Synopsis
This study argues that for students to envision a role for themselves in the process of social change for sustainability, instructors and scholars in the field of environmental education (EE) must work to construct equitable opportunities for student participation in place-based EE programs. This requires carefully and critically examining the structural constraints and affordances in local communities where students are asked to take action for sustainability, and how students are positioned in these spaces with respect to their unique identities and subjectivities.
Drawing on the agency/structure dialectic as a theoretical framework, the study uses qualitative case reports to document how four students enrolled in a residential EE program at a small college in the Midwestern U.S.: (a) narrated the process of social change for sustainability at various spatial and temporal scales, and (b) embodied agency to work towards change for sustainability in their local contexts.
Students were interviewed about: (a) the change for sustainability they want to see in their own lives, their communities, and the world, (b) how to make that change happen, (c) barriers to that change, and (d) their role in that change. Corresponding work in local communities was also studied, focusing on how their plans for addressing place-based sustainability problems were developed and implemented.
Key findings illuminate how students embody change for sustainability (their actions and interactions in local communities) and how this relates to how they narrate change for sustainability (their descriptions of the process of social change and their role in that process). This includes how students’ local experiences with sustainability work critically inform the way they envision the abstract understandings of the process of social change for sustainability, and helps develop place-based models of social change.
The study’s implications for EE programs include a call for local and collective action, to: (a) work towards ensuring equitable access to local sustainability work for all students, (b) develop a critical consciousness of race in EE programs, and (c) rethink what place-based pedagogy means for non-White, non-American students in rural American EE programs through critical examination of discourses and narratives that are privileged in those local spaces.
Conferring University: Michigan State University
Year of award: 2016
Further information: Author’s stable email address: [email protected]
URL of dissertation publication: http://gradworks.umi.com/10/10/10107053.html