Introduction: Co-creating a Faculty Development Model

Environmental politics is a multidisciplinary field of study, which explores the drivers of – and responses to – environmental problems. Depending on the instructor’s areas of expertise, courses in environmental politics can cut across levels of analysis (local to global) and cover a wide range of topics, including climate change, biodiversity loss, trade in toxic chemicals, marine pollution, fisheries management, food and agriculture, forest and land degradation, and many others. As the field of environmental justice – which broadly speaking interrogates the procedural and distributional impacts of environmental issues, while also emphasizing the importance of recognition of various viewpoints, identities and life experiences, and pointing to reparative/restorative justice – has grown in parallel to environmental politics, it has become clear that politics and justice cannot be disentangled in the way we think about, teach, and study environmental issues. Teaching environmental politics demands that instructors interrogate how environmental problems – and responses to them – disproportionately impact different groups of people and communities across lines of identity, such as race, gender, class, etc. The field of environmental justice provides tools to do that.

This book originated in a desire to help instructors more effectively integrate concepts of environmental justice into the existing environmental politics curriculum using accessible, flexible, evidence-based pedagogical approaches that stimulate student engagement and enhance student learning. The multidisciplinary team of collaborators transformed this book into one that also offers instructors from any discipline – from ecology to history to economics and beyond – pedagogical strategies that can be used to center equity and justice not only in teaching practices but in the design of courses and curricula. This expansion in the scope of the book is particularly fitting for the subject matter, as centering equity and justice in the classroom – both as subject-matter and as pedagogical praxis – is an essential component of environmental justice.

The goals of this book are, therefore, threefold: (1) to provide instructors from diverse disciplines with concrete projects (i.e., assignments, class activities) for teaching environmental politics and justice; (2) to ground those projects in cross-disciplinary, evidence-based pedagogical approaches that center equity and justice in student learning; and (3) to develop a model for community-based faculty development that can communicate those pedagogical approaches across disciplines.

This book brings together exceptional scholars with deep commitments to growth in their own teaching. Collaborators were assembled from fields as wide ranging as political science, the arts, economics, astrophysics, history, sociology, political economy, geography, anthropology, city and regional planning, Native American studies, engineering, online education, ecology, pyrogeography, biology, and political ecology. These scholar-teachers were invited to collectively explore and learn how members of this diverse and specialized community bring issues of equity and justice into their teaching. Critical to this experiment was the interdisciplinary editorial team, which combined environmental politics expertise (Jinnah) with research-based expertise in the field of teaching and learning (Dubreuil, Greene, and Foster). This editorial team guided the interdisciplinary team of collaborators through a series of community meetings that sought to build a community of learners through scaffolded conversations about varied disciplinary approaches to equity in teaching and learning and, ultimately, how those approaches can be woven into our teaching of environmental politics and justice.

This book presents the results of sustained and varied engagements between these scholar–teachers: a set of teaching products that can be integrated into many different types of courses, from those highly specialized in environmental politics and justice to those that seek to integrate a single module on an environmental issue, such as climate change or sustainability. As we discuss in more detail below, some of the contributors to this community of learners developed specific projects (i.e., assignments, class activities), while others prepared reflections on the practice of teaching in ways that center equity and justice in student learning. While the former can be assigned to students off-the-shelf, the latter present ideas and approaches that can be integrated into teaching practice in multiple ways, from improving an existing assignment in a course to transforming a scholar–teacher’s entire pedagogical approach.

The novelty in our approach was twofold. First, the premise of this multidisciplinary experiment is that we are all acclimatized within tacit disciplinary norms and practices. We so absorb these norms that we often perpetuate a “hidden curriculum” for students, who may end up baffled by all that is taken for granted in terms of prior knowledge when they first engage with our field. As faculty, we also internalize disciplinary practices with respect to our approaches to research and teaching. In bringing together such a multidisciplinary group, we were able to cross-pollinate and think expansively about teaching practice, uncovering differences we were not even aware of across our fields of inquiry. Second, although our community conversations were all about things that the collaborators were already doing in their teaching, we elevated their teaching practices, design choices, and activities to the level of collegial and collaborative discussion, including the willingness to explore and question together the goals and techniques that guide effective approaches. In short, our experiment has been to gather highly interdisciplinary researchers in community for a conversation about – and deep investigation of – their teaching practices, and to surface that conversation for this larger reading audience. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first or one of the first attempts to bring together leading scholars in a field to share teaching strategies, innovations, and experiences, commenting on and collectively responding to each other’s teaching work in ways all too often reserved exclusively for our activities as scholars.

This experiment takes place at a time of widespread scrutiny of the teaching mission of research-intensive institutions of all kinds, a new and overdue attention to ensuring educational equity in institutions of higher education. It comes amid ongoing questions about whether colleges and universities are preparing students to meet the most pressing social, environmental, and political issues that confront us. Valuable work is being done to “professionalize” teaching in higher education, including bringing the science of learning to teacher preparation and course and curriculum design, and leveraging data to support student success. Indeed, three of the co-editors of this volume work full time in this emerging arena. Yet we all agree and have found from long experience that the most transformative work around higher education teaching and learning happens in communities of practice, where experienced educators – who may not have a foundation in evidence-based teaching practices – learn, innovate, and develop their teaching together, supported by those of us who spend our time deep in the research on teaching, learning, and equity. This book, then, can be seen as a kind of illustration of, and test case for, what can emerge when leading researchers who are also dedicated educators and mentors join together with teaching and learning specialists and researchers, in community, to transform their practice. As bell hooks notes,

“one of the dangers we face in our educational systems is the loss of a feeling of community, not just the loss of closeness among those with whom we work and with our students, but also the loss of a feeling of connection and closeness with the world beyond the academy.” (hooks, 2013)

To make this book, we set out to restore some of that sense of community, as well as the sense of connection and commitment to the larger world, in an effort not only to become better teachers, but to reimagine our labor as academics in a way that is joyful, sustainable, beneficial, and transformative for ourselves, our students, and the world beyond the academy, in hooks’ terms.

The Process: Community-Based, Asset-Based Faculty Development for Teaching and Learning

Environmental politics and justice courses are ideal sites from which to deploy the “High Impact Practices” that George Kuh and others have defined as essential to the successful transformation of higher education pedagogy in this century. Ticking nearly all of Kuh’s high impact boxes, these courses are by definition interdisciplinary and problem based. They put students into contact with real-world issues with global scale impacts, which require responses grounded in diverse archives, data sets, and methodologies. Solutions to such urgent global crises require collaborative approaches that draw on research in multiple fields, and these as yet unsolved global challenges demand critical thinking of the first order. Environmental politics courses are perfectly suited to inquiry-based learning, in which students define as well as research the “big questions” they will tackle, and draw on both quantitative and qualitative data to produce final projects that take shape in multiple media. The questions they research, moreover, have immediate and ever more pressing urgency to the lives of students enrolled in these courses.

The authors and collaborators gathered here stood out to us for the many ways in which they were already engaging students with innovative approaches to teaching, including simulations, games, role-playing exercises, targeted mentoring programs, and collaborative projects crossing science and policy. Nonetheless, we know that while academics communicate and collaborate as a matter of course concerning their research, we rarely come together to compare notes, share practices, and learn from each other when it comes to our teaching. This project provided an opportunity for just that type of engagement, and to share the outcomes of those engagements with others who care deeply about student learning.

Our approach is important as it speaks to another, guiding purpose of this book: to develop a model for community-based, collaborative faculty development work that could be used in any discipline or field. We, therefore, take some time here to explain how we built this community and how the process both enhanced the collective output of this project and derived benefits for individual collaborators, in hopes that this information might be useful to others.

The project was built around two community discussions. The first was a three-hour online engagement in June 2021. The second was a day-long blended meeting, with some participants online and some in-person at UC Santa Cruz in October 2021. We used pre- and post-meeting surveys to identify community needs and interests and shaped the meeting agendas based on those surveys. In this way, and in being responsive in real time to community needs, our collaborators co-created the community discussion design with the editors of the volume in order to make it maximally useful and interesting to them.

Specifically, in advance of the community discussions, we asked collaborators a pair of questions to help us focus the discussion along the lines of established literatures in the learning sciences (Box 0.1).

Based on the survey results, we identified readings for the first community discussion focused on cultivating students’ sense of belonging and engaging with alternative forms of knowing (Box 0.2). During the meeting, we used these readings as context, inviting collaborators to draw on their own lived experience to explore, for example, barriers and catalysts to enhancing students’ sense of belonging. Collaborators were also asked to prepare and post to our shared drive a one-page concept note related to their proposed chapter, so that participants could arrive already informed of and by each other’s existing approaches and philosophy around teaching environmental justice.

Also at the first community discussion, one collaborator (Suarez) presented a proposal for how his project on using humor to enhance learning could be integrated across the book. This resulted in a series of cartoons that readers will find dispersed throughout the volume and an interactive online supplement (https://bit.ly/TeachingEnv-Humor), which deploy the tools from Suarez’s chapter to the central concepts of other chapters.

In advance of the second community discussion, collaborators posted draft chapters on a shared online drive and all collaborators were invited to comment on as many or as few of the chapters as they wished. The co-editors also provided feedback on all chapters. As part of the editing process, the co-editors used the tagging function in Google Drive to catalyze conversations between collaborators and to identify areas where we saw emergent conversations across chapters. This yielded an active asynchronous online conversation among collaborators in advance of the community discussion and primed us to have deeper conversations at the meeting itself. Based on these conversations, we divided participants into small groups and asked collaborators to engage preliminarily with the draft chapters of those in their small group in advance of the second meeting.

During the second community discussion itself, small groups facilitated by co-editors and some collaborators with teaching and learning expertise (Dunkin, Tassio) met to discuss their chapters in the context of a series of questions we provided based on survey data and the pre-meeting asynchronous online discussions (Box 0.3).

As an essential element of our “learning community” development, we also provided plenty of opportunities for informal connection and community-building among collaborators throughout the process. At the outset we invited everyone to post a self-narrative to our shared drive that was more reflective of their identity and how they come to their work than a typical name, affiliation, and key scholarly achievements bio would be. These self-narratives were beautiful and helped us to feel like we knew one another before we met in our shared Zoom space for the first community discussion. They opened the door for more thoughtful and vulnerable conversations among many folks who had not previously met one another, and exposed shared experiences such as birthplace, spiritual practice, or family history that might not otherwise have come up at a scholarly meeting. We allowed for further holistic community-building by hosting pre- and post-meeting dinners at the second community discussion and by hosting periodic drop-in online office hours where collaborators could stop by to discuss any element of the project, or just to say hello (folks did both). At the other end of this journey, we also hope to keep conversations alive with an interactive platform on our website, through which readers who deploy these projects can engage in continued discussion with collaborators about their experience. Additional ideas we considered pursuing that others might wish to try included providing meal delivery for online participants during the meetings, hosting a book launch event to bring collaborators together again for conversation, reflection and community-building, and presenting on our process in this project at a disciplinary conference on environmental politics or justice.

It’s worth noting that this project was born and completed during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2022). The pandemic forced us to reflect on and significantly transform our own pedagogical approach. We had to think creatively about how to connect collaborators and produce meaningful engagement amid the incredibly heavy emotional and professional loads all humans, and especially teachers, were carrying during this time. We had to think carefully about how to productively engage with each other in a hybrid space, and how to use technology effectively to build community at a time when the vast majority of public discourse inside and outside the academy insisted that online spaces were inimical to relationship-building. We thought deeply about how we would use people’s time with each other and we were willing to be guided by the priorities and assets of the group. We had to be open to the direction in which the community would take us. This included listening to and incorporating the many ways in which the topic of justice was already emerging as a primary preoccupation for teachers and learners engaging with each other during COVID-19. The ideas gathered in this book are, therefore, the fruits of shared labor among our 28 collaborators, and a testament to the ways in which these scholars formed themselves and their practices around collective goals in productive dialogue with – and not despite – the pandemic context.

In constituting our collaborators as a learning community, our hope was to enable them to improve upon the already bold educational experiments that many had tried individually in their classrooms, and to consider how these pedagogical experiments might translate to other courses and institutional settings. We were surprised and delighted by the generosity, mutual respect, creativity, and playfulness that the members of our learning community brought to the project and to each other. Those editors who already work in the area of faculty development had some prior experience of the way that voluntary communities of academics gathering to “work on” their teaching quickly emerge as sites of radical collaboration that bring out qualities in colleagues that may be less often seen in the scholarly conference or department meeting. Yet this community in particular, sharing scholarly and political commitments as well as pedagogical vulnerabilities and aspirations, was uniquely able, in our experience, to create a climate of sincerity, mutual benefit, and genuine transformation.

We hope that readers will adopt our community-oriented, collaborative approach – both with their students and in joining the collaborative conversation about teaching we hope this becomes. This book is about more than talking about environmental justice. It demonstrates the natural fit between scholar–teachers willing to collaborate in a new way and the innovative pedagogical work that the commitments and principles they surfaced bring forth. The focus on equity and justice that emerged from this collaboration could, with a different community or set of participants in different fields, have surfaced a different and equally defining, shared, guiding theme or question. Whereas our focus was on environmental politics and justice, this model for faculty development can be translated across disciplines and countries.

ORGANIZATION OF THE VOLUME

This volume is divided into two main part. Part I aims to provide instructors with concrete classroom projects (i.e., assignments, exercises, etc.) to teach environmental politics and justice empirically and conceptually, and to help instructors think critically about developing learning outcomes through such projects. These project chapters are authored by exceptional environmental politics and justice scholars who are already attending closely to and constantly innovating in their teaching. These projects present off-the-shelf instructions for specific activities (i.e., projects) that instructors can deploy in their class- rooms. These chapters offer not only project instructions but also background readings for instructors and students with various levels of relevant experience in the topic, as well as reflections on things like common challenges and equity considerations that should be addressed in adapting these projects to specific learning environments. We offered contributors to this portion of the volume a loosely consistent structure for their contributions, in order to make them readily adaptable by other scholar–educators.

Part II looks outside the environmental politics and justice specialization to reflect on what we can learn about teaching this subject from other disciplines and ways of knowing the world. These “reflection” chapters are authored by scholar–teachers in fields that do not necessarily engage in environmental politics and justice in their classrooms, but who are leaders in their centering of equity and justice in student learning in their respective disciplines. The reflections help us think about how to improve our teaching by integrating strategies such as mindfulness and critically engaged art; and by thinking carefully about things like how addressing the hidden curriculum, alternative ways of knowing, and careful design of online course content can impact student learning. Readers will find concepts from these reflection chapters woven throughout the project chapters. The co-editors and collaborators have produced these reflection chapters through the set of curated conversations and community discussions detailed above, which were designed to bring out the pedagogical strengths of each assignment or class activity and address potential ways to translate these activities into courses that may be larger, smaller, or at a different level of the curriculum. Readers can also look to these reflection chapters for more general ideas about how to improve the existing curriculum in their courses – environmental politics and justice related, or otherwise.

Specifically, Part I presents 11 projects. Chapter 1 begins with Kemi George’s exploration of using music as a basis for knowledge production. He presents a research project through which students learn to understand the ways in which subaltern groups can produce knowledge about the world through music, how this knowledge challenges hegemonic conceptions about the natural environment, and how this affects policy engagement, advocacy, and mobilization. This is followed by David Pellow’s invitation to students to learn about and engage in creative, imaginative discussions of current and future environmental and climate epochs by thinking through the pros and cons of key frameworks, and to propose their own frameworks that might more effectively and accurately capture the most important social and ecological dynamics of our time and of possible futures. Manisha Anantharaman and Jennifer Lee Tucker then present a project that critically examines informal waste work and economies that can help students rethink sustainable development practice, moving from intervention to reparation. In Chapter 4 Prakash Kashwan presents a public engagement project, rooted in a critical pedagogy and an ethic of care. Kate O’Neill and Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis then outline an online United Nations climate simulation designed to foreground equity and justice. In Chapter 5 Sikina Jinnah and Juan Moreno-Cruz present an ethics bowl approach to discussing highly controversial topics – in their case, climate engineering. Alero Akporiaye and D.G. Webster then present a project aimed at helping students better understand how power works in natural resource governance settings – in this case, mineral exploitation. In Chapter 8 Beth Rose Middleton Manning presents her “Keepers of the Flame” project, which seeks to engage students and other participants in Indigenous methodologies of experiential, reciprocal, respectful learning, with a focus on cultural fire as a land stewardship tool. Pablo Suarez then offers in Chapter 9 a set of innovative, humor-based approaches aimed at fostering creativity, connectedness and candor when confronting complex issues. Elizabeth Allison explains in Chapter 10 how contemplative practice can be integrated into the classroom; and in Chapter 11 Ravi Rajan and Flora Lu outline their “Global Environmental Justice Observatory” project, which supports students by emphasizing the necessity of high-quality research, persuasive writing, conviction, passion, purpose, and an acute awareness of both history and current events.

Part II’s eight chapters begin with Crystal Kolden’s reflection on how her research on wildfire disasters has cemented her conviction that biophysical sciences must teach environmental justice. This is followed by Kathryne J. Daniel and Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz’s reflection on how dismantling hierarchies in the classroom, as well as listening and emphasizing relationship building, can disrupt the status quo and yield a more inclusive approach to science. Chessa Adsit-Morris then explores the potential for socially engaged art to inform a re-evaluation and reimagination of higher education pedagogy post-COVID-19. In Chapter 15 Juan Moreno-Cruz details his own introspective search for a more critical way of teaching economics that convinced him that the way forward lies in introducing feminist economics concepts, approaches, and lenses into the traditional curriculum. Kristy Kroeker similarly reflects on her own journey, which led to her realization that connecting scholarship in the natural sciences to solutions requires inclusive engagement and authentic relationships with community counterparts developed over time – relationships built upon understanding, empathy, and trust. In Chapter 17 Robin Dunkin advocates for an approach to teaching science that explicitly teaches students how to get comfortable with and move through the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing. In Chapter 18 Michael Tassio reflects on the benefits, concerns, and opportunities for online learning that he observed as a result of the pandemic and discusses the potential of online education to drive toward equality, equity and justice. Finally, in Chapter 19 Sapana Doshi and Tracey Osborne offer us a reflection on how awareness-based mind–body practices can support transformative education that is aligned with environmental and social justice. They explain how somatic and mindfulness practices can unleash the potential of learning in the classroom in order to foster the conditions for making change in the world.

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