Teachers’ Ecojustice Literacies Inquiries in Politically and Ecologically Vulnerable Places

• In Event: Teachers’ Multiliteracies: Exploring Agentic and Empowering Possibilities

Abstract

While researchers have begun to respond to calls from NCTE (2019) to include literacy teachers in the urgent work of addressing climate change, research remains to be done on how teachers use language and communication themselves around climate and environmental crisis. This is especially important when considering the connectivities between these issues and the embodied experiences of teachers, students, and communities.
We share a participatory research study in which researchers worked with K-12 educators in workshops that supported exploring and articulating an ecosophy (ways of storying commitments to action that center relationships with the natural world; Naess, 1989; Stibbe, 2021) and the role of literacy in responding to issues of ecological injustice. On the first day of the workshop, teachers engaged with several multimodal texts, including poetry, picture books, and a Shell Oil commercial. They also discussed their own political, teaching, ecological, and geographic contexts. On the second day, teachers were invited to participate in an immersive place-based experience by taking a walk through a threatened nature preserve. After the walk, they were prompted to create multimodal compositions in the form of zines.
In this study, we considered how teachers explored and articulated ecosophies and relationships with the human and more-than-human world through their embodied, place-based, and multimodal experiences. Data sources include audio/video recordings of each workshop, multimodal artifacts, individual follow-up interviews, and member-checking conversations. Analysis drew on ecolinguistics (Stibbe, 2021) and mediated discourse approaches (Scollon & de Saint-Georges, 2012).
Our findings revealed possibilities not only for creating space for teachers to ‘try out’ ecojustice literacies, but also for listening to the stories teachers tell about the world in which they live and work. By giving space to our teacher-collaborators to examine the complexities of living and teaching in Florida, they collectively turned to confronting the political attacks facing them in their school systems as intertwined with the environment. One teacher, who shared that her classroom library had been removed in response to recent Florida legislation, wrote the phrase, "stories are our survival guides” in her zine. These words were accompanied by a photograph of her empty bookshelf containing a fake plant and captured the threat and the promise shared through this exploration.
When reflecting on the retreat during follow-up interviews, our teacher-collaborators pointed to the power of collective catharsis during the workshop. Although teachers had not met before the first day of our work together, they found power and collectivity through room to breathe together, openly talk about the challenges and complexities of policy, and turn to their own explorations as meaningful, immersive practice. In particular, the walk and resulting multimodal compositions provided opportunities for teachers to explore their own stories and experiences, but also to consider how such approaches might be possible within their own classrooms - even in politically and ecologically vulnerable places.

Authors

• Alexandra Panos, University of South Florida

• Kristin Valle Geren, University of South Florida

• Katharine Hull, University of South Florida