Teaching social studies amid ecological crisis

ABSTRACT

We live in ecological crisis. While understanding the human-made crisis requires scientific expertise, addressing it requires active, informed citizens. Thus, the crisis is a matter for the field of social studies education, the subject area foremost tasked with teaching students to become effective citizens of their many communities. However, environmental issues (EI) have been marginal in the highly anthropocentric field. Through an online survey, this study investigated public-school secondary social studies teaching in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania at a time when powerful political forces have downplayed or refuted the ecological crisis. A strong majority of 1,174 responding teachers believed that it is important for social studies teachers to teach EI yet most did not teach EI often in the 2017–8 school year on account of four main barriers: perception that EI are more the domain of science than social studies; lack of comfort, preparation, and knowledge for teaching EI; political controversy surrounding EI; and already-crowded, non-EI-focused social studies curricula. Despite these barriers, there are encouraging signs for teachers teaching “earthen social studies” and addressing the crisis—but the field must support it.

KEYWORDS:

• Earthen social studies
• environmental issues
• ecological crisis
• climate change
• teacher survey

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge assistance provided by the Population Research Institute at Penn State University, which is supported by an infrastructure grant by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Particular thanks go to Yosef Bodovski.

Notes

1. The terms climate change and global warming are not exactly the same—global warming is a form of climate change—but as they are often used synonymously both in public and scientific discourses, we use them synonymously here. Additionally, while we typically use “climate change” instead of “global climate change” for the sake of brevity, we always imply that the issue is global in scale.

2. We place quotation marks around “living” in order to draw attention to the complexity of the relationship between living and nonliving materials and how ideas about living are culturally constructed.

3. Our orientation toward an ecosocial conception is cultivated from a confluence of additional pedagogical theories and practices that we are not able to engage further here. These include: critical pedagogy (Freire 1970/2011; Gruenewald, 2003), EcoJustice education (Bowers, 2001, 2006; Martusewicz et al., 2015), ecological literacy education (Orr, 1992, 1994; Stone & Barlow, 2005), grassroots education (Esteva & Prakash, 2014), Indigenous approaches to education (Cajete, 1994; Deloria & Wildcat, 2001; Grande, 2004), land education (Calderon, 2014a, 2014b; McCoy, Tuck, & McKenzie, 2016), radical pedagogy (hooks, 1994, 2009), and still others.

4. In this article, we focus on the field of social studies education in the United States because this is the national context in which our study is situated.

5. It is important to note that these excerpts are androcentric as well as anthropocentric, which is unsurprising if we think of the workings of value hierarchies and how classism, racism, sexism and anthropocentrism are interrelated (Martusewicz et al., 2015).

6. EI are not contained within political boundaries. However, we focus our attention on the national context of the United States and, within that, the state context of Pennsylvania. This placing does not suggest, though, that EI are insignificant in other states and countries; rather, it is an acknowledgment and reflection of how the contexts of particular places matter, even with respect to an issue as massive as global climate change.

7. As southwest Pennsylvania has a long history with the fossil fuel industry, it is no coincidence that Trump touted his commitment to the industry in a campaign speech in Pittsburgh (Davenport, 2016).

8. Part of this state-level context has to do with the fact that many of the structures of U.S. public education exist at the state and local levels. While the teaching of all U.S. teachers is placed within the same national context (which, to be clear, is quite complex and messy but nonetheless one national context), those teachers have unique state contexts. Teachers also have other scales of place, including more global and local levels.

9. Shiva (2010) has explored the problematic usage of the term “resource,” which once “suggested reciprocity along with regeneration” but now has been redefined as the “parts of nature which were required inputs for industrial production and colonial trade” (p. 228).

10. We built the survey through a multi-step process. We began by reviewing past social studies teacher surveys (Martell & Stevens, 2018; Passe & Fitchett, 2013) as well as Plutzer et al.’s (2016) survey of science teachers about their beliefs and teaching about climate change. Mindful of these surveys and the context of Pennsylvania that we described above, we drafted a series of questions. We then asked two social studies teachers that we knew to take the survey and assess it for clarity. After edits based on the teachers’ suggestions, we secured IRB approval from our university.

11. The United States Census Bureau (n.d.) defines unified school districts as school districts that “provide education to children of all school ages in their service areas” (para. 3).

12. For frequency questions such as this one, specific measurements for each option were not specified.

13. Within these discipline areas, the teachers reported connecting EI most frequently to geography, which is perhaps due to the ‘human-environment interaction’ theme of geography. As economics often deals with the consumption of natural resources and as history is, historically, the most prominent discipline of social studies education, it is perhaps not surprising that teachers would link teaching about EI to these disciplines. Additionally, social studies curricula and standards are frequently organized by the four main disciplines (civics/government is the fourth) so teachers may have been most comfortable linking EI to these deep and recognizable structures of the field.

14. That the teaching of effective citizenship is the main purpose of social studies education might serve to explain the frequency with which teachers connect EI to citizenship, but the field has also struggled to link directly EI and citizenship (Kissling & Calabrese Barton, 2013). The comparatively low response percentages in the “often” column and the comparatively high percentages in the “never” column for democracy, poverty, and racism are noteworthy to us. Democracy is a common focus of social studies education in the United States but it is not typically put into conversation with EI (Houser, 2009). Along with democracy, the topics of poverty and racism, while likely not as central in the social studies curriculum as they should be, are regular topics in social studies.

15. While it is possible that a teacher might be steeped in information about climate change or fracking but remain unsure about, for example, whether it is an immediate threat, we suspect this is unlikely.

16. There were some—albeit few—comments to the survey that reflected the political controversy surrounding EI. In response to a question asking how the teachers taught about recent powerful hurricanes, one wrote, “I discussed it as a natural weather event that occurs every year in the Western Hemisphere. Please do not try to assign climate change to these naturally occurring events!!!!!” A second wrote of teaching “a general idea of what happened and where [the hurricanes were] located. I didn[‘t] teach them that it was a consequence of global warming. That is nothing more than a dishonest and immoral tactic that is used by the left to force environmental propaganda on pliable students.”

17. Following Eisner (1985), students do learn from what is absent from the curriculum, but that learning is rarely, if ever, constructive and certainly not the kind of learning necessary for ameliorating ecological crisis.

18. We are reminded of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 speech at Riverside Church in New York City in which he explicitly sought to connect the injustices of extreme materialism, militarism, and racism. For a contemporary version of such connection that includes treatment of the Earth, see hooks (2009).

Additional information

Funding

The project from which this article comes has been supported by a Research Initiation Grant from Penn State University’s College of Education.