This book is about opening up different possibilities for changing the future by examining the relationship between learning and environmental justice across university-based activities, south-north collaborations, and grassroots movement building efforts. There are important efforts being made across these fronts to educate, analyze, and organize new generations of learners to confront — and transform — the intersecting social, environmental, economic and political dimensions of the Anthropocene. Yet, few of us consistently make the additional time needed to reflect and analyze critically what makes our efforts most effective — what works and what patterns need to be challenged, and what methods do we use to assess this. Presumably, some changes and improvements are adopted organically as we move forward with new projects and work; however, this book argues that without a more systematic approach to evaluation — especially one that centers the experiences of those on the front lines — institutionalized practices are not likely to change in thoughtful ways by themselves.
This book therefore brings together experiences for several differently located groups working toward environmental justice, with an interest in developing new generations and movements for social change. Through a case study approach, I document how different groups are learning to organize and organizing to learn in news ways, with the goal of social and institutional transformation. The central tension turns on understanding when learning ultimately supports the reproduction of the status quo and when, on the contrary, learning contributes to social, institutional, and environmental transformation toward justice and sustainability. The relationship between justice and learning is complex. There have been growing calls for better understanding and integrating justice into how environmental concerns are addressed — from energy transitions to urban resilience to sustainability education — yet the challenge is often framed in terms of adding content, with little attention to transforming the practices that organize learning what might constitute environmental justice in the first place. When a focus on changing processes does occur, there is often a failure to take seriously institutional inertia and power structures within as well as beyond the particular institution in question, playing into the status quo’s aggressive default position.
Much of the work discussed in this book is tied to my own experiences with projects at Arizona State University, where President Michael Crow is advancing his vision for the New American University. The basic tenets of this vision include (1) expanding revenues, especially through tuition from online learning and partnerships with the private sector, to compensate for, and accommodate, the ever decreasing state funding for higher education; (2) in conjunction with this, there is a major emphasis on including more students in the university’s machinery while providing better supports for student success; (3) putting the university in service to community needs; (4) related to the preceding point, creating conditions for large-scale transdisciplinary collaborations capable of addressing real-world issues, such as sustainability concerns; and (5) climbing the ranks nationally and internationally in terms of basic metrics (enrollment numbers, research expenditure, patents, etc.). I will discuss these tenets in more detail below, with sources to back up these claims. What is worth noting here at the outset is that while these five tenets are quite common at most universities, ASU has aggressively put them into action in ways that have been viewed largely as successful, but which require more careful analysis to fully grasp the direction — and implications — of the New American University.
The present moment is filled with potentialities, some of which will develop and emerge as prominent components of the future while others will not, depending on the conditions and actions of various groups. This is an inquiry into those conditions and actions, as seen through the work of community organizers, academics, Indigenous leaders, and early career scholars. The case studies include: the development of a Transformative Learning Working Group involved in a new Teaching Assistant training program, among other initiatives; an undergraduate Student Advisory Group focused on building student voice in curriculum design; an international working group on urban informality and nature-based solutions; a Latinx grassroots environmental justice organization; an Indigenous approach to pedagogical innovation in sustainability education; an online workshop series in holistic green infrastructure implementation using problem-based learning; and a scholar-activist group’s efforts to build new forms of north-south collaborations for political and ecological consciousness. Part of the claim of this book is that these projects cannot simply be understood as isolated events, though there are separated one from the other; rather they are connected to a central organizing practice that demands greater attention, as various groups with different starting points engage in a methodological experiment in the development of new social relations for new environmentally just futures.
Could there be an environmentally sustainable future without environmental justice? Increasingly, even large institutions are falling inline with what environmental justice (and other progressive) groups have been saying: no. That is, without environmental justice some groups are being systematically targeted, their rights, freedoms, and health sacrificed by design for the benefit of some other groups, which means that such a situation is unsustainable: the logic of sacrifice zones means that pollution is concentrated for some, while kept out of sight for others, and so long as this occurs, the actual objective environmental conditions of the world are in jeopardy. Just because the elite keep it out of sight doesn’t mean it’s not there. Achieving environmental sustainability means first achieving environmental justice — the two actually must occur simultaneously, and so it is critical to work on them together. And yet most ‘environmental’ learning has focused less on justice and more on lifestyles for the middle and upper classes: buying organic or otherwise environmentally friendly products, recycling, and nature recreation. These are not entirely bad choices, but they essentially make up a rich consumer-friendly façade upon which the actual conditions of degradation and injustice continue to worsen. Learning about environmental justice and developing environmentally just approaches to sustainability are thus critical steps to achieving just and sustainable futures for all.
Now universities as institutions are jumping on a new bandwagon of justice. In response to social movement organizing (including the recent work of groups in support of the movement for Black lives), nearly every university (among other companies) have had to demonstrate what they are doing to address racism. Yet, in almost all these cases the response has been entirely about promoting and situating the university already as a leader in regards to racism, without acknowledging the ongoing failures to systemically understand and address race, among other related issues of class and gender. In other words, elements of social justice principles are now being coopted by universities to increase their credibility as institutions of authority, without actually confronting the problematic patterns that organize how learning typically takes place in these institutions. In fact, universities are in a fight for the viability of their own institutional futures, which the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed in stark ways.
Learning does not happen in a vacuum. Learning is already conditioned to take place in specific ways, many of which are designed to justify the status quo and confirm beliefs that everything is happening as it should be already. For new learning to occur, new learning conditions must be created. In this study I focus on the organization of learning toward environmental justice, recognizing that different future possibilities necessarily require conditions that support fundamentally different ways of knowing. Studying the organization of learning is always an unfinished project because learning happens all the time, everywhere — at least, potentially — so it is not limited to any one setting (such as formal education) or any one group of people’s dominant ways of knowing. Rather, it is critical to look at what counts as learning in different places across (and within) different groups of people — what steps are being taken for learning toward environmental justice and how do the steps that various groups are taking add up as a dynamic interaction and possible collective strategy for environmentally just futures?
To intentionally set limits for the present inquiry — some parameters for what is to be studied and how — I have developed several case study chapters that examine what different groups are learning about environmental justice. This is not just a question about contents — it is more fundamentally about the process of organizing learning toward greater environmental justice outcomes. Learning for environmental justice needs to be transformative — it needs to help give rise to fundamentally different people, different subjectivities, and different forms of economic, social, and community organization — it needs to give up or reframe some of what has been learned in the past, if it is going to aid and abet the development of radically different futures. The first case study examines how this learning is happening through student-led initiatives at Arizona State University, with a focus on the College of Global Futures, which houses the School of Sustainability, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and the School of Adaptive Complex Systems. How are students learning to practice or rehearse the kinds of environmentally just futures that are needed to push the present course onto a new trajectory? The second case study is at the level of international collaborations across south-north research communities, with a focus on urban informality, nature-based solutions, as well as scholar-activist analysis of the connections between lived experiences and macro-economics of capitalist trade. The third case study is about learning at the level of grassroots activism, with a focus on environmental justice group, Chispa Arizona, working in the central Phoenix valley.
I posit ecological consciousness as different ways of knowing, including activist, academic, and Indigenous teachings. Across these different ways of knowing and case study projects, there is a key question about how to break the normalization of uneven power relations, how to unlock further learning and social change? What does it look like to challenge that normalization, to make room for alternative sets of relations to organize learning that support a much broader range of human development pathways? How might these alternatives be implemented in specific contexts now, how do they rest on fundamentally different ways of knowing, and when and how might they complement each other in a wider process of building broad-based social movements? Another cross-cutting theme is about intergenerational learning, with a focus on the tension between learning from the experiences of older generations and having the dominant inequitable patterns imposed on new generations for the purposes of propping up existing forms of dominance, hence the need for new generations to discover their own pathways. In the academic case studies, there is a focus on what it means to prepare early career scholars to become the next generation of leaders, and in the context of grassroots organizing there are questions about how to engage more people (outreach) in environmental justice work in ways that are relevant to working class struggle, racism, sexism, and struggles over what Harsha Walia calls “border imperialism.”
Before diving into the literature review and case studies, I want to say something about how I arrived at this point of asking these questions in the first place — this was itself an achievement and I want to share a bit about how I got here, as a way of situating myself in this inquiry. When I was a doctoral student at Ryerson University in Toronto, I attended an ‘obligatory’ teaching assistant training and orientation with at least a hundred other graduate students hired as markers and tutorial leaders. Student engagement and student success were cornerstone phrases from our university president then, and the faculty member selected to lead this training orientation talked about the different ways that we as teaching assistants should be engaging our students in meaningful small group discussion to support their success. The irony was that this message was in total contradiction with the medium in practice at that moment: there we were in a giant auditorium sitting for three hours listening to this one white man pontificating his powerpoint slides from a podium at the bottom center of the room about the importance of us TAs engaging our undergraduate students. To be fair, perhaps others in the crowd found this orientation useful — it was on one level an achievement that the university felt obligated to make room for any TA training and orientation at all. When I was doing my Master’s degree at Trent university, I remember finding out a week before class started that I would be a TA leading tutorials in area I felt was outside my expertise, with absolutely no training provided, besides a meeting with other TAs and the professors just days before the first class in which, to my shock at the time, we didn’t even discuss what I should be doing as a TA. My questions were met with empathy and warmth from professors as well as support and shared concern from other graduate students, but mostly my role was carved out already in the machinery of undergraduate learning: I just had to be in the room with my tutorial group at the right time every week and do a good enough job to not have anyone complain too much. The truth is that many TAs handle this role very well, and the format — a small tutorial, not a large lecture auditorium — can be conducive to undergraduate student learning. But being somewhat proactive and genuinely interested in how I would plan out my role as a TA, I approached the university’s center for instructional development, where I was encouraged to write a short article outlining my plan for using small and large group discussion as a tutorial format. This was the beginning of my love and curiosity about teaching and learning.
Later that year I was hired to research and write two-pagers on specific teaching practices, and these handouts would become part of the center’s new teaching assistant training program made up of a series of workshops with a certificate of completion at the end. I wrote the articles and completed the program, and when I finished my Master’s I applied for a job at Ryerson University’s Learning and Teaching Office, an entirely new position called TA/GA Program Coordinator, where I would be responsible for spearheading the university’s first ever TA/GA training program across all five faculties (Arts, Engineering, Business, Communication & Design, and Community Services). I was very lucky that at the very same moment, another TA training initiative was just being launched specifically for TAs in the Faculty of Arts, led by small group of faculty, staff and students. Alan Sears, a full professor with a long career of intentional pedagogical practice, Gretchen Bingham, leading the Student Success Center with creative train-the-trainer approaches, Tanya Lewis, the director of the Student Access Center, and Kris Erickson, a graduate student developing a community arts and photography as a practice approach to pedagogy — this group became my mentoring community, where I learned about how to subvert dominant approaches in favor of a pedagogy of liberation within a community of care. I learned about popular education, critical pedagogy, and problem-based learning, and I took some of my first steps toward understanding pedagogy beyond the surface level of instructional design, toward an analysis and response to the structural machinery and power relations within which the role of the TA rested. From thinking about the institutional context surrounding the work TAs were expected to perform (show up and lead tutorial discussion or mark a hundred essays in a week, for example), I began to make sense of some of the feelings and challenges I faced as a TA, and as a TA program coordinator.
So when I decided after a couples years to do a PhD, with a funding package that included TA work, I had had enough experience not to be wowed by the TA training and orientation that consisted of listening to a faculty member tell me about the importance of student engagement — because I knew we could do this in much better ways, I had experienced some of them myself. And I was determined to practice and develop my skills and analysis through my own participation in action-research projects with my peers.
In my PhD, I learned about the language of “critical pedagogy” and “transformative learning” in the Marxist tradition of Brazilian literacy educator, Paulo Freire. I borrow a lot from this language. I also borrow a lot from the kind of institutional ethnography developed by Dorothy Smith and colleagues using women’s perspectives and feminist analysis to uncover the power structures — and associated analytical concepts — that help reveal the hegemonic status of patriarchal thinking in society. This work recognizes that individuals and whole groups of people are already born into institutionalized contexts that shape their experiences and movements in the world, such that part of their learning must fundamentally be about mapping those spaces and social relations themselves. This work helps make power visible in the form of social relations, intertextual spaces, and architectural practices that organize human movement in particular ways, raising critical questions about possible alternative configurations led by and for the people (the women, the workers, the students, etc.). I had started learning about some of these patterns in my undergraduate years in cultural anthropology, with a particular interest in Indigenous histories. In my Master’s degree in Canadian Studies and Native Studies, I began developing in more depth an understanding of how I was myself born into a white male world, as I started to recognize its parameters as well as the possibilities for alternatives where Indigenous, feminist, and other forms of social relations were emerging.
My postdoc years were primarily efforts to put into practice the insights I had gained so far, in the form of small action research projects, which I will discuss further in chapters that follow. Now as a faculty member and Lecturer in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, I want to use some new found job security to develop my program of work at a more conscious level, which will improve my teaching, research and service activities and effectiveness.
My experiences have shown me that power is normalized over and over again through encounters that tend toward reinforcing dominant assumptions that naturalize the status quo because we are physically and ideologically channeled toward particular movements routinely, over and over again, such that over time the diverse ways of knowing that humans are capable of practicing are shut down in favor of a much more limited set of practices that favor the reproduction of dominant power relations. And yet pushing back against this imposition is a constant struggle renewed over and over by the energies of different people interrupting this reproduction and learning what it takes to so intentionally and at larger and larger scales of organizing work. Sometimes this happens organically, out of necessity, and sometimes this organic necessity is shut down, causing pain, isolation, further self-censorship, and despair. It is time to amplify the number of people learning how to break that cycle, to make explicit and learn from the pedagogies and practices that build capacity for a movement of movements.
ecologicalconsciousnessdotorg 