward, our planet. Teacher preparation programs bear responsibility to prepare novitiate teachers for climate justice teaching in their curricula, framing, relationality, and pedagogical approaches (Nxumalo & Montes, 2021; Seguro et al., 2021). Fortunately, the urgency to teach about/for climate justice has primed teacher educators to reflect on their work in an effort to shed this past and build anew. However, how to best do this is an unfolding puzzle with myriad obstacles and possibilities (Beach, 2023).

Theoretical Framework
Knowing this, we adopt 4th Generation CHAT (Engeström & Sannino, 2020) as a tool for analyzing and understanding the complicated, multi-scaled, and “wicked” nature of teacher education given its nearly non-existent response to the climate crisis and troubled history producing harm against humans and the Earth. We couple this theoretical approach with notions of name/mapping abundance (Fujikane, 2021) as first steps in (re)imaging teacher education and world building given our changing climate (Mitchell & Chaudhury, 2020).

Design
This presentation offers a close read of the integration of climate justice into one teacher preparation program in the northwestern United States through the curriculum mapping of a program-wide effort to cohesively respond to the climate crisis in critical and justice-oriented ways. Our team of teacher educators engaged in a reflexive participatory curriculum mapping process that helped elevate curricular connections to climate justice, relationality, and pedagogical moves to work in/with community experts. Both selective and open-ended coding (Strauss, 1987) were used in a qualitative data analysis of instructor reflections (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) and the collaborative curriculum maps and audio recordings created during two programmatic wide reflexive mapping sessions.

Findings
Significantly more opportunities to integrate climate justice across the program in inter/trans-disciplinary ways surfaced than we previously anticipated. Most instructors were eager to turn into this necessary and critical work—and in collaboration! Furthermore, this work quickly became about more than just the curricula. Anti-colonial and Anti-racist Pedagogies for climate justice (Nxumalo & Montes, 2021) became collective commitments that transcended coursework, field practicums, and identity caucusing through creative, and communal, reconfigurations of quarterly learning.
Other findings revealed that prioritizing the preparation of teachers to teach about/for climate justice worked in service of deepening other orientations to justice within the program and forged a cohesive path for moving learning out into community where the experiences and expertise of Black, Brown and Indigenous classroom teachers, youth, program graduates, and community-based organizations can be centered. We also found that although any transformation to/within the larger education system is laden with logistical challenges, this work cultivated multigenerational sustained engagement in the program by attending to climate change—this suggests radical ways to disperse expertise, teach about “wicked problems” (Engeström & Sannino, 2020) and structure learning for keeping learners connected as they attempt climate justice work in their own classrooms.

Contributions/Significance
Given the dire need for climate justice in schools, this study contributes to the developing field of climate justice teacher education and provides a model for broad integration into preparation programs.

Authors

• Kelsie Fowler, University of Washington

• Anne Beitlers, University of Washington

• Saraswati Noel, Western Washington University