Towards Critical Environmental Education by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030506094
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Our students learn how to engage community members in conversations that unearth their “real” concerns. Each student is embedded in a community-based organization for 30 weeks, which provides critical knowledge about how people live, work, and play in urban places. The students learn to encounter head-on matters of health, safety, housing, and access to food that impact environmental integrity and well-being. The relationship of social justice and environmental leadership informs all aspects of this groundbreaking program. The UEE program reworks traditional “nature-based” approaches. We thread urban ecosystem dynamics into each quarter of study uncovering how ecological integrity is shaped by politics, economics, diversity, and equity.

Each closely knit student cohort is as diverse as the urban communities we study and serve. This rich diversity ensures authentic and visceral representations of how race and inequities impact experience with pollution, gentrification, access to healthy food, waste management, lack of green space, and the impacts of climate change. For many of our students, it is their first experience in a classroom with a majority people of color. For most of our students, UEE is the first academic experience with mostly instructors of color. For our white students, it is the first “environmental” set of courses where they may be in the minority.

We are breaking the “green ceiling.” What does that mean? Racism and inequality, displacement and exclusion are as important to the environmental conversation as urban ecology and educational strategies. The faculty work hard to create a safe space for reflection and direct confrontation of these facts without sacrificing attention to issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, or waste streams. The students work with each other - in and outside the classroom - to find truth, clarity, and a way forward that integrates the social/cultural and environmental realities. Environmental issues are laced with social exploitation, unfair health and wellness policies, disparities in pollution, the lack of inclusion in urban planning, and more. Once we work through initial raw and angry feelings, our goal is to find a way to work together with respect and understanding.

This chapter will provide examples of some of the educational approaches designed by the faculty in the UEE program. The faculty are challenged to prepare future environmental leaders to grapple with the environmental issues in urban habitats where most of the human population lives. Our approaches and strategies are innovative and responsive to a changing climate and dense, complex urban centers. We are out on the streets and in communities as much as we are in the classroom.

The chapter will also capture some of the learning reflections penned by UEE students. We encourage our students to think critically, to develop cultural competency, and to cultivate educational approaches that embrace equity, inclusion, and collective action. UEE faculty work together to examine the deep intersections of ecology and infrastructure, politics and place, social justice and environmental integrity as the basis for research projects, learning, and praxis.

As we work to extend the focus of environmental education into city streets and step into the

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