Cultivating Collective Knowledge, Memory & Resistance in Reinvigorating Environmental Science in Chicago

• In Event: Addressing Issues in Environmental Justice Education through Collective Power in Chicagoland and Southern California

Abstract

1. Objectives or purposes

This paper offers an urgent, yet cautious, approach to developing solidarities across district-community-university RPPs towards policy and professional learning that can support grassroots projects operating in Chicago’s sacrifice zones. We aim to address how we navigate relationships across entities – school districts, community organizations and academic institutions – to teach toward environmental and climate justice. Science education is crucial to address pressing issues in the world, and in Chicago, that require multidimensional knowledge and action, such as climate change, pandemics, and myriad environmental injustices to build the world anew through critical hope (Authors, 2025). Furthermore, building relationships and networks between science education and out-of-school partners facilitates impactful and timely educational projects that address urgent issues of ecological sustainability in the city.

2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
In school science, calls for equity respond to longstanding racialized pathways in science, which deny high status learning opportunities to Black, Latine, and Indigenous students (Tate, 2001; Nasir & Vakil, 2016; Bullock, 2017). Meanwhile, environmental justice issues are mostly ignored by curricula (Miles et al., 2025). Utilizing a learning ecologies framework, we are emphasizing connective tissue between out-of-school spaces as knowledge infrastructure (Pinkard, 2019; Penuel et al. 2016). We need transdisciplinary solutions to address complex problems - for example, environmental humanities lessons focused on the complex and inequitable economic and ecological impacts metal recyclers have in Black and Latine communities.

3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry

Through a participatory design research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), we are exploring tensions between equity perspectives that emphasize access to disciplinary knowledge versus more expansive and transdisciplinary perspectives. We aim to reinvigorate the environmental science curriculum in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) – through quarterly meetings between community organizations, district personnel, teachers, students and faculty – building curriculum and pedagogy anchored by social, historical and political dimensions of environmental science in Chicago. We identify design principles (for learning engagements, partnerships, school policies, and computing tools) to inform our learning ecosystem design and infrastructure.

4. Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials + 5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view

Our more-than-teacher collective emphasizes life-giving vigorous learning rather than academic rigor. This means collective community-based learning matters alongside individual achievement. It also implies that transdisciplinary problem-solving supersedes disciplinary rigidity. We have been convening a series of participatory meetings with more-than-teacher collectives, youth, parents, and CPS leaders. We document the conversations with social analysis artifacts (Vossoughi, 2014), thus analyzing and iteratively working towards policy recommendations by utilizing our collective knowledge, memory and resistance efforts embedded within our current CPS educational ecosystem. Taking the process of looking back to move forward, we are pooling this knowledge as a form of taking the long path, allowing us to design a framework for environmental science courses influenced by our deep relations with each other as individuals and a collective. We are offering in-process findings and tactics grounded in our commitment to building consequential research during the ongoing onslaught of anti-intellectualism, scholasticide and environmental degradation.

Authors

• Kaleb Germinaro, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Michelle Rabkin, Chicago Public Schools

• Daniel Morales-Doyle, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Alejandra Frausto, Northwestern University

• Jocelyn Vazquez-Gomez, Little Village Environmental Justice Organization

• Melissa Espindola, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Christa Haverly, Northwestern University

• Andre Botello, Chicago Public Schools