Designing Justice-Centered and Intersectional Environmental and Climate Learning Across a Professional Network

Abstract

In our current socio-ecological and political realities, educational systems must be transformed to align with ongoing social, environmental, and climate justice movements. In particular, these movement spaces offer guiding principles regarding the interconnectedness of oppressive structures and the possibilities of moving toward more just and thriving futures (e.g., Murdock, 2020; Rhodes, 2022; L. Thomas, 2022). In this dissertation, I draw upon sociopolitical learning theories to explore how educators, educational leaders, and other adult allies can work across scales to support emancipatory learning and collective action. This research is situated within ClimeTime, a statewide initiative to strengthen climate education through the design of professional learning and open-access resources by educational leaders located across different institutional contexts. Leveraging critical qualitative methods, including critical ethnography (Madison, 2005) and critical design ethnography (Barab et al., 2004), I weave together stories of educational leaders’ personal justice-related learning journeys as well as their engagement in the collaborative efforts of the professional network. These accounts reveal how rich histories of intentional, lifelong learning shape their justice-centered commitments and enactments. In addition, I provide in-depth narratives from two ClimeTime projects: the STEM Storylines (project-based, action-centered, and transdisciplinary curricular resources for elementary learners) and the Climate Justice League (a professional learning community supporting teachers to incorporate social justice connections in their science classrooms). These case studies demonstrate the importance of critically attuned and relational professional support structures to nurture teachers’ power as facilitators of liberatory learning experiences and community-rooted changemakers. Through sharing these stories, I also highlight how collective sense-making, dialogue and storytelling, and cross-pollination within sustained network spaces like ClimeTime are needed to disrupt oppressive logics within educational systems and move toward more intersectionally just possibilities. In these ways, designing learning for socio-ecological well-being requires multi-level and multi-sector transformations and the cultivation of holistic ecosystems of support and action.