Art|e|facts: Transdisciplinary visioning for just climate futures

• 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
Educators in the Anthropocene face a moral imperative to not only teach young people about socioecological phenomena, but to foster ethical decision-making that serves their communities and results in significant shifts in human behavior (Author, 2022). We heed a call for models of teacher education that expand beyond disciplinary constraints, design transdisciplinary models of learning to enable an “ontology of multiplicity” (Colucci-Gray, 2013) to explore possibilities for worldbuilding and cultivating a justice-centered environmental ethic.

Within our teacher education program, we focus on the call from the session description to: “ “enact thick care” (Puig de Bellacasa, 2017), promote collective responsibility (Kimmerer, 2013), and nurture speculative world-building (Mitchell & Chaundhury, 2010)” as a way of engaging climate justice within an environmental education program. These climate justice activities happen across contexts within our program- practicum, teaching 4-6th grade youth, academic coursework, one-to-one mentoring, and applied learning sessions. We seek to understand grad students' design decisions and the relationships to climate justice teaching and learning.

Theoretical Framework
We draw on theoretical perspectives of learning for social and collective action to frame the tools and approaches for educators to use in processes of critical reflection, speculation and dreaming for just and equitable possible futures (Curnow & Jurow, 2021). We also draw on expansive learning theory to identify the trajectories of educators’ sensemaking and emotionality in relation to their community of practice and larger socioecological systems (Engeström & Sannino, 2010).

Methods & Data
This study takes place in a graduate program affiliated with a large research university in the Pacific Northwest. In the 10-month residential practicum component of this program, graduate students connect theory to practice as they design and implement outdoor environmental education learning experiences for visiting 4th-6th grade students. Data for this study include curricular materials, recordings of planning and debrief discussions, transdisciplinary artefacts,

Findings
Our analysis draws upon emotional intimacy to consider climate justice in relationship to prefiguration, prolepsis, and emotional configurations and the ways in which these constructs shape grad students’ relationships with each other, youth participants, natural kinds, and more-than-human others (Bang & Marin, 2015; Curnow & Vea, 2020; Uttamchandani, 2021).

We explore these themes through textual analysis of multiple students’ coursework for example pedagogical zines and transdisciplinary artefacts as examples of grad student sensemaking through ArtScience in academic coursework from the 2023-2024 academic year (Vossoughi, n.d.). Emergent findings demonstrate the ways in which grads embrace ontological multiplicity in the design of teaching tools and coursework. For example, one graduate student’s pedagogical zine demonstrates the interweaving of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, personal experience, ArtScience practices, and Western environmental knowledge.

Significance
Transdisciplinary can be a difficult modality for students to embrace but we view it as an essential part of engaging with the complexity of the challenges and opportunities for climate justice. Engaging in complex ways with complex problems is one of the ways that our program prepares our students to work towards just and equitable climate solutions.

Authors

• Priya Pugh, IslandWood

• Déana A Scipio, IslandWood

• Renee Comesotti, Islandwood

• Michela Dimond, IslandWood