Exploring Conceptions of Creativity and Latinidad in Environmental Education Through the Lens of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Abstract

Environmental education seeks to foster meaningful connections to local and global environments through creative nature experiences. Responding to critiques of historical inequities, practitioners are prioritizing equitable access for historically marginalized youth, particularly from Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities; this identity-centered prioritization, while essential, generates questions of normativity, diversity, relevance, and engagement within identity groups. Drawing on creativity as meaningful person-world encounters characterized by pluriperspective, future-oriented, nonlinear, and open-ended qualities, this chapter uses culturally sustaining pedagogy to explore how environmental education studies (a) operationalize Latinidad and associated constructs, (b) enact creative experiences in environmental education, and (c) qualify the roles of Latinx communities in shaping these creative experiences. We review studies of environmental education with Latinx youth in the United States that explicitly employ culturally sustaining approaches to engage these communities. We bring together these frameworks as a strategy to move beyond discrete notions of Latinidad in environmental education and toward nuanced conceptions of what it means to acknowledge and cultivate environmental literacies in these diverse comunidades.