Learning with and through Emotion: A Case Study of Outdoor Environmental Educators Engaging with Eco/climate Emotions Towards Climate Justice Possibilities

Abstract

The field of Environmental Education (EE) is facing multiple crises around the climate crisis and an overdue recognition of the racist and ableist assumptions within EE spaces (Bang et al., 2014; Miller, Schmidt). These two issues are profoundly intertwined with emotions of anger, fear, shame, and disillusionment. In EE teaching and learning, focusing on what I describe as eco/climate emotions—the range of emotions people experience in relation to environment, environmental injustice, the climate crisis, and their intersectionalities in EE—provides opportunities for critical reassessment of environmental ideologies and teaching practices that prioritize Whiteness. With this dissertation, I rely on Intersectional Environmentalism (Thomas, 2020), sociopolitical learning theories, and embodied learning practices, to examine how engaging with emotion can motivate, shift, and transform environmental educators’ teaching and learning towards more just practices. The study took place in collaboration with Cedar Harbor (CH), a non-profit EE organization that provides both school programs and a graduate program for environmental educators. Utilizing methods of critical design ethnography and social design experimentation, I provide a case study of environmental educators walking in conversation to build critical theories through emotion and interaction with the land, engaging with emotion as a process of learning through contradiction toward individual and institutional change, and embracing pedagogical climate courage. Weaving together their stories of tension, community, and belonging allowed emotion to be centered as a sense-making tool necessary for cultivating EE spaces of acceptance, justice, transformation, and thriving. Providing this critical space for engaging with emotion in embodied ways with the lands and waters, positions EE as having an integral role in the environmental and climate justice movement.