Agency and Solidarity Consciousness: Enactment of a Critical-Trandisciplinary Framework for Community and Justice-Centered Environmental Education

• In Event: Redefining Care in a Global Pandemic: Problematizing Relational Models in Socio-Ecological Systems

Abstract

Purpose/Theoretical underpinnings: Solidarity consciousness (SC) is the sense that others’ experiences, ideas and struggles are our concern, based on our shared humanity. This poster describes “care” as a notion of solidarity consciousness both emerged from and was shaped by the enactment of the Crit-Trans Heuristic (CTH) (Authors, 2016) in an urban community garden -based environmental education program. The Grow Community (GC) program is designed around the CTH uses local environmental justice issues as contexts for learning and centers liberatory (environmental) pedagogies with applications across, and outside, and in resistance to the disciplinary enclosures of the neoliberal academic curriculum. The CTH builds on and extends tenets of two major fields: critical pedagogy (i.e. Cf. Freire, 1970; Hooks, 2003; Kincheloe, 2008) and transdisciplinarity (i.e. Nicolescu, 2007; Bernstein, 2015) and has six tenets for designing for learning (see figure 1).

Data sources/Analysis: To learn about the SC that emerged from the enactment of the Crit-Trans framework, constructs of affordances (Authors, 2017) and the Transformative Activist Stance (TAS) (Stetsenko, 2017) were employed as analytical frameworks to unpack participants’ narratives, elucidating their experiences in the program and learning opportunities in relation to their identities and consciousness. Reflections of 14 (11 students and 3 teachers) participants were gathered through dialogic interviews, participant observation and artifacts produced in the program.
Results: We found that the CTH produced affordances of reciprocity, rethinking/reframing learning, safety, and leveraging prior and novel experiences in the context of others produced solidarity consciousness contributing to participant agency, identity, and “solidarity consciousness.” From the perspectives of affordances and TAS, the participants demonstrated a unique enactment and development of personal agency, and in some cases expressed a sense of developing solidarity consciousness, a relational mindset defined in context.

Significance: The deep disruptions and disproportionately distributed suffering experienced during the global Covid-19 pandemic have laid bare and exacerbated longstanding, painful realities and contradictions, within a world shaped by neoliberal narratives of progress. Among the conditions required to address these are learning experiences that intellectually and ethically orient youth to engage with complex issues, to distinguish and connect different ways of knowing, to discern the reliability of sources and narratives, and to access and invent opportunities to assert “agency” (or intentional action) in rectifying injustices. This study of the CTH enacted is one instantiation of resistance in ways that promote participant agency. Participants taught and learned about environmental issues, food justice and gardening and the ways in which they intersect with the well-being of their families and communities. Both agency and solidarity consciousness are described as dispositions that promote positive social engagement around complex environmental and related social-justice issues, with the intention of bringing about a more life-affirming and equitable futurity. Positive change requires relational and critical consciousness, inter- and trans-disciplinary thinking, and the intellectual and creative capacities to imagine and enact, from the possibilities afforded by each individual’s positionality, alternatives to the neo-liberal logics that shape our world.

Authors

• Pieranna Pieroni, CUNY - Brooklyn College

• Theila Smith, University of Groningen

• Jennifer Dawn Adams, University of Calgary