Using Co-Design Practices to Infrastructure Climate Justice Education Across a State-level Teacher Education Network

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Integrating Climate Justice Education Across Teacher Education Programs: A Remedy of Critical Transdisciplinarity and Collective Action (Table 6)

Abstract

Objectives
In this age of acute climate crisis and environmental degradation with its disproportionate impacts, there is a growing awareness that we need to broadly disrupt whiteness, anthropocentrism, and extractive logics in human-nature relations. This will necessitate figuring out how to promote onto-epistemic transformation of public understanding centered on multispecies caring (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) and human-nature relationality (Bang & Marin, 2015).
A key strategy for scaling these efforts is to shape the experiences of preservice teacher candidates across a network of programs to take up climate/environmental justice education (Beach, 2023). Over the past two years, we have developed a networked improvement community (Bryk, et al., 2010) to engage faculty and instructors from 16 teacher education programs across Washington in relationship building, shared learning, and collaboratively (re)designing teacher education infrastructure. One key research question becomes: What are the epistemological, ideological, and political frames that a far-flung network of teacher education faculty and instructors, mobilize in the collaborative construction of a material infrastructure for climate justice teacher education?

Theoretical Framework
Our design-focused research-practice partnership (Coburn, Penuel & Geil, 2013) takes the form of a network improvement community (NIC) at the state-level (Bryk, et al., 2010) engaged in the transformation of teacher education. We approach this work from core commitments to social and multispecies justice through a transdisciplinary and multiple-ways-of-knowing educational imaginary to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2015).

Fourth-generation cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) provides a productive theoretical framing for our work studying “coalescing cycles of expansive learning in a heterogeneous coalition of activities facing a critical societal challenge” (Engeström & Sanino, 2020, p. 12)---where “radical expansion of social relations” occurs through processes of dialogue, trust, collaboration, and infrastructuring (Bell, 2019; Penuel, 2019), which are still susceptible to regressive ideological dynamics tied to whiteness, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and other oppressive systems manifested through education.

For the first phase of analysis we co-designed artifacts to identify design elements that highlight: substantive frames, critical and political clarity frames (Madkins & McKinney de Royston, 2018), and pedagogical frames. Second, we engaged in an inductive and iterative coding of these dimensions (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). This then helped develop a conceptual framework to guide state-level education NICs through integrating climate/environmental justice.

Findings
We found pre-service educators were very focused on centering social justice through education and held established commitments and approaches, often integrated into the associated teacher education programs, or in reflection of their personal commitments (e.g., Christian social teachings or upholding Indigenous sovereignty). CHAT analysis of network activities revealed that modest financial incentivizing of collaborative design activities among teacher educators in the network can catalyze significant course (re)design. Second, an in-person design institute opened spaces for deep learning, course transformation within and across teams. Third, approaching climate change through critical, political, and translocal frames supports transdisciplinarity coordination.

Significance
Trandisciplinary teacher education holds significant promise for helping society transition to a more flourishing and just environmental future in a changing climate. This work highlights the possibilities of approaching CHAT-focused infrastructuring as a relational practice that supports the transformation of teacher education.

Authors

• Philip L. Bell, University of Washington

• Kelsie Fowler, University of Washington

• Deb L. Morrison, University of Washington

• Nancy Price, University of Washington