Climate justice pedagogies in green building curriculum

Abstract

This article draws on environmental justice frameworks located in urban planning (Agyeman et al., 2002; Pellow, 2007) and critical place inquiry (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014) to focus on the relationship between green building curriculum, career and technical education, and climate justice. Green building—a rapidly growing field within the architecture, planning, and design fields—seeks to mitigate the consequences of climate change by reducing the built environment’s impact on the natural world. Green building involves technical learning and is often carried out by credentialed professionals. We thus ask, how do we advance climate justice through green building curricula? We draw insights from a green building education program from a Career and Technical Education classroom to discuss the need to engage high school students’ knowledge about the connectivity between their communities and green building plans. We identify the consideration of erasure and futurities in green building curricular efforts, youth as co-planners and co-designers, and organizational learning and change as central to reimagining responses to ecological precarity in justice oriented-ways.