“Harnessing Data for Improving Environmental Sustainability Education in New York City”

• In Event: "Navigating the Complexities of Environmental and Sustainability Education: Contradictions, Overlaps, and the Role of Data"

Proposal

Amidst the global surge in interest for Environmental Sustainability Education (ESE), a noteworthy trend has emerged in the United States: 25% of its largest school districts have adopted local ESE policies. These policies aim to both improve educational practices (e.g., teaching about sustainability) and reduce schools’ ecological footprints (e.g., minimizing waste and pollution). In this presentation, I explore the pivotal role of a research-practice partnership (RPP) between Teachers College, Columbia University (TC), and the New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) in supporting the implementation of a local strategic plan for urban sustainability (Pizmony-Levy et. al., 2021).

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are collaborative, long-term relationships between researchers and education system leaders, developed to address pressing problems of practice. RPPs foster a sustained collaboration across multiple projects, with both parties contributing to the research process. As Coburn and Penuel (2016) explain, RPPs center on issues faced by policymakers and practitioners while integrating original research to provide solutions. Although RPPs have become more common across various educational domains in the U.S. thanks to support from foundations and other funders, they remain underutilized in the context of ESE.

The TC-NYCPS RPP is one of the first of its kind in the field of ESE, and it has achieved significant success. This partnership brings together interdisciplinary teams from both organizations to conduct research aimed at understanding and enhancing the role of schools in advancing New York City’s sustainability goals. Through a collaborative process, the teams work to identify research questions, design studies, and collect data using a variety of methods, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations, and document analysis. The longitudinal data collected through these efforts provides insights into schools’ ESE engagement over time, enabling both policy and programmatic decisions based on robust, data-driven evidence.

In this paper, I delve into the emergence and development of the TC-NYCPS RPP, highlighting key milestones, challenges, and strategies for navigating tensions and frictions. Specifically, I examine what it means to “see like a city” and explore how researchers and practitioners develop a shared "governmental gaze" for analyzing and improving ESE (Scott, 1998; Valverde, 2011). This presentation also offers critical reflections on the lessons learned through this partnership, discussing how the RPP framework can serve as a model for other urban districts looking to integrate sustainability education into their strategic planning. By presenting a decade of research, policy shifts, and practical outcomes, this paper showcases the importance of RPPs in transforming the future of ESE in New York City and beyond.

Authors

• Oren Pizmony-Levy, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Maja Dahms, Columbia University, Teachers College