Experiential Learning to Create Authentic Learning

Equity in a Time of Socio-Environmental Justice

by editor | Apr 18, 2024 | Environmental Literacy

Equity in a Time of
Socio-Environmental Justice

by Max Jimenez
Environmental Literacy, Policy

This article was republished with permission and originally appeared in California Classroom Science (CCS), an e-newsletter produced by the California Science Teachers Association (CSTA).

hen we talk about the education system and how it can be utilized as a tool to promote equity and fight for socio-environmental justice, I’m sure we are all wondering, what can this possibly look like? As someone who has gone through California’s public education system from elementary school all the way to a four-year public university, I have so many ideas of possible solutions. My thoughts don’t just come from what I’ve read, they come from what I’ve experienced as an immigrant woman of color who came from a working-class family.
Reflecting back to when I was younger, I don’t recall having any formal discussions about what was going on in our environment. I believe that this was due to our underfunded and under-resourced public education system. In each grade, I had between two to three different teachers, making my education experience unstable and inconsistent. However, I remember watching commercials and cartoons with the jingle, “reduce, reuse, recycle,” to reduce pollution that was hurting our environment. Yet, I felt that there was never a reason that truly connected with me. Even if I heard of different ways I could make change for the better, I didn’t understand why it was vital for me to be a part of that movement for social change. Awareness is great, but no matter what age we are, it is much better to be conscious, and that only happens through thoughtful interactions that empower youth.
As I got older, I learned why the practice of “reduce, reuse, and recycle” was important and how pollution affects my family and me. I learned that my community was more susceptible to certain diseases due to our lack of access to clean air and healthy foods. This brings me to my first point, it is crucial to create spaces for young people to identify how certain issues are closer to them than they think. We cannot water down and sugarcoat problems because we believe that we need to protect young people from the harsh truth. By hiding the truth from young people, we are losing the opportunity to make change. We don’t have time to waste. Young people have the most to lose because these issues impact their future and they deserve to know the truth.
In fact, knowledge is so accessible nowadays that even if you don’t tell us, we will find out anyway. We know where our money is going and we will find out what key decision makers are voting on issues that affect us most. Young people are so fed up, that they are registering to vote in historic numbers and there has been an increased number of young people running for office!

My second point is that for education to be effective, it must be relevant to what students are going through in their daily lives. Often, this is related to climate and other environmental issues. If they are able to understand that these local issues are affecting them and the people they care about, then it’s only a matter of time until they will be able to connect it to larger, global issues. This doesn’t just create a better understanding of what is happening in our world, but this makes it easier for young people to find solutions to the issues they’re concerned about. As a benefit, this nuanced understanding that these different struggles are interconnected teaches young people what it means to be in solidarity with other people’s struggles.

In learning spaces, it is important to accommodate people’s understanding of the world. This brings me to my third point, students come from different backgrounds, and I have noticed that “environmental justice work” has been structured for white and affluent communities. We must consider how sustainability can be inclusive to people of color and working-class communities. We need to make sure that the movements we are fostering center around frontline communities who are being impacted most. Centering around frontline communities means honoring the resilience and experiences of those community members (for example, black and brown youth). This does not mean you can tokenize their existence and participation to benefit your own agenda. Some ways you can prevent tokenization of frontline community members is to avert your assumptions around the idea that all people they share their identities with (whether that’s race, gender, class, etc.) are the same because each is unique. Despite shared identities, there are different intersections of identity that people face, making their experiences unique from one another. Having one person carry this responsibility to represent everyone who holds the same identity is an unfair expectation. Another example of tokenization is when young people aren’t given the opportunity to claim their power in spaces that are meant to empower them. In addition, it is common for organizations and classrooms to tokenize marginalized community members for the sake of fulfilling a “diversity” requirement. Doing so is extremely disrespectful, and folks with privilege must do their own research* to find ways to honor the wisdom and experiences that marginalized community members face systemically.

I have experienced tokenization on different occasions. My first memory was when I was working with a climate education organization called Alliance for Climate Education (ACE). ACE took young people, including myself to the State Capitol to lobby for progressive climate policies. ACE helped us practice how to lobby with government officials and supported us throughout the whole process. My experience when lobbying was difficult because it was my first time talking to government officials and persuading them to support climate policies. What should have been an empowering experience, didn’t feel that way. It didn’t feel empowering because when I would tell them why these climate policies are important to the livelihood of those in my community, and when I asked them to support a bill we were advocating for, they either applauded us or told us that we did a great job. It was obvious that they didn’t take us seriously. Some of them even asked to take a picture with us even if they didn’t seem serious about supporting what we asked for. It was hard to accept that even if the communities we were a part of were being affected by climate change and environmental racism, people in power didn’t seem to get past the fact that even if we are young, our voices matter. The fact that they had the audacity to make that experience a photo opportunity for them, to make it seem like they engaged with youth, was even more disrespectful because they didn’t take our demands seriously. This example of my experience being tokenized was disempowering and disheartening. However, I learned a lot about my experience lobbying and I hope that you can recognize that it is especially crucial for learning spaces, such as a classroom, to avoid this kind of culture. The first step to avoid this and honor young people’s experiences is to remember that we are all students (no matter your age) and there is so much we can learn from young people if we include them in the conversation.

Lastly, if we really want to honor young people in this movement, please take us seriously. Don’t give us a pat on the back or applaud us when we demand justice. Don’t patronize our experiences and don’t use our resistance as a photo opportunity to make yourselves credible in the same space where you are making decisions that don’t benefit future generations. It is not up to you to decide how and what we learn, the world is changing so fast and we don’t have the option of waiting until we are older to take action. We need y’all to make space, instead of taking space from us, so we can fight and create a world that we can AND want to live in. Accessibility for all is a priority if we want to embody the word, “justice,” because what is the point of having environmental or climate education if all students do not have access and if it’s not done in a way that respects local expertise. Making space can mean creating lesson plans that will give students the opportunity to share the knowledge they already possess with one another. Allowing students to build collective knowledge is essential in establishing their confidence, as well as creating opportunities for students to develop a community with one another. We must restructure these top-down, vertical learning structures where students are only learners and are only capable of retaining information. An effective solution I have seen is providing collaborative learning spaces that allow students to flourish. This means that educators take on the role of facilitator. Facilitators are still able to reach learning goals, but in this way, the participants have the agency to find their own way of achieving those learning goals. We must have faith that our students have the power to analyze their surroundings critically and that they are able to develop these skills on their own. From my experience, I learned the most when my teachers and mentors/femmentors constantly reminded me that the knowledge I possess has great value. Asking students what they want to learn about and involving them in the creation of lesson plans will show them taking the initiative over their own education is possible. I know that when I was given the space to take control over what and how I wanted to learn, it was easier for me to understand the concepts my teachers carefully planned and allowed me to recognize that I have the agency to empower myself through education.

To close, when we all talk about justice, people will have different approaches and when young people decide to be militant—don’t repress and silence us! We need your support in this intergenerational fight for socio-environmental justice. We need to remember that organizing and fighting for this justice is not glamorous, it is a necessity. The actions we take to defend our Earth, and our livelihoods are acts of survival.

Some good starting places for those willing to dig deeper:

Cohen, Julie. “How Social Justice and the Environment Connect.” Futurity, 2017.
Sandler, Ronald L, and Phaedra C. Pezzullo. Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007.
Southern Poverty Law Center. “Analyzing Environmental Justice.” Teaching Tolerance, 2018.

Max Jimenez is a 4th-year student at the University of California, Santa Cruz studying Politics and Community Studies. She was raised in Northeast Los Angeles, where she continues to organize for environmental and housing justice.

by editor | Apr 18, 2024 | Environmental Literacy

“We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate, and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.”
– Sonya Renee Taylor

he outdoor science and environmental education (EE) field is reeling. The impact of COVID-19 has been devastating. The pandemic has revealed that across the country, organizations in this field are structured and have responded more like restaurants than school systems. Within days or weeks of the shutdown, there were massive lay-offs and furloughs, and by the end of the calendar year, if shelter in place and physical distancing guidelines are not lifted, nearly three-fourths of all organizations are uncertain about their ability to reopen (Collins, Dorph, Foreman, Pande, Strang, & Young, 2020). Ever.
For all of us, regardless of what sector of business, government or public good we are in, there is no playbook or set of best practices for making our way through this situation. Every organizational leader we’ve talked to is juggling competing priorities, responsibilities as novel as the virus itself, and no-win decision-making dilemmas, with fewer resources than they had before. It is clear that the challenges of 2020 will continue to test even the wisest and hardest working leaders.
And, as is a common theme during crises (especially economic crises), we are hearing from white-led organizations that work on equity, inclusion, cultural relevance, justice, and diversity, much of which began recently, is “being put on pause.” Some leaders are questioning whether or how equity work can continue when they don’t know if their organizations will survive this crisis or when most of their staff have been laid off. This line of thinking leaves the field on a path that will return us to the “normal” that resulted from decades of performative commitments to racial equity, inequitable policies that disadvantage Communities of Color, and exclusive and marginalizing workplace environments (Romero, Foreman, Strang, Rodriguez, Payan, & Moore Bailey, 2019). We suggest that anti-racism in our field is important enough that we should pursue it even when it is not convenient to do so.
What if we returned from this pandemic with a deep and profound commitment to a new way of being? What would it look like if, instead of this crisis making our work towards equity slower and less important, it became an opportunity for the field to work towards equity faster and make that work a higher priority? What if equity and inclusion were built into every fiber of our reimagined and reopened organizations, considered in every new initiative so that “pausing” is not possible as it is simply how we go about each day? As the Learning Policy Institute wrote, “(school) districts and states can make policy and practice decisions in the coming weeks and months that both respond to current needs and chip away at long-standing gaps in opportunity and access. (Cardichon, 2020)” We believe the same is true for environmental education organizations.
Here are seven ideas for white-led organizations to join the effort in transforming the EE field to a new way of being that is rooted in racial equity and has justice embedded at every inflection point:

1 Talk about racism.
Racism is at the heart of inequity in this country. Currently, the impacts of COVID-19 on health and the economy are being disproportionately felt by People of Color. When we think about how environmental education can emerge stronger from this pandemic, it must involve naming race as a factor in inequity. As The BridgeSpan Group wrote in a recent report, “A race-neutral approach would fail to account for the ways that existing disparities and structural racism affect outcomes (Patel, Smith, & Martin, 2020).” We need to directly talk about anti-blackness, white supremacy culture, police brutality, and how racism is built into our country’s policies and systems in deep ways that manifest in our everyday interactions. When white people speak out, People of Color don’t bear the burden alone to bring these issues to light. As Natasha Cloud wrote, “if you’re silent, you are part of the problem (Cloud, 2020).” Specifically, the environmental movement and environmental education field are steeped in racist history from John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, to the formation of our National Parks, to the field’s insular hiring and advancement trends, to the appropriation of indigenous culture while simultaneously erasing its current context and contributions, to the stories we tell and songs we sing at campfires. We have a responsibility to read, discuss, and to educate ourselves and each other about the harm embedded in our history, our “monuments”, and which ones need to be pulled down (Brune, 2020).

2 Rethink goals, priorities and measures of “success.”
There is a damaging, harmful paradigm in our field that tells us that the value of our work is defined by “numbers served.” This paradigm privileges quantity over quality and outputs over outcomes. When our funders, our boards, and our egos tell us that more is better, and the surest sign of resilience when we reopen is to return to our previous scale as quickly as possible, equity is always the casualty. Prioritizing numbers served will lead to two racist outcomes: we will design programs for majority audiences first and wait until “later” to adapt them for marginalized communities with “special needs;” and we will offer programs first to customers that can pay retail program fees because more revenue allows us to hire more staff and run more programs. Scholarships, tuition waivers, transportation grants, and community partnerships will have to wait until “we are back on our feet,” until we have “more bandwidth.” A new paradigm would have us look away from head counting, and instead prioritize addressing the needs of the most vulnerable communities first. Communities that have been hit the hardest by COVID-19, hammered by school closures, failed by remote “learning,” traumatized by racist violence, and historically denied the physical and emotional benefits of access to safe outdoor spaces–what if we designed our reopening strategies to serve these communities first? We can make the case to our philanthropy and government agency partners that they should also adjust their measures of success to address relevant societal challenges rather than simplistic numeric targets.

3 Re-imagine the workplace.
For those of us still working, the workplace looks radically different. Not only have our office locations largely shifted to our homes, but ways of interacting, meeting, conducting programs and doing business have been completely disrupted. This disruption is an opportunity to examine our existing workplace structures, systems, and cultures through the lens of white supremacy culture (Okun, n.d.). Tema Okun and Keneth Jones write that white supremacy is part of the fabric of all of our organizations, but the good news is, there are antidotes. Let’s re-envision how we work with one another: how decisions are made, who holds power in our organizations, what kinds of expertise and lived experience are valued and promoted, what we expect from one another, and how transparent those expectations are. Let’s create new practices and traditions, define shared values, and create new feedback systems that promote equity, inclusion, respect and power-sharing.

4 Reinvigorate professional learning.
Organizations facing a financial crunch when reopening may have a natural reflex to reduce professional learning time to maximize the time spent delivering programs. We recommend going slow to go fast. Double down on professional learning and the reflection time that it provides to rethink the quality, purpose and priorities of your work. In addition to safety protocols, program logistics, and inspiring new natural history content, make sure that your new team has plenty of time to get to know each other, to build rapport and a common vision, to define values, and to create a brave space for challenging conversations together. Ensure that professional learning includes time to: increase understanding of the history of racism in our field (and the U.S. more broadly), reflect on unconscious bias, build awareness of and strategies for confronting microaggressions, and focus teaching and learning on cultural relevance, multiple ways of knowing, and, as Paulo Friere says, “using education as a practice for freedom (Friere, 2018).” Take some time to learn directly from the communities that you will be inviting to your programs. While your whole team should have opportunities to attend conferences and workshops, it is important to prioritize the participation of professionals who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in these opportunities. For many Black, Indigenous, and People of Color on a mostly white staff, their only opportunity to find affinity spaces, empathy, mentors of Color, and relief from being a “minority” is to attend professional learning experiences outside your organization. Professional learning and networking that includes opportunities to engage in affinity spaces can provide for those with marginalized identities an antidote and healing to counteract the effects of isolation and oppression, and, for those with dominant identities, provides a learning space that does not rely on the emotional labor of the oppressed.

5 Redesign hiring practices.
When we’re open and begin to rebuild the capacity of the EE field, we can reconsider what expertise we want at every level of leadership in our organizations. We must prioritize experience and expertise advocating for and communicating about equity, lived experience in and with the communities we’re striving to reach, and models of leadership beyond those rooted in white supremacy culture and characteristics. Redesigning hiring practices includes redesigning job announcements and job descriptions, qualifications, hiring criteria, interview questions, performance evaluations, and where we recruit. These reimagined components will ring true if they mirror comparable revisions to our organizational mission, vision, values, goals and priorities. Changes to the racial and gender diversity of our directors, middle managers and instructors that six months ago could only happen gradually over years, could now be a stunning and welcome example of punctuated equilibrium. Our newly comprised teams will be uniquely suited to establish partnerships and design authentically culturally relevant programming with and for marginalized communities that we aim to serve first. Note to HR directors and hiring committees: you shouldn’t have any trouble finding qualified Professionals of Color to apply; they were among the first to be laid off at the outset of the pandemic!
6 Rebuild partnerships.
Establish authentic and mutually beneficial relationships with a broad range of environment-rich organizations across sectors including environmental justice, youth development, health and wellness, food justice, nutrition, transportation, clean water, clean air, and more. These organizations may not self-identify as being in the environmental education sector. Meet, read up, listen carefully, find the intersection of the goals of your programs with the needs and priorities of your partners. In addition, establish partnerships with school districts, county offices of education, and other mainstream education systems that can provide access to environmental education experiences for a broader range of learners. When we envision mutually beneficial relationships, rather than audiences or customers we can serve, we can dismantle a deeply rooted sense of saviorism that positions those with resources as benevolent bringers of outdoor experiences. Partnerships with community-based organizations and school systems can help us to identify vulnerable populations, and help us to understand what societal conditions have led to their vulnerability. If these genuine partnerships are established at the same time that we have redesigned hiring practices and reimagined our workplace, we can have the resources, expertise and lived experience within our organizations to build trust and expedite the efficacy of our work together.
7 Redefine the field.
With broader partnerships, inclusive workplace cultures, more equitable hiring practices, and a clear focus on equity at all levels of our work, we can redefine the field of environmental education — which has roots in the oppression and marginalization of People of Color — into a field that works towards ensuring that every person is able to access the healing benefits of spending time outdoors and connecting to nature. Environmental education can be a field that recognizes and honors that “environmental literacy” is comprised of the knowledge, skills, know-how, attitudes, values, and beliefs that are held by communities in unique and powerful ways.
Centering equity cannot be the work of one person or even one organization–individuals must work together to change policies, pedagogy, curriculum, culture, and systems. All of these steps are part of a systemic approach to centering equity and, in particular, racial equity. Prioritizing racial equity will enhance the environmental education field for us all. As BridgeSpan articulates, “deliberately prioritizing racial equity will further benefit the rest of society through the ‘curb-cut effect,’ which has shown that laws and programs designed for vulnerable groups have positive impacts on others (Cardichon, 2020).” Naming racism, creating antidotes to white supremacy, valuing many kinds of experience and expertise, and building strong partnerships will improve our relationships to each other and to nature, and make the environmental education field stronger, more resilient, and vastly more relevant.
None of these actions are new. Each of these ideas has been articulated, described in-depth, and called for by social justice and environmental justice leaders of Color in the environmental education field and beyond, for decades, often in ways that are under-recognized and under-supported. Their messages have been largely ignored or unseen by white-led and predominantly white organizations. There is nothing good about this pandemic: the loss of life, loss of jobs, loss of cherished organizations is staggering and hard to comprehend. Since there is no going back, let’s figure out how to use this moment, by establishing an environmental education field that is truly centered in racial equity and inclusion.

References:
Brune, M. (2020). Pulling down our monuments. Retrieved from https://www.sierraclub.org/michael-brune/2020/07/john-muir-early-history-sierra-club
Cardichon, J. (2020). Using federal stimulus funds to advance equity and opportunity. Learning Policy Institute, Washington, DC. Retrieved from https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/blog/using-federal-stimulus-funds-advance-equity-opportunity
Cloud, N. (2020). Your silence is a knee on my neck. Retrieved from https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/natasha-cloud-your-silence-is-a-knee-on-my-neck-george-floyd
Collins, M. A., Dorph, R., Foreman, J., Pande, A., Strang, C., & Young, A. (2020). A field at risk: The impact of COVID-19 on environmental and outdoor science education: Policy brief. Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley; California. Retrieved at https://www.lawrencehallofscience.org/sites/default/files/EE_A_Field_at_Risk_Policy_Brief.pdf.
Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury publishing USA. (First published in Brazil in 1968).
Okun, T. (n.d.) white supremacy culture. Retrieved from https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/White_Supremacy_Culture_Okun.pdf
Patel, S. M., Smith, A. H., & Martin, H. (2020). Racial equity implications of the covid-19 pandemic: Opportunities for philanthropic response. The Bridgespan Group. Retrieved at https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/library/philanthropy/racial-equity-implications-covid-19-philanthropy
Romero, V., Foreman, J., Strang, C., Rodriguez, L., Payan, R., & Moore Bailey, K. (2019). Examining equitable and inclusive work environments in environmental education: Perspectives from the field and implications for organizations. Berkeley, CA. Retrieved at http://beetlesproject.org/resources/equitable-and-inclusive-work-environments/

Jedda Foreman is Director of Environmental Literacy programs at the Lawrence Hall of Science. She is a passionate educator deeply invested in place-based and experiential education.

Rena Payan is the Senior Program Manager at Justice Outside, where she is tasked with working toward equity and representation in the outdoor field by supporting young adults from diverse backgrounds through training that will develop them into outdoor leaders, stronger community advocates, and more confident stewards of the Earth.

Laura Rodriguez is Chief Program Office at Justice Outside. Her passion for the outdoors is matched by her desire to effect change within the outdoor field; and to this end, she approaches the work of racial equity, inclusion, and cultural relevancy with resolve, authenticity, and empathy.

Craig Strang is Associate Director of the Hall and the Director of BaySci (The Bay Area Partnership for Science Education) and MARE (Marine Activities, Resources, and Education). He is also the BEETLES Principal Investigator.