Teacher Education Meets the Climate Crisis: A Collaborative Autoethnography (Poster 6)

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

Abstract

Purpose
This project springs from a central inquiry: Where the justification of the purpose of public schooling in the U.S. has traditionally been tied to the economy and the labor force, what if the “why” of schooling was instead bound up in an ethic of ecological care? That is, what if public schooling was re-oriented both to 1) center the lifeways, knowledge, and practices of the human, non-human and more-than-human species that occupy our planet, and 2) attend to racial and multispecies justice in pursuit of a broader climate justice imperative?

Theoretical Framework
Drawing on Ted Aoki’s (1993) distinction between the “planned curriculum” and the “lived curriculum,” as well as Ivan Illich’s (1971) call to “deschool” not only oppressive institutions themselves, but also the myriad means through which workers have internalized institutional thinking, our project explores what de-institutionalization can look like in the context of two teacher education programs spread across one state in the Pacific Northwest. We paid particular attention to the sensory and embodied learning that necessarily accompanies critical consciousness when enacting the changes necessary to deinstitutionalize and decolonize micro and macro spaces within higher education. We worked the hardened (and often precarious) ground that has been left to abandon, and therefore upholds institutionalized values and values systems that do not reflect those of beloved and authentic community. As we work that ground, we plant seeds of change.

Methodology
Using the tools of duoethnography (Sawyer & Norris, 2013) and collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al., 2013)--and buoyed by Noddings’ (2012) conceptualization of the intersubjective nature of care--we, three teacher educators, document the significant changes we made to our respective courses and programs to center climate and racial justice in tandem, as well as our ongoing written reflections and recorded dialogues that occurred throughout the academic year. We utilized separate rounds of open and focused coding (Emerson et al., 2011) to surface themes from the corpus, and preliminary analysis of the data suggests that 1) climate justice cannot be separated from the pursuit of equity along racial, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability lines even and especially in teacher education; 2) de-institutionalization requires sustained effort, commitment, honesty, listening, vulnerability, and courage--all ideally supported and modeled by leadership at all levels of the university; and 3) centering climate justice in our coursework met an unaddressed need among preservice teachers to act and teach in ways consonant with an ethic of ecological care and in doing so, alleviated articulations of climate anxiety pent up and often unexpressed in the rigamarole of a state certification program. Taken together, these findings point to both the possibilities and challenges of undertaking a radical shift toward eco-justice within university-based teacher education programs.

Significance
We anticipate this work will be formative and useful to (teacher) educators looking to meet the urgency of the climate crisis from within and beyond their respective institutions. Further, our project speaks to the necessity of confronting racial and climate justice in partnership with others, and at all levels of public life.

Authors

• Richard D. Sawyer, Washington State University - Vancouver

• T. Francene Watson, Washington State University

• Jessica Masterson, Washington State University - Vancouver