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Oral Presentation Session
Reviewed by: Council on Anthropology and Education
Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students, Those Involved in Mentoring Activities
Primary Theme: Environment and Environmental Inequality
Secondary Theme: The Political
How do dynamics of change interface with visions of science and environmental education? Discourse about change may index social and cultural changes, climatic/biotic changes, or changes in naturecultures that resist human-nonhuman binaries. In classrooms and other educative spaces, including formal and informal institutions and beyond, learners and educators alike adapt to dynamic conditions in the world “outside.” We also continuously grapple with questions of diversity, equity, and inclusion that may require new practices of teaching and learning. Social movements and political participation can become sites of learning about science and the environment. These sites of learning may challenge conventional definitions of educational experiences. Political and ideological diversity and change may also challenge us to rethink which learners are “appropriate” subjects of environmental or science education, what curriculum “counts,” and what models of research conduct are best for cultivating ethical relations. Processes of change, resilience, and adaptation are inherent to ecosystems and human-nonhuman relationships. In addition, within the disciplinary spaces of science, change appears as discovery, contest, and refinement. How might science and environmental education conceptualize, respond to, engage with, instigate, or find itself implicated in these dynamics of change?
Papers in Part One of this two-part session, organized by CAE Committee #13 Science and Environmental Education, address questions of learning and education in human-ecological relationships that arise in the context of activism and efforts for community transformation and justice. The papers address learning and education in diverse settings including elementary, secondary, and higher education; gardens; and other sites of community action. They address how educators and learners can engage meaningfully in projects of social-ecological change that may require novel arrangements or innovative pedagogical and learning practices. Drawing on (and contributing new perspectives on) diverse theories and methodologies to frame their studies--wayfaring, agroecology, constellational understandings, youth participatory action research, positionality, and precarity, to name a few--these papers reveal how power shapes teaching and learning, including the cultivation of agency in new places. They also indicate how education can highlight hopeful pathways toward just human-ecological relations in a world of change.
Erin Allaman
Associate Professor of Education
Colorado Mountain College
Austin Cruz
University of Arizona
Trevor Durbin
Kansas State University
K. Michelle Glowa
Assistant Professor
California Institute of Integral Studies
Corey Knox
Education Researcher
University of Arizona, College of Education
Tanner Vea
Assistant Professor
Pennsylvania State University
Tanner Vea
Assistant Professor
Pennsylvania State University
Sarah Stapleton
Assistant Professor
University of Oregon