Title: Philly-based climate justice
What: Middle School 8-session (once a week) unit
Where: Science Leadership Academy Middle School
Context: I am proposing a 7th/8th grade minicourse at Science Leadership Academy Middle School, a School District of Philadelphia project-based learning school on Drexel’s campus. Mini courses run for 8 weeks in the fall, winter, and spring once a week for about 80 mins. They are often run by community partners and outside folks while teachers have professional learning time in the afternoon on Wednesdays. I am planning on co-teaching it with at least one of my students in the Dragons’ Teach program: Hannah Dominguez. As part of a final project in one of my courses, she proposed a land-based environmental justice unit for middle school students in Philly that uses mapping and storying the land to support students in learning about environmental racism’s impact on our current neighborhood infrastructures and what has/can be done about it. Further, the climate pedagogies incubator has provided me a TON of resources (i.e., emotions-focused heuristics, short readings on environmental racism, land-based pedagogical practices) and ideas (i.e., getting learners out into the green spaces of Philly) to make this 8-session mini-unit impactful for students. I’ll explain those later in the document.
Learners will develop:
A perspective on the ongoing, disproportionate, effects, neighborhood by neighborhood, of histories of environmental racism in Philadelphia.
A vision for the kinds of steps current organizations and communities are taking for environmental and climate justice across the city.
An imagination of what actions communities and local government can take for a more just, climate-resilient, future.
Curious about climate change’s impact on Philly and how that may differ by neighborhood? Wondering what local organizations are doing or can do to slow the changes a rising global temperature is having on us? In this mini-course you will engage with the sciences of climate change and the disproportionate impacts it has on lands, waters, people and other living things across Philadelphia. The mini-course focuses on investigating what has and what can be done collectively to address climate and environmental justice.
Starting with our land: Imagining the history and future
Introductions and icebreaker (read poem, and on the board).
Brief sharing about how emotional thinking about climate justice can be!
Neighborhood wonder walk: What do you notice including what non-human organisms? What do you wonder? How do you imagine this land looked like long ago? What about in the distant future?
Return, read out the Land Acknowledgement (from Incubator week 4) and have a discussion
Resources
Wonder walk instructions and note-taking space (clipboards)
Learning In Places: Socioecological histories in place framework (for facilitators)
Introduction to environmental racism
Map review, reflection, discussion
Imagining a map (in groups): If we were to map the air quality by neighborhood, what would that look like? Why?
Resources
Arc-GIS created maps of greencover and average summer temperature of Philadelphia
Brief tutorial on using Arc-GIS
Field Visit: Local Urban Garden
In this field visit and discussion with Urban Gardeners and leaders, students will get to observe, reflect on, and ask questions about a local urban garden full of raised beds. They will finish by, in groups, documenting the relationship between urban gardens and communities; continues another wonder walk
Resources
An “urban garden” noticing protocol and reflection sheet with clipboards
Climate change: discussing, analyzing, and advocating for the future
This week, students will discuss the interlocking crises of environmental racism and climate change. They will leave with a usable definition of climate change and climate justice in the context of Philadelphia. GUEST: Local Climate activist
Resources
• Read together: A Letter to Adults p. 323-327 from All We Can Save
• Watch/read about Autumn Pelitier, Anishinaabe Youth Water Protector
Climate emotions
Start with a brief reflection on emotional response to Climate discussion
Researching a Philadelphia-based environmental justice issue to present to the rest of the group week 8 with a choice of how or what media to present (Groups of 3)
Resources
Presentation development
Researching a Philadelphia-based environmental justice issue to present to the rest of the group week 8 with a choice of how or what media to present (Groups of 3)
Environmental Justice WINS: a Jigsaw
JIGSAW Learners will explore resources about specific environmental justice success stories from around the world; goal is to create, as heterogeneous groups of 4 spanning all the topics, an explanation of lessons for a local issue or project (Philadelphia) of their choosing.
Resources
Wrap up
Final wonder-walk
Sharing Local Environmental Issue media
My experience of the incubator deeply inspired putting this mini-course together. First, I have incorporated quite a few resources in this initial design. For example, I was inspired by the incubator’s exploration of climate emotions to build in space for students to consider their own emotional responses to discussions of environmental racism and climate change. Further, in week 5, I plan on using the “5 stages” as a resource for reflecting and discussing. I also am hoping to use at least one resource from the Jigsaw activity we did. I also was inspired by incubators push to focus on the local lands and waters as a source of inquiry and knowledge generation along with a push to include local experts of different kinds. I am planning at least one field experience and one guest to come visit with students. I could see another iteration of this mini-course focusing even more on supporting youth to learn from/with the local experts and community leaders. Finally, the incubator inspired me to focus even more on developing with work with project-based pedagogies in mind.
I plan on co-teaching this mini-course with at least one of my undergraduate STEM Education minor students (Hannah). I see this as the first development of a reverberation, where it will inspire and inform how she works with young people in the future as a teacher or, possibly, as an informal science educator. I will also learn a TON working with her (as I already have). I also plan to use this mini-course as a model for my Project-Based Instruction course in the spring to challenge my students to consider developing their own mini-unit’s focused on climate change. Outside of Drexel, I hope to write and present about how youth interact with the mini-course – building on the bourgeoning scholarship on climate change education, equity, and justice. I am planning on trying to get IRB permission to do research on course during at least one of its iterations over the next few years. Further, I see this as an opportunity to move forward in my own journey as a climate change educator and teacher educator by putting a lot of my own ideas, theories, and interests into practice. I see this as a start to my Philadelphia-based climate pedagogies praxis, in the Freirean sense.