Environmental justice: insights from an interdisciplinary instructional workshop

Abstract

Environmental justice recognizes the connections between social and environmental concerns and interrogates power dynamics related to environmental issues. Courses in environmental studies and the geosciences provide an opportunity, and perhaps an obligation to explore environmental justice, but few resources exist to help instructors do so effectively. A 2013 interdisciplinary workshop at Carleton College sponsored by InTeGrate—Interdisciplinary Teaching of Geoscience for a Sustainable Future—convened instructors interested in environmental justice as a topic of instruction and produced a series of insights and challenges for doing so. Environmental justice instruction provides opportunities to tackle tough issues of race, class, and privilege in a variety of disciplinary contexts particularly in geoscience courses, where course content regarding hazards, climate change, and other topics may contain social justice components which are not often included in instruction. Teaching environmental justice, though, presents a number of challenges: how can instructors teach the conceptual and theoretical explanations of environmental justice while giving students the necessary tools to address environmental injustices? The InTeGrate workshop provided insights for addressing these challenges and developing materials for future pedagogical use in a variety of higher education contexts.