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Objectives
As J. T. Roane et al. (2021) points out, “the seeds of a different world are already alive in the everyday practices of ordinary Black and Indigenous people.” Taking this idea as a point of departure, this study engages oral history as both a pedagogical tool and methodological approach for surfacing the cultural, land-based knowledge of communities of color with urban youth. We posit that such knowledge offers a powerful foundation not just for teaching and learning, but for the urgent work of world-building in an era of climate crisis, forced migration, and genocidal violence.
Frameworks
Our study engages community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris, 2012) as grounding theoretical orientations. Community cultural wealth is a framework operating from the premise that communities of color are sites with multiple strengths. Culturally sustaining pedagogies, meanwhile, represent an approach to education that treats learners’ cultural knowledge and practices as goods unto themselves, where culture is recognized as intergenerational, complex, and constantly-shifting. From these perspectives, we inquire into the pedagogical possibilities that emerge when learners are afforded explicit opportunities to explore their own communities’ land-based cultural wealth through storywork.
Methods and Data Sources
This study reports on the co-design of a youth-focused oral history workshop series. Participatory design research (Bang and Vossoughi, 2016) provides a methodological grounding for our approach, in which we partner with an urban farm in Los Angeles, California to co-design the workshop series while studying the learning processes that occur throughout implementation. At this farm, high school age Black and Latinx youth participate in a curriculum centered on food sovereignty, agroecology, and land stewardship. The workshop series, integrated into the broader curriculum, provides a pedagogical space and research context in which youth are positioned as co-researchers to document stories around their communities’ relationships to land, farming, and food.
Results
We present a series of conjectures (Sandoval, 2014) which guide or co-design and ultimately point to a model for environmental education that is simultaneously historically-responsive and futures-oriented. The first concerns framing the land-based cultural knowledge and practices of communities of color as a form of cultural wealth, even as such knowledge is traditionally devalued. The second positions oral history as a pedagogical tool through which youth might become more attuned to their own communities’ storied, nuanced, and occasionally painful relationships with land. The third and final focuses on trauma-informed rememberance practices – across generations, species, lands, and waters – as a generative space in which to form new relational intimacies that sustain the work of building climate futures.
Significance
It is the everyday practices of communities of color that provide fertile ground in which to anchor “proleptic and future-oriented arrangements for learning and the social world” (Gutiérrez et al., 2017). In co-designing this pedagogical model, we aim not only push back against dominant representations of urban communities of color as being disconnected from land and the greater living world, but to consider how storytelling and storylistening can expand the boundary of social, cultural, and political engagement in environmental education.