Justice-Centered Climate Change Pedagogy: Lenses to Guide Curricular Development (Poster 9)

• In Event: Building STEM Teachers’ Social Justice Teaching Capacities: Future Directions for Teacher Education

Abstract

Purpose
Climate change is a multiplier of environmental racism and other structural inequalities that disproportionately impact BIPOC communities (United Nations, 2019; Tessum, 2021). Yet, traditional science classes often narrowly focus on scientific understandings rather than social and political causes and consequences, and proposed actions are typically individual and practical rather than collective or political (Busch et al., 2019; Clark et al., 2020; Damico et al., 2020). To address this need, we designed and studied a professional learning (PL) program designed around four environmental justice (EJ) lenses that center the social and political aspects of climate learning.

Theoretical framework
We approach climate learning through justice-centered science pedagogy (Morales-Doyle, 2017), which is grounded in local issues, engages students’ personal and community funds of knowledge, adopts critical perspectives, and supports students in seeing themselves as knowledge creators and change makers. Drawing from this pedagogical approach, and other research on social justice and climate/environmental learning, we developed four environmental justice lenses (see Table 4): address positionality, engage multiple ways of knowing, analyze oppression, and take action toward more just futures.

Methods
This study is situated in a week-long PL in Northern California focused on precipitation extremes. Participants (24 total, 8 consenting) were local elementary teachers, secondary science teachers, and secondary teachers from other disciplines. In the PL, teachers engaged in science and justice-focused activities (see examples in Table 4), as well as reflection on their teaching and curricular planning.

Data Sources
Data sources include fieldnotes, teachers’ artifacts, and video recordings of teachers’ engagement. We used the climate justice lenses as a deductive coding scheme, analyzing the extent to which the lenses were reflected in teachers’ curricular designs. We then contextualized this analysis by using fieldnotes to examine supports and missed opportunities for integrating these lenses in the PL design.

Results
The lens that teachers most frequently integrated into their curricular designs was honoring multiple ways of knowing, most commonly through storytelling. Teachers often used storytelling to highlight justice-focused perspectives and the actions of communities of color. For example, one teacher used storytelling to introduce indigenous fire management practices in his curricular design on wildfires, and another used storytelling to highlight the activism of farm workers in a lesson on food justice. In contrast, teachers less frequently integrated the lenses of positionality and analyzing structures of oppression.

Significance
Our study offers a practical design tool, the environmental justice lenses, which can be used to guide teacher professional learning and the development of K-12 curricular sequences. Additionally, we provide an empirical contribution of the extent to and ways in which these different lenses are taken up by teachers. Based on our analysis, we are developing additional tools that 1) connect evidence of structural oppression, including stories and data, to climate phenomena; and 2) ground curricular design in students’ relationship to issues of climate justice. Finally, we are revising the PL to include additional opportunities for teachers to represent their justice thinking publicly, to both foster their collective sensemaking and support our analysis of teacher engagement.

Authors

• Emily V. Reigh, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Alyssa Manogue Dray Sayavedra, California State University - Monterey Bay

• Jacob Barton, University of California - Berkeley

• Gita Dunhill, California State University - East Bay

• Helen Fitzmaurice, University of California - Berkeley