Immigrant children promoting environmental care: enhancing learning, agency and integration through culturally-responsive environmental education

Abstract

This paper examines the potential of culturally-responsive environmental education to engage immigrant early adolescents. Our study suggests that environmental involvement can become a means and an end for children to bridge their school and home in agential ways. Drawing from a multi-phase study involving focus groups with children, parents, and teachers from three culturally-diverse schools in Montreal, as well as a green action research project, we examine children’s role as environmental educators and ambassadors. The role of environmental ambassador allowed children to take on positions that departed from conventional parent-child social scripts, and enhanced the communication between school-student-home, between generations, and spoke to their sense of place. We contend that culturally-responsive environmental education offers a unique space for enacting democracy, knowledge creation and integration, but this opportunity is often squandered. Bi-directional, responsive, and consistent home-school-community-place relations need to be actively supported.

Keywords:

• environmental education
• immigrant children
• learning
• culturally-responsive, agency
• intergenerational

Acknowledgement

We would also like to thank research assistant Giulietta di Mambro.

Funding

This research was supported by the Fonds de Recherche Société et Culture [grant number 145405] and the Center for Human Relations and Community Studies at Concordia University.

Notes

Parts of this paper were presented at the 7th World Environmental Education in Marrakesh, Morocco in June 2013.

1. Please note that questions and excerpts from transcripts have been translated from French into English for this article.

2. This widely used phrase refers to French-speaking individuals who can historically trace back their Québec lineage since at least 1760. This term renders invisible the status of Indigenous peoples in Québec.

3. Dewey ([1927] 1954) had earlier observed that the publics had become too large, too diffuse, and too scattered to enact collective judgement.