Environmental Studies And Sciences Research Articles

Environmental justice teaching in an undergraduate context: examining the intersection of community-engaged, inclusive, and anti-racist pedagogy

Since the early 1980s, the environmental justice (EJ) movement was critical in drawing much needed attention on how Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), and low-income groups have experienced a disproportionate burden of environmental harms. This movement eventually formed the field of environmental justice, a multidisciplinary area of study that attempts to identify environmental injustices and provide theory and practice for their resolution. Despite the expansion of the EJ field and recent public attention, research shows that both EJ content knowledge and BIPOC students are isolated and excluded from Interdisciplinary, Environmental, and Sustainability (IES) programs within higher education. In addition, these studies have shown a relationship between EJ content and community-engaged practices with the inclusion of BIPOC students. This study sought to examine how and why EJ teaching and community-engaged pedagogies may be associated with inclusive or anti-racist practices by examining four faculty members teaching undergraduate EJ courses at four institutions. Using a multi-case study design, primary findings showed that faculty members held activist course objectives, which led to distinct community-engaged practices, such as the invitation of diverse guest educators, inclusion of readings from diverse authors, field experiences with EJ communities, and the integration of alternative ways of knowing that resist Eurocentric biases. The discussion and implications explore how these practices intersect with inclusive and anti-racist pedagogies, and provide recommendations for their implementation within the context of Environmental Studies and Sciences (ESS) in higher education.

Background, approaches, and resources for teaching energy in environmental studies

Production and use of energy have figured prominently in environmental studies and sciences (ESS) for many years, and it is particularly relevant to enduring themes, such as climate change, environmental justice, ecosystem disruption, and the study of natural resources. Despite its acknowledged centrality, relatively few ESS courses have delved into the intricacies of energy in a broad interdisciplinary framework. This paper encourages the development and improvement of such courses but recognizes that ESS faculty will have to select topics and resources to match their own abilities and interests and the needs of their students. The paper (a) proposes a framework for conceptual content and (b) suggests numerous resources organized in 5 categories and 17 subcategories. Each subcategory has an explanation of its role in the larger picture about energy, and each resource has a brief annotation about its content and utility. Future work on energy in ESS should address pedagogical techniques, different ways of integrating perspectives from different disciplines, and the needs of specific subsets of ESS courses and programs.

Confronting anxiety and despair in environmental studies and sciences: an analysis and guide for students and faculty

In the field of environmental studies and sciences (ESS), teachers and students face a daily barrage of dire news and information from all manner of sources and all corners of the earth. Accepting, processing, and using that information in a professional learning context present existential, emotional, intellectual, and physical challenges that are too seldom made explicit in teaching and learning. This lack of explicit recognition of the deeply personal challenges of teaching and learning ESS represents a missed opportunity that disadvantages faculty and students alike by increasing, rather than decreasing, the likelihood of anxiety and despair in ESS. We analyze and provide a perspective on these circumstances, and offer several strategies for improving our ability to integrate personal and collective wellbeing into formal teaching and learning in ESS.

Narratives of place: critical reflections on place-making in the curriculum of environmental studies and sciences (ESS)

This essay reflects on the experiential learning of place and place-making in the ESS curriculum, and contributes to the literature on critical place-based education. This paper discusses “narratives of place” as part of a critical race theoretical framework that provides grounding for the pedagogical tools of experiential learning, storytelling, and mental map making to empower students to discover and recover their sense of place. When students have the opportunity to tell their own stories in ways that support and validate their lived realities, they cultivate fertile ground for their narratives of place. Such an approach encourages different understandings of how people make sense of the world and their place in it. To accomplish this, I first discuss the importance of cultivating a sense of place in empowering students to decolonize history. I then reflect on my own teaching experiences in two courses. First, I reflect on storytelling and mental maps as pedagogical tools that encourage students to understand the various ways people experience the environment. Second, I reflect on experiential learning activities that can de-center the environmental “canon” and allow students possible pathways to understand how power influences the ways people encounter their environments in distinct ways. I conclude by offering narratives of place as a possible solution for developing a more critical ESS curriculum that better understands difference, diversity, and inclusion.

Inconvenient truths: pluralism, pragmatism, and the need for civil disagreement

Environmental philosophers and ethicists who have advocated for “environmental pragmatism” have been right to insist on the importance of pluralism in environmental debates and on the utility of pragmatism in navigating them. But they have tended to rest their claims too heavily on the premise that consensus is a necessary, and readily achievable, condition of pragmatic thought and action. Recent developments within environmental studies and sciences (ESS) suggest a similar trend. What the pragmatist tradition requires, by contrast, is a commitment to the disagreement that necessarily accompanies ideological diversity and to the conservation of the conditions, structures, and institutions within which that disagreement can exist and even thrive. Ultimately, pragmatism prioritizes dissent as the basis for a healthy and rigorously democratic community. With environmental problems, this prerogative becomes even more pronounced, given their invariably complex social, political, and scientific dimensions, which require intellectually and ideologically diverse responses. Environmental discourse, education, and politics would benefit from the recognition that conflict among pluralistic constituencies, when considered through the lens of pragmatism, becomes not a problem to be solved but a fact to be lived with, and a tool to be used.

Intersectional feminism for the environmental studies and sciences: looking inward and outward

Although hardly new, our current political climate has brought the specter of American injustice more explicitly into the public eye. The Black Lives Matter Movement, the Flint water crisis, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the various marches on Washington, among others, demonstrate the clear links between humans, nonhuman nature, and justice/equality. Now, then, is a critical moment for the field of environmental studies and sciences to evaluate how we “look outward” at the topics we study and “look inward” at how we conduct our ourselves and our work. Environmental studies and sciences (ESS) purportedly brings a transdisciplinary/multidisciplinary approach to research by linking the arts, humanities, social, and physical sciences in pursuit of more just socioecological outcomes. However, a cursory reflection on the field suggests continued disciplinary divisions that sort the nonhuman and human world into more-or-less distinct and sometimes problematically immutable categories. Further, manuscript discussion sections typically mix in issues of justice and equality ad hoc, rather than explicitly building them into research design and practice. In this article, we argue that feminist theory, and in particular theories of intersectionality, can critique and strengthen the ESS agenda by reforming current practice. Specifically, we draw on intersectionality to reframe how we organize the work we do (looking inward) and how we ask research questions (looking outward). We then use this theoretical framework to suggest how intersectional diversity can inform our future research programs, making the field more poised to meet the complex challenges of global environmental change.

Recapturing the learning opportunities of university sustainability indicators

Reconfiguring student involvement in university sustainability assessments and reporting can create important learning opportunities. In the 1990s, students conducted campus environmental audits and assessments, which were often the first step towards improving university environmental practices and creating sustainability programs. These audits, often conducted as class projects, capstone projects, or theses, gave students agency in a significant environmental issue, and they provided integrative, compelling, and collaborative environmental learning experiences. Today, university sustainability ratings and rankings are largely developed by organizations outside universities, with data provided by university sustainability staff and administrators. Hundreds of colleges and universities participate in the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS) administered by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), posting information in 70 categories in public reports. Environmental Studies and Sciences (ESS) faculty and students can participate in the process of assessing university sustainability by producing their own sustainability indicator reports from the STARS data. A literature of sustainability indicators, particularly the work of Donella Meadows, describes indicators from a systems thinking perspective and explores how the selection of indicators can change system behavior by providing missing feedback or influencing a system’s goals. It describes an inclusive process for developing indicators to ensure they will be meaningful to the larger community. Students can use these theories and processes to critically evaluate sustainability data, to develop their own sense of the components of a sustainable institution or society, and to advance understanding of sustainability within their university community. Creating and communicating sustainability indicator reports for their particular university can provide an ongoing topic for ESS capstone courses.

Response: Theory in, theory out: NCSE and the ESS curriculum

This commentary is a response to the article by James Proctor titled “Theory In, Theory Out: NCSE and the ESS Curriculum” (Environ Stud Sci 5(2):218–223, 2015) which critiques the report Interdisciplinary Environmental and Sustainability Education on the Nation’s Campuses 2012: Curriculum Design (Vincent et al. 2013) and its findings related to environmental studies and sciences (ESS) curricula. Our report does not constrain curricular discussion or evolution nor does it encourage a move toward convergence in ESS curricula as Proctor asserts. Instead, the implications are simply that, while there is a wide diversity of interdisciplinary environmental and sustainability (IES) degrees, there are some shared aspects of the identity of the field and broad approaches to curriculum design. The results also reveal that a degree program’s name is not a reliable indicator of curricular content and that newly emerging programs in sustainability and energy fit within the broad ESS paradigm. All of the National Council for Science and the Environment’s (NCSE) Center for Environmental Education Research (CEER) studies and reports are designed to support ongoing discussion by providing relevant information obtained using rigorous research design and statistical analysis techniques. They are not intended to be prescriptive or support the status quo.

Replacing nature in environmental studies and sciences

The concept and practice of place is an important answer to two questions posed at the outset: what is the environment of environmental studies and sciences (ESS), and what sort of ecoliteracy do we need today? Yet place is more than it has often been understood in ESS, where notions of the local and the natural have loomed large. Scholarship from the field of geography can help ESS reframe environment and ecoliteracy in a manner amenable to the contemporary world. Place has been a century-long conversation in English-language geography, building on traditional regional approaches and running to recent work, paralleling contemporary notions of geographical imaginations, in which places are now understood as diverse nodes in larger hybrid nature-culture networks, and senses of place are now understood as “glocal” identities. Contemporary geographical approaches to place challenge common associations with nature and the local; and ESS may feel a bit like “everything studies and sciences” as a result. But ecoliteracy could become a new knowledge and practice of the larger connections that define place, and this deeper sense of place could suggest to our students a deeper way of dwelling on Earth.

Introduction: unsettling the ESS curriculum

We launch this mini-symposium, “Status Quo, Conflict, and Innovation in the ESS Curriculum,” with a background and overview of essays, closing with recommendations for future trajectories. The notion of Kuhnian paradigms and the related distinction between settled, “puzzle solving” vs. unsettled, “paradigm shift” moments in the history of knowledge is applied to the Environmental Studies and Sciences (ESS) curriculum to explore its own tendencies toward settlement and unsettlement. We argue that the current moment in ESS is less settled than some believe, and understandably so; moving toward settlement is important and timely, but must be done with proper reflection, which thankfully is evidenced in a range of recent literature. This mini-symposium, which builds upon a number of recent related discussions, includes six articles exploring the contemporary ESS curriculum from a variety of perspectives: high school preparation, the undergraduate student experience, curricular assumptions regarding social change, recent national-scale curricular assessments, the need for greater attention to regionalism, and the creative possibilities afforded by teaching through objects. We ultimately suggest, via this introduction and the following essays, that rather than accept the curricular status quo as a settled trajectory, we can embrace the richness and diversity of current engagement contributing to the future development of the ESS curriculum.

Discursive diversity in introductory environmental studies

Introductory environmental studies and sciences (ESS) classes can be powerful and formative experiences for undergraduates. Indeed, instructors likely aspire towards influencing and enhancing the perspectives, analytical tools, and critical-thinking skills their graduates carry forward into careers in and beyond environment-related fields. This task, however, is doubly challenging: not only to meaningfully engage students with environmental issues but ideally also to think critically about the at-times competing ideologies and perspectives in ESS. This requires that courses be taught in ways that further critical thinking, develop metacognitive skills, and introduce students to a diversity of environmental discourses. In this paper, we present the results of a brief empirical survey of a small sample of North American ESS undergraduate programs. Using discussions of climate change as an example, we pay particular attention to the explicit goals, diversity of literature presented, and organization of the courses, using typologies e.g., Nisbet (Wiley Interdiscip Rev Clim Chang 5(6):809-823, 2014) to highlight the prevalence of particular environmental discourses and not others. We highlight a handful of promising practices and potential blind spots in the pedagogical design of these courses, while arguing for the importance of instructor reflection, iterative improvement, and further research into potential common weaknesses in ESS instruction.

Theory in, theory out: NCSE and the ESS curriculum

The National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) has played a prominent role performing empirical research on the environmental studies and sciences (ESS) curriculum over the last 10 years and in significant ways has helped define the “new normal” of the ESS curriculum—for instance, in foregrounding sustainability as its core theme. Greater attention to the conceptual assumptions and implications of this effort—i.e., how theory informs and follows from NCSE’s empirical research—may help us better interrogate this “new normal” as we collectively chart the ESS curriculum of the future. In this paper, I examine one key recent NCSE report, titled “Interdisciplinary Environmental and Sustainability Education on the Nation’s Campuses 2012: Curriculum Design.” Its theoretical dimensions are summarized via three key steps: (a) the ideal ESS curriculum builds on diverse forms of knowledge, (b) this diverse knowledge can be organized into major curricular models, and (c) sustainability integrates these curricular models. The final step, presented without empirical justification, appears to derive both from earlier NCSE-related publications and theoretical assumptions from the first two steps. I conclude by rephrasing these three steps as questions for continued discussion and debate. Ultimately, theory and empirical research both matter in discussions over the ESS curriculum, which would ideally be informed but not constrained by NCSE’s contributions.

A manifesto for theory in environmental studies and sciences

Environmental studies and sciences (ESS), an inherently practical field, nonetheless demands greater attention to its theoretical assumptions as a necessary step toward continued intellectual and pedagogical development and real-world relevance. This need for theory arises from the status of ESS as an integrative interdiscipline—one practitioners of ESS celebrate, yet with considerably greater challenges in achieving inclusivity and coherence than other interdisciplinary fields face. Three examples are briefly raised here: the definition of environment in ESS, how environmental actors are conceptualized, and the identity of ESS as a problem-oriented field. These three examples are initial priorities requiring better theorization, with many intellectual resources ESS can draw upon to address them. We close by reminding the reader that theories are ideas that take us places, not just idle speculation, and by advocating “theory across the (ESS) curriculum.” In addition to the three examples we cover, we invite the reader to join us in identifying and evaluating other current theoretical assumptions in ESS, in reframing ESS on more robust theoretical grounds, and in integrating this work into the curriculum.

Environmental connections and concept mapping: implementing a new learning technology at Lewis & Clark College

What is environment? The answer to this question is fundamental to how we teach environmental studies and sciences (ESS). We follow recent scholarly literature in approaching environment as connection, not as some category of reality, and consider pedagogical implications via concept mapping, a new learning technology. Concept maps potentially offer a visually explicit means of representing and analyzing the hybrid connections between actors that define environmental issues. We explore the utility of concept mapping as pioneered by Joseph Novak and others via the Cmap Tools application, in which concept maps (cmaps) consist of concepts connected by propositions; both can include linked resources, and the resultant cmap can be collaboratively edited and shared online. We evaluate concept mapping in the context of a sophomore-level environmental methods course taught annually at Lewis & Clark College. The course includes adaptations of concept mapping drawing on Novak’s work and actor-network theory, designed for students to reflect on their environmental perspectives, synthesize course material, and explore a proposed topic for environmental research. These exercises were evaluated in fall 2010 using self-reports, assessment rubrics, and open-ended student responses. Results showed that higher achieving students generally found concept mapping more demanding and attained more sophisticated understandings of connections. This suggests that concept mapping helps facilitate the intellectual struggle that characterizes engaged learning, yet also that not all students embrace this struggle to fully grasp environment-as-connection. In a larger sense, the study illustrates challenges in cultivating new approaches to environment in the ESS community.

Introduction: why link Indigenous ways of knowing with the teaching of environmental studies and sciences?

This paper introduces a mini-symposium on bringing Indigenous ways of knowing together with the teaching of environmental studies and sciences (ESS). Both knowledges share a fundamental interest in the relationship of humans with the Earth, yet until recently, Indigenous ways of knowing have rarely been visible in the teaching of ESS. Teaching with both knowledges can better prepare ESS students for a multicultural world and help them develop a more complex perception of the environment. Such teaching helps address the social justice issue of longstanding marginalization of Indigenous peoples in academia. As ESS explores its boundaries and identity, addressing the many knowledges that lie outside of Western scientific and intellectual frameworks is critical. The authors include faculty and researchers from biological science, plant ecology, integrative science, sustainability, Indigenous environmental studies, and education. They identify as members of specific Native American, First Nations or Aboriginal communities, and/or Anglo-European or European heritages. They hail from public, private, and tribal institutions in the USA and Canada, serving Indigenous and mainstream students. Their papers range from scholarly analyses to conceptual reviews to personal narrative and a Trickster tale. A theme throughout is the need to respect both ways of knowing, dismissing neither science nor Indigenous ways of knowing, but bringing both together. The papers describe significant groundwork in teaching practices, conceptual frameworks, a body of literature, and course and program structures. The authors address the relationship between knowledges, why and to whom this interface is important, the impact of cultural erasure, the necessity for Indigenous voice in the classroom, the teaching/learning process, and directions for further research.