Youth Narratives of Place and Reflections on Learning From a Critical Urban Environmental Pedagogy

• In Event: 66.046 - Diverse Approaches to Critical Pedagogies of Place in Urban Environmental Education

Abstract

This presentation shares the dynamic processes in teaching and learning through conceptually integrating critical pedagogy of place (Gruenewald, 2003), ecopedagogy (Kahn, 2010), and urban political ecology (Heynen, Kaika & Swyngedouw, 2006) alongside critical pedagogies (Freire, 2000) and youth participatory action research (Cahill, 2007). It seeks to expand EE to include socio-environmental issues as experienced by young people living in urban environments while also supporting them to better understand how they construct ideas about place and provides the critical tools necessary to investigate the deeper and often hidden ideologies shaping urban environments.
This implementation of a critical urban environmental pedagogy makes the neoliberal context that youth are living in explicit through participatory action research (PAR) methodologies. Here, PAR as a pedagogical praxis affords the construction and analysis of data by youth while illuminating and politicizing issues most salient in urban environments. When youth are engaged in this form of critical urban environmental pedagogy, they can begin to connect the social, economic, and political processes that shape their neighborhoods and begin to contest dominant forms of neoliberal urbanization. Using an urban political ecology lens, youth can more explicitly and critically recognize processes that shape urban environments.
In this presentation, the co-researchers will share perceptions of their environments, their connection to learning, and their emergence as critically conscious citizens. We present diverse cases of youth experiences drawn from multiple data sources constructed and interpreted by youth including photovoice narratives, neighborhood and final course reflections, and multiple blog posts. The particular participant cases presented were selected based on their geographic location, within distinct communities, as well as the way they exemplified themes that materialized throughout the course including neighborhood stereotypes, identity, and change, and youth history and comfort in neighborhoods. This allows for an analysis of how themes intersect with distinct neighborhood qualities as the youth describe their personal identities, social relations, and relationship to place. These cases focus on the material and social spaces of youth and the meaning young people are making of specific places and processes. While each of these cases is unique, together they represent some of the common concerns and tensions experienced by youth growing up in New York City today.
The youth presenters have had unique experiences living in their respective neighborhoods. These experiences are based on their diverse and evolving subjectivities and there are multiple places where their voices intersect and contradict. Identifying emerging patterns, tensions, and contradiction these cases investigates how meaning is being constructed in around ethnic identity, assimilation, diversity, and gentrification, all relevant experiences of youth in urban environments. Each of these cases represent the knowledge youth bring through their personal experiences with local environments and the shifts in thinking that participation in a critical urban environmental pedagogy afforded.

Authors

• Marissa E Bellino, The College of New Jersey

• Kaitlyn Figueroa, High School for Environmental Studies

• Christopher Caraballo, The University of Vermont