Investigating critical community engaged pedagogies for transformative environmental justice education

Abstract

Effective environmental justice education poses unique challenges to both educators and students. For students, this pursuit is cognitively challenging at best and emotionally paralyzing at worst. It requires deconstruction of culturally produced narratives that uphold privilege, conceal complicity, and promote individual-level response to systemic problems. In this paper, we explore critical approaches to pedagogy, place, and community engaged learning, as well as their specific resonance with the challenges inherent in environmental justice education. We then thematically analyze student responses to two critically oriented community-engaged learning projects. Student experiences proved transformative as students came to see the structural elements that maintain environmental racism more clearly, demonstrated systems thinking, expressed feelings of agency, and articulated their own positionalities in thoughtful and constructive ways. From these data, we offer critical community-engaged pedagogy as transformative practice for environmental justice education.

Keywords:

• Environmental justice education
• critical pedagogy
• community-engaged learning
• transformative education
• critical service-learning

Acknowledgements

This research and the students’ experiences would not have been possible without the support of my University of Utah colleagues Kate Magargal and Brian Codding in the Anthropology department. In addition, Sarah Tabak played a key role in organizing and supporting students, projects, and community partners as well as editing this manuscript. We are also grateful to the Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective for their expertise not only in bicycle access and repair but especially for creating welcoming and inclusive spaces that enhance our community. Finally, we are grateful for the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Students who have lent their time, passion, and intelligence to the study of EJ and the Bennion Center who support engagement to bridge campus and community.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.