Moving gender from margin to center in environmental education

For the past 30 years or so, a small group of environmental education scholars have attended to gender and promoted feminist theories and methodologies (e.g., Barrett, 2005; Barron, 1995; Davies, 2013; Di Chiro, 1987; Fawcett, 2000; Fontes, 2002; Gough, 1999a, 1999b, 2004; Gough & Whitehouse, 2003; Gray, 2016; Hallen, 2000; Harvester & Blenkinsop, 2010; Li, 2007; Lloro-Bidart, 2016; Martusewicz, 2013; McKenzie, 2004, 2005; Newbery, 2003; Russell & Bell, 1996; Russell & Semenko, 2016; Sakellari & Skanavis, 2013; Storey, DaCruz & Camargo, 1998; Stovall, Baker-Sperry, & Dallinger, 2015; Wane & Chandler, 2002; Warren, 1996; Whitehouse, 2012; Whitehouse & Taylor, 1996).¹ Historically, this scholarship has remained somewhat on the margins of the field (A. Gough, 2013, in press; Russell & Fawcett, 2013), however, it is time for renewal.

This special issue of The Journal of Environmental Education is devoted to the topic of gender and environmental education. The issue brings together an international group of scholars who share a common dedication to promoting social equity and gender equality in environmental education and beyond. Including research reports, theoretical inquiry, autobiographical explorations, and creative assemblages, collectively the articles demonstrate the exciting possibilities that come with bringing gender from margin to center (see hooks, 1984).

There is much encouragement internationally for centering gender. The Future We Want, the outcomes document adopted at the Rio + 20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (2012), reaffirmed the necessity for promoting “social equity, and protection of the environment, while enhancing gender equality and women's empowerment, and equal opportunities for all, and the protection, survival and development of children to their full potential, including through education” (para. 11).

The new Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2016) include Goal 5: “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.” Yet girls and women, along with other marginalized groups, have been overlooked in much environmental education practice, theory, and research, subsumed under the notional category of “universalized people” (A. Gough, 2013, in press). Women, cisgender or otherwise, have always had distinctive contributions to make to environmental education as one form of anti-oppressive resistance. Greater attention to the dynamics of gender in the field—including intersections with race, class, sexuality, ability, body size, and animality in the contexts of colonization, neoliberalism, globalization, and anthropocentrism—is needed if we are to understand and respond effectively to the complex environmental and social issues we face. Many of these research concerns on their own, let alone in their intersectionality, remain on the margins of environmental education research (Fawcett, 2013; A, Gough, 2013; in press; Haluza-Delay, 2013; Lowan-Trudeau, 2013; Russell & Fawcett, 2013; Shava, 2013); some appear to be on particularly bare ground with little growth evident, although we hope this special issue will encourage a new flourishing.

For this special issue we called for manuscripts that respond to the need for promotion of social equity and enhancing gender equality and women's empowerment within environmental education. We welcomed theoretical and empirical research papers and we explicitly aimed to gather together a collection of articles that reflects a broad scope of perspectives, methodological approaches, and research foci. Although not exhaustive, in our call for papers, we sought submissions that addressed questions such as:

• How does EE research in diverse areas of education (primary and secondary education / higher education / vocational education / non-formal learning / EE policy) address the relation between education and gender in the context of environmental issues?

• What are the contributions, merits, challenges, and pitfalls of gendered approaches to EE research in better understanding the relation between education and societal transformation in the context of environmental issues?

• How can we map/present/understand/critique the diversity of theoretical conceptualizations of environmental education and gender as a process in which the political and the pedagogical are intertwined?

• How might a gender perspective in EE research more generally contribute to the development of theory and/or empirical underpinnings of research, not only in environmental education but also pedagogy, climate change, and biodiversity? Which vital issues, research questions, methodological considerations, and/or theoretical challenges does a gender perspective add or highlight?

• Which perspectives, research methods, and/or theoretical traditions related to gender remain un(der)addressed in EE research? Which of these could progress EE research, and why?

We received proposals and papers that addressed some, but not all, of these questions. We were delighted that we received sufficient submissions such that there will be two special issues of The Journal of Environmental Education on gender and environmental education. The second issue will be published in 2018.

The seven articles included here in the first special issue represent a range of responses to the questions raised in our call for papers and, in recognition that the personal is political, they are ordered roughly from the more personal to more theoretical. Five of them are collaborative articles, which is noteworthy given feminist explorations of the benefits and challenges of collaboration (e.g., Baker, Shulman, & Tobin, 2001; Gilbert & Masucci, 2008; Mountz, Miyares, Wright, & Bailey, 2003; Peck & Mink, 1998; Russell, 2006; Russell, Plotkin, & Bell, 1998) and our observation that much environmental education scholarship has tended to be solitary. Several of the articles are authored or co-authored by doctoral students or recent graduates, which may indicate a new wave of gender-related research. It will be interesting to see if these trends continue as gender-oriented scholarship expands in the field.

In the first article, Laura Piersol and Nora Timmerman (“Reimagining Environmental Education Within Academia: Storytelling and Dialogue as Lived Ecofeminist Politics”) deconstruct their own experiences in the academy to make clear how useful ecofeminist analysis remains to environmental education. This is a not uncontroversial position given the critiques of essentialism ecofeminism has faced, which has served to divide feminists and silence ecofeminists. The authors seek to learn from such critiques but not be immobilized by these. They argue for a continual reflexivity to create space for ecofeminism's complex, intersectional, non-anthropocentric analyses so vital to addressing humanity's destructive relations with the (once and no longer) natural world. An ecofeminist lens is useful in identifying the pervasiveness of anthropocentrism and the devaluation or erasure of more-than-human voices and concerns. For Piersol and Timmerman, ecofeminism is powerful for informing their own environmental education practice and they demonstrate its continuing relevance to help us respond to ecological and social injustices.

The second article, by Teresa Lloro-Bidart and Keri Semenko (“Toward a Feminist Ethic of Self-Care for Environmental Educators”), explores what a feminist ethic of self-care might look like for environmental educators. Drawing on Foucauldian perspectives, feminist environmental education scholarship, and feminist writing about temporality, relationality, and self-care, they challenge neoliberal ideologies that constrain self-care. Considering that women disproportionately bear the emotional costs of teaching and more women work in education and in caring labor and service-oriented tasks, including animal care, the consequences of this work requires feminist analysis. Discussed are the specific burdens faced by animal-focused and environmental educators. For Lloro-Bidart and Semenko, a feminist ethic of self-care necessitates attention to neoliberalized educational regimes and the intersectional oppression of women and nonhuman animals, and requires deliberate acts of restoration to create time and space for truth-telling and self-care.

Alexandra Schindel and Sara Tolbert, in the third article (“Critical Caring for People and Place”), ask “What role does/should caring play in environmental education?” by drawing on qualitative data from a case study of young people and their teacher in an urban high school who undertook a local, urban park restoration. Schindel and Tolbert take on the theoretical lenses of caring and justice by egalitarian and feminist scholars to examine how authentic caring plays out in the teacher's practice and in the young people's experiences. Not only did the teacher exhibit authentic caring in his practice, the young people in the study identified caring relationships as an influential factor in their participation in school and with urban renewal. The concept of critical caring for people and place is argued as being an effective and practical approach to educational and environmental justice.

In the fourth article, Larraine Larri and Maxine Newlands (“Knitting Nannas and Frackman: A Gender Analysis of Australian Anti-Coal Seam Gas Documentaries and Implications for Environmental Adult Education”) draw on poststructural and material feminist ideas to analyze two documentaries about the anti-coal seam gas activist movement in rural Australia. The documentaries are titled Frackman and Knitting Nannas. The main protagonist in Frackman is a former construction worker turned activist, Dayne Pratzky. Knitting Nannas documents how Clare Twomey and other Nannas protest the industrialization of a similar, rural landscape. The scene-by-scene analysis of these two documentaries reveals a repetition of gender blindness in Frackman. Both documentaries show adults learning to actively become champions for the environment. The Knitting Nannas model offers opportunities for greater social inclusivity and creative relationship building. Larri and Newlands focus on the importance of paying research attention both to gender and to community-based approaches in informal, adult environmental education.

In the fifth article, Catherine Hart (“En-Gendering the Material in Environmental Education Research: Reassembling Otherwise”) discusses the history of gendered research in environmental education research, to make a case for drawing on increasingly complex and nuanced concepts to explore future matters of gender. Gender is not a binary, neither is it one variable among many. Hart's critique is that there have been conceptual limitations in the ways qualitative research is framed and grounded. She looks at how we can move beyond normative binaries and methodological simplicity toward researching multiple subjectivities, diffractive analyses, and intersectionality because, as she says, it is just not that simple anymore. Hart uses two examples to demonstrate onto-epistemic considerations, theoretical framings, and concepts that can be applied by researchers keen to explore, in more complex ways, matters of gender in environmental education research.

The sixth article, by Jesse Bazzul and Nicholas Santavicca (“Diagramming Assemblages of Sex/Gender and Sexuality as Environmental Education”), focuses on sex/gender and sexuality as key dimensions to understanding our shared worlds. They seek to explore the ethico-political-ontological environments that give shape to, and are shaped by, becomings and the struggles of sexuality. The resulting diagrams are both material and discursive and are simultaneously cultural, biological, human, and nonhuman. Bazzul and Santavicca diagram assemblages to capture potentially salient topics in environmental education. Their desire is to generate discussion and facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas about sex/gender and sexuality and environmental education. Diagramming is an activity that can assist students and teachers map and imagine potential areas of critical engagement, new becomings, and ecologically and socially just futures.

In the final article, Chessa Adsit-Morris and Noel Gough (“It Takes More than Two to (Multispecies) Tango: Queering Gender Texts in Environmental Education”) use the metaphor of dancing a tango to frame their article as a performance piece. A tango is a relational dance and, as such, Adsit-Morris and Gough respond to three articles published in the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education that each called for more queer scholarship in environmental education. Working along the edges and margins of phenomenology, they play with (dis)orientation and assemblages to dance with earlier ideas about the implications of queer theory for environmental education. Moving from the static to the generative, the authors show how new entanglements and assemblages can help reimagine and reinvigorate environmental education scholarship.

Looking forward, although we were delighted with the range of submissions that are being published in the two special issues of The Journal of Environmental Education, we do admit to disappointment that neither issue includes articles from Africa and South America, and that there is only one article that jointly represents Asia and Europe. We are sure that there is relevant research being undertaken in these places and we encourage authors to submit their writing to the Journal so that we may look to a third special issue with an even wider range of voices in 2019 and eventually to a time when gender is no longer at the margins of environmental education.

Note

Notes

1. This list of citations certainly does not include all references to scholarly work that centers gender or makes substantial use of feminist theory. One project inspired by conversations that began in the first meeting of the “EE Feminist Caucus” of the American Educational Research Association's Environmental Education SIG (Russell & McKenzie, 2015) is a living bibliography of feminist environmental education scholarship (Russell, Lloro-Bidart, McKenzie, Gough, & Whitehouse, 2016). Readers can contact Constance Russell at [email protected] to request a copy.