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STEM Teaching Tool #87 -- Topics: Equity Instruction Culture

Identifying local environmental justice phenomena for science and engineering investigations

Teachers should engage students in local, personally relevant environmental justice science learning to develop more holistic understandings of current issues, possible solutions, and activisms to participate in.

District Staff & PD Providers should help educators connect with EJ contexts and organizations to focus investigations on the everyday, interdisciplinary work of supporting frontline communities.

School Leaders should support community-based EJ investigations, support the involvement of EJ organizations in classroom activities, and honor the expertise of students and community partners.

What is the Issue?

Making sense of phenomena that are based on pressing environmental justice (EJ) issues allows students to explore locally relevant concerns, to engage in meaningful science and engineering learning, and to engage in civic reasoning and action. Investigating local EJ issues that are personally meaningful provides crucial opportunities for students to understand the causes, implications, and various perspectives related to real issues in their communities and cultivate individual and collective agency. This type of learning adds relevance and supports youth in understanding, advocating for, and making change.
Image via Kiana Bosman, unsplash.com/@capturedby_kiana

Authors:

By Jennifer Pinney, Michal Robinson, Tina Miller-Way & Philip Bell
Edited by Rae Jing Han, Christina Guevara, Philip Bell, Abby Rhinehart & Deb L. Morrison

Reflection Questions

What environmental justice issues are in your community? How is science illuminating an injustice-or how is science implicated in it? What designs are causing injustice-or how is justice promoted through design? What does meaningful EJ learning look like from community, student, and teacher perspectives?

Whose interests are being served in EJ efforts? Is the focus on tech-as-savior, individual responsibility, degrowth, collective action, or systemic transformation?

Things to Consider

Environmental justice (EJ) is a resistance movement in which the work starts, lives with, and is led by the people experiencing the harms and challenges of environmental injustices (e.g., water insecurity, toxic pollution, food insecurity), with the goal of moving everyone into the work of transforming injustices. Learn about environmental justice.

Environmental policies and regulations do not keep pace with societal change (see how EPA and OEJ have progressed over time). Understanding and engaging with these issues can prepare young people to change the oppressive systems, values, and norms that have allowed inequitable practices and policies to persist.

Help students develop compassion for and learn from people who are experiencing environmental injustices, including their own and/or other nearby communities. By focusing on local issues, teachers can help students avoid making judgments about what marginalized communities in other places "should" do, without understanding the full context. Engaging in nearby community issues can foster students' sense of social responsibility and collective agency to be part of solutions.

Environmental justice learning incorporates interdisciplinary perspectives. Students benefit from integrating ethics with concepts and practices from various subjects into a broader conceptual framework and exploring various viewpoints on EJ issues. EJ investigations help students understand how science must be integrated with other disciplines to inform ethical decisions for communities.

Attending to Equity

Environmental injustices tend to be created by dominant ideologies underlying decisions and actions such as: imbalanced resource extraction, disproportionate protections, and unsustainable patterns of consumption. Use firsthand perspectives from frontline communities in investigations, including responses that promote community thriving (e.g., Climate Frontlines). Center non-dominant leaders (e.g., BIPOC, low socio-economic communities & womxn) to enact ideologies and values supporting healthy communities. Include different forms of storytelling to highlight community narratives-photos, videos, art, poetry, testimonials, and dance.

Communities include both humans and more-than-humans. Science should be used to advocate for healthy, just, and thriving conditions for all living beings. Considering the place-based nature of environmental injustices, how can you respond to different histories of places that derive from power and privilege?

Recommended Actions You Can Take

Consider using these criteria and this process to identify a meaningful anchor phenomenon. To stay focused on EJ phenomena, also ask: (1) Does the phenomenon disproportionately or differently affect a community of color and/or a poverty-impacted community? (2) Can students access different forms of evidence (e.g., narrative accounts, photos, maps, quantitative data) and connect with local community experts to support their sense-making of the phenomenon? (3) Does this phenomenon allow students to explore the different dimensions and principles of EJ?

Identify local EJ issues: EJSCREEN and EPA data and mapping tools can help find sites of local relevance. Public GIS databases can also support place-based interdisicplinary investigations: Tree Equity Score, How's My Waterway?, AirNow, Current Flooding Conditions & Flood Risk Map, Social Indicators for Coastal Communities Initiative & Interactive Map.

Engage students in self-documentation to identify EJ issues faced by their own communities and how they have been responding to them.

Leverage critical engineering design and the practice of communication to support meaningful responses to environmental injustice. Responding to environmental harms includes design-related actions of repair, clean up, and/or abatement, as well as strategic communication to help correct prejudices outsiders may have about a community.

Supplemental Material: What is environmental justice? Why we should connect our science and engineering investigations to local environmental justice phenomena

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STEM Teaching Tools content copyright 2014-22 UW Institute for Science + Math Education. All rights reserved.
This site is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Award #1920249 (previously through Awards #1238253 and #1854059). Opinions expressed are not those of any funding agency.

Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License. Others may adapt with attribution. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Opinions expressed are not those of any funding agency.

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Identifying local environmental justice phenomena for science and engineering investigations : StemTeachingTools (en-US)

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STEM Teaching Tool #87 -- Topics: Equity Instruction Culture Teachers should engage students in local, personally relevant environmental justice science learning to develop more holistic understandings of current issues, possible solutions, and activisms to participate in. District Staff & PD Providers should help educators connect with EJ contexts and organizations to focus investigations on the everyday, interdisciplinary work of supporting frontline communities.

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Pressing societal challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, have further exposed injustices disproportionately impacting minoritized groups. In K-12 classrooms, unprecedented societal challenges disproportionately impacting minoritized groups present an unprecedented opportunit…

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How should we promote learning in order to create more just, regenerative, and flourishing conditions for all Earthly beings, human and otherwise?

Working through perspectives of care, wellbeing, and equity, the participants in this graduate seminar will collectively inquire into how climate and environmental justice can be promoted through varied contexts of education. Over the term, we will explore topics, exemplars, and possibilities of interest and obligation to our learning community. We have chosen to make our collaborative activities public online in order to invite others into this learning experience with us. In the interest of helping cultivate broader awareness and engagement in these efforts, please make use of these resources as you would like.

To learn more about our initial points of departure, see the detailed course description. We will update this site over time with , , and products of our shared inquiry. We also invite you to follow along and join in our inquiry on Mastodon at #UWClimateEd.

If you would like, you can also explore the 2021 run of this course.

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Climate & Environmental Justice in Education

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How should we promote learning in order to create more just, regenerative, and flourishing conditions for all Earthly beings, human and otherwise? Working through perspectives of care, wellbeing, and equity, the participants in this graduate seminar will collectively inquire into how climate and environmental justice can be promoted through varied contexts of education.

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Practice Brief 69 -- Topics: Informal Ed Equity

Using Local Phenomena to Communicate Climate Solutions

Science communicators should be familiar with their audiences (e.g., how they talk and care about climate-related phenomena), and they should be involved with what local communities are doing to respond to climate change.

Organizational leadership should consistently share resources for climate science communicator professional development that support collaboration with local community members, businesses, government, tribal nations, educators, etc.-and prioritize that work.

What is the Issue?

Communicating the reasons why we should respond to climate change is no longer enough. Climate science communication must be grounded in the real actions of local communities. Focusing on the local phenomena (e.g., sea level rise and flooding in New Orleans) that are challenging communities, and local responses will allow others to envision solutions and approaches appropriate for their own community -fostering collective agency and collaborative decision-making amongst local governments, nonprofits, businesses, and the public.

Image caption: Founder of ISeeChange, Julia Kumari Drapkin, shows children a map of historic New Orleans. Drapkin highlights the parts of the city that used to be swamp. Credit: Impact Media Lab / AAAS

Authors:

by Christina Guevara, Elana Kimbrell, Emily Cloyd, Tiffany Lohwater & Abby Rhinehart | v. 2, April 2021

Reflection questions

How are local community histories, needs, values, resources being considered in how you're communicating your climate change knowledge?

How are the knowledges of youth and diverse communities being seen and included as local assets in climate change response?

How are the climate change responses you're presenting adaptable and scalable across contexts?

Which communities are or are not represented in how you're communicating about climate change solutions?

Things to Consider

When scientists communicate about climate change, solutions often seem distant and abstract to community members-even when the community involved is one of those most heavily impacted by climate change (e.g., young people and low-income communities of color).

Move towards climate communication that focuses on local solutions (and away from reiterating decontextualized facts) can alleviate climate anxiety and despair and promote agency. Communicate both the local risks and local solutions - what is concretely happening in communities today.

Focusing on local community responses allows individuals to make personal connections to climate change in positive and constructive ways. When climate change feels personal, urgent, and close-to-home, then peoples' beliefs, values, and identities change to make informed decisions, reducing psychological distance and political polarization.

Because the impacts of climate change vary, it is necessary to communicate with the specific needs, values, and resources of each community or person in mind. Within each community, decisions are made based on interpretations of science findings within social and cultural contexts. Making decisions about complex issues like climate change requires contributions from experts outside your established network to maintain locally relevant adaptation and mitigation responses. Collaborate with local leaders, tribal nations, and others who live and work in your community to craft communications. Their place-based knowledge is essential.

Attending to Equity

Recommended Actions You Can Take

ALSO SEE STEM TEACHING TOOLS

STEM Teaching Tools content copyright 2014-22 UW Institute for Science + Math Education. All rights reserved.
This site is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Award #1920249 (previously through Awards #1238253 and #1854059). Opinions expressed are not those of any funding agency.

Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License. Others may adapt with attribution. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Opinions expressed are not those of any funding agency.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Using Local Phenomena to Communicate Climate Solutions : StemTeachingTools (en-US)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Practice Brief 69 -- Topics: Informal Ed Equity Science communicators should be familiar with their audiences (e.g., how they talk and care about climate-related phenomena), and they should be involved with what local communities are doing to respond to climate change.