Attending to equity
Critical Pedagogy & Justice-Oriented Science Pedagogy
- Article, Educational resource, Research
Critical Pedagogy and Praxis
Developed by revolutionary Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire in his seminal 1970 publication “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (Freire, 1970), critical pedagogy is an approach to education that emphasises the development of critical thinking skills and consciousness about issues of social justice. It encourages all those involved in the education project at hand (learners, educators and other stakeholders) to use this critical consciousness to question societal norms and existing power structures, and to act to change them. It seeks to increase awareness of sociopolitical issues and promotes engagement in dialogue and active efforts to address societal inequalities.
A key concept in critical pedagogy is “praxis” – a term which encompasses ongoing interaction between reflection and action. Freire posits that the words used in a dialogic learning setting must contain both dimensions, as “there is no transformation without action” (p. 60). Without action, words can become “idle chatter” or “blah” (p. 60); however, without reflection, action can become activism as “action for action’s sake”, making dialogue impossible.
This is relevant in the context of LEVERS as the central commitment is one of reflective and considered meaningful action in relation to climate change. Adopting critical pedagogy in teaching and learning within LEVERS calls for reflection on the (in)justice dimension of climate change, and a subsequent commitment to action.
The theoretical underpinning of LEVERS also incorporates the ideas of expansive learning and transformative agency developed by Engeström, Sannino and co-authors (e.g. Engeström, 1998, Engeström & Sannino, 2010, Sannino, 2016). Expansive learning emphasises collaborative and transformative processes through which groups of learners actively participate in reshaping their understanding and practices through reflection on historical and present-day activity systems, and subsequent actions. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines agency as ‘the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power’ (Engeström et al., 2022). Transformative agency (Sannino, 2016) emphasises the capacity of individuals to contribute to and lead meaningful and transformative changes in their working and learning contexts, fostering a sense of empowerment and ownership. In particular, it focuses on the individual’s capacity to act not just to reproduce or maintain the existing state of affairs, but to challenge and transform it – it always asks “Agency for what?” (Engeström et al., 2022)
LEVERS also recognises the need to move away from traditional views of science-as-progress, and economic growth and globalisation as the ultimate goals for a “modern” society, and instead to adopt a post-objectivist critical stance. Such a stance acknowledges that all learning environments include dimensions such as historical power differentials, colonialism, capitalism, culturally situated interests, and political and ideological positions and serve to either maintain the status quo and (re)produce inequities or disrupt historical and ongoing injustices and redress them (Esmonde & Booker, 2016). Projects within LEVERS aim to support learners to engage with science in ways that are meaningful to them, and that are mindful of complex histories and previous injustices. To incorporate these insights without slipping into relativism, LEVERS adopts a “transformative activist stance” (Stetsenko, 2014) – one which “embraces social action and agency based in political imagination, vision, and commitment to social transformation” (p. 183).
By utilising learning design that fosters learners’ autonomy and active participation in their own learning through project-based learning that involves cycles of dialogue, reflection and action (see Section 6), LEVERS supports transformative learner agency. This approach recognises learners of all ages in the LEVERS project as co-creators of knowledge, empowering them to shape their learning experiences. By promoting critical thinking, dialogue, and sociopolitical consciousness, LEVERS aims to cultivate individuals who can engage with the world thoughtfully and contribute to positive climate action and societal change, fostering a sense of responsibility among learners to transform their future for the better. Creating an appropriate setting for such a co-creation of knowledge may require an adjustment of traditional educational practices towards more democratic learner-led approaches, or a shift from classroom-based-instruction to community or place-based learning.
Critical eco-pedagogy
To reach a level of critical eco-pedagogy in LEVERS, the selected environmental issues will be tackled by integrating ecological awareness and sustainability into the project-based learning activities. While it is essential for learners to make sense of the scientific dimensions of the environmental issues at hand (suitable for the educational level in question, and aligned with 42 the curriculum where appropriate), a critical eco-pedagogy lens will also incorporate critical thinking about the interconnectedness of humans as part of the natural world, and our relationships with humans and non-human entities – one another, other species, our planetary environment, and past and future generations. It will prompt learners to use systems thinking to explore the root causes of selected environmental injustices, fostering a deep understanding of ecological systems that include Indigenous and local knowledge and historical contexts, sustainability, and social justice. Critical eco-pedagogy encourages learners to analyse the environmental impact of human actions, inspiring a sense of responsibility and ethical stewardship. By connecting learning in LEVERS programmes to real-world ecological and sociopolitical issues, a process of reflection and action will embolden all involved stakeholders to become informed advocates for environmental preservation and agents of positive change in their communities.
Resources
Read: ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’
‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi) is a powerful book blending Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and personal reflections. It explores the interconnectedness between nature and humanity, emphasizing the importance of reciprocity and a harmonious relationship with the Earth. The book challenges conventional perspectives on the environment, offering a perspective that encourages a deeper, more sustainable connection to the natural world.
Listen: Corn Tastes Better
Corn Tastes Better – An episode of the Emergence Podcast in which Robin Wall Kimmerer narrates her own feature written for Emergence Magazine (read it here)
Learn: Ecopedagogy for Beginners: Putting Climate Change Education Into Action
Ecopedagogy for Beginners: Putting Climate Change Education Into Action (paid course on FutureLearn)
Justice-centred science pedagogy
To apply these ideas of critical, agentive and transformative learning specifically to a science education context, we turn to the justice-centred science pedagogy presented by Daniel Morales-Doyle (2017). As well as critical pedagogy, this draws on culturally-relevant pedagogy – an approach to teaching that recognises and incorporates students’ diverse cultural backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives into the learning process. Culturallyrelevant pedagogy aims to create an inclusive and empowering educational environment by bridging the gap between students’ cultural identities and the curriculum, fostering meaningful connection to the subject matter. Culturally-relevant instruction should draw on everyday experiences, learner interests and identities. 43
Within justice-centred science pedagogy, rigorous science learning happens through the critical exploration of Social Justice Science Issues (SJSI) – issues of relevance and consequence to the learners, which have a social justice component as well as a scientific component. Morales-Doyle (2017) presents the example of high-school students learning advanced chemistry through an authentic investigation of soil quality in the vicinty of their school, which is situated close to a heavily industrialised zone. Learners are positioned as expert knowledge holders who use their critical science agency (Basu et al., 2009) to merge scientific and other forms of knowledge and practice to address instances of injustice, and to take action on critical issues in their local communities.
In designing learning environments with justice-centred science pedagogy in mind, LEVERS also aims to promote learners’ “rightful presence”. Rightful presence (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2020) is an emerging framework for equity-oriented STEM education. It goes beyond equity through access and inclusion and recognises the potential for traditional educational practices to reproduce systemic injustices. Designing for learners’ rightful presence asks educators to partner with minoritised learners, and not just welcome them into spaces with pre-defined rules and roles for success, but rather to expand what counts as science learning, and to let them become the authors of their own learning and becoming, in other words “transformative intellectuals” (Morales-Doyle, 2017).
Resources
Case Study: Green Energy Technologies (GET) in the City Project
Green Energy Technologies (GET) in the City Project (Calabrese-Barton & Tan, 2010) In the summer of 2007, 20 students ages 10-14, from the Green Energy Technologies (GET) in the City Project set out to discover the ways in which a downtown neighbourhood exhibited the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, compared to that of a wooded park beside a lake. The students were intimately involved in the development of the project, bringing their own experiences of sun-beaten jungle gyms, playgrounds, and parking lots to the conversation, while also eschewing the traditional “build a model” lesson plan.
The students also democratically chose the locations for their comparison, demonstrating their understanding of UHI, land cover, and their own neighbourhoods and communities. Students built upon their classroom-based experiments to develop three data generating strands: temperature recording, landscape recording, and comparison of built areas to green space.
Fourth and fifth strands, interviews with residents and workers and photographs of design aspects of the area, were added after a small number of students expressed interest in conversations with people they encountered in these areas about the human experience of the UHI effect. The students’ enthusiasm for video recording became apparent throughout the course of the project and thus, the three short documentaries were born: Where Da Heat Go?; We’re Hot What About You?; and We Be Burnin’.
Supplementing these documentaries with field notes, interviews, and student produced artifacts, researchers, Calabrese Barton and Tan used critical ethnography to approach their research questions:
- How do students express their agency with and in science in informal community-based learning environments?
- What is the relationship, if any, between learning science and acquiring or fostering agency in science?
What they found was youth actively participated in activities that allowed them to challenge the traditional roles of educator and student and gave them a voice in ways that are not widely available to students in classroom settings. In all of the documentaries, the students are clearly the UHI knowledge holders and they were effectively empowered to position themselves as experts and communicators. This empowerment is twofold—firstly, the students were confident in their own knowledge and the role as experts, and secondly, in their ability to take action on the basis of their expertise.
Case Study: Addressing Inequity through Community Environmental Education
Addressing Inequity through Community Environmental Education
A study by Griswold et al. (2022) describes an environmental education initiative for adults that involved community residents learning to monitor local air quality using low-cost air sensors. The project was based in a Chicago neighbourhood with a disproportionate share of environmental burdens, which pose a threat to health, economic resiliency and vitality, and community strength and wellbeing. The authors note that while there are many reports on the kinds of community science projects that adult learners engage in, little is known about the learning processes involved in these types of projects.
This study aimed to address this gap, by examining the learning of 14 adult volunteers involved in the initiative.
They found that as the participants learned about air monitoring, they developed new skills related to science and technology, and adapted existing skills to a new context. They also reported increased awareness and connection with their local environment. In addition to individual learning, the volunteers learned in community—as they built confidence and skills in using low-cost air sensors, they widened the circle, drew other community members into the project, and acted as educators, teaching the new recruits about air monitoring and local air quality.
Together, the community participants devised strategies for improving community air quality and health, making community-wide action to facilitate change seem possible. The findings indicate the potential for equitable education for sustainability through community environmental justice projects, and demonstrate the mobilisation of critical science agency towards collective wellbeing.
Case Study: Social justice into science education for middle schoolers
U.S. researchers Bradford et al. (2023) co-designed a project with teachers, students, and experts, in which social justice would be incorporated into science education for middle schoolers.
The resulting module was an examination of the racial trends inherent in the health effects of those suffering from asthma caused by particulate matter in the air. Using data visualization and interactive models, the students were able to compare the distribution of pollutants to the cases of asthma and identify trends in their own neighbourhoods, working together to hypothesize and explore possible causes of these trends.
The team had two research questions:
- What perceptions do science educators have about integrating social justice into their curriculum?
- In what ways do the co-designed materials and teaching practices affect the level of uptake of social justice into science learning?
These questions were framed using social justice science pedagogy, which emphasizes that science instruction must be contextualized and intimately involved in challenging systems of oppression, while simultaneously allowing students to be the key drivers of transformation and holders of their own expertise.
To address these questions, the researchers employed several data-gathering techniques. They conducted interviews with teachers and students at two different schools with differing student demographics. The researchers were also able to track students’ responses through a web-based programme and identify the frequency with which the students’ responses referenced race or socioeconomics before and after participating in the unit. Using these datasets in combination with digital artefacts from the co-creation process (Google docs, emails, etc.), the researchers were able to recognise that while both teachers were looking for ways in which to centre social justice in their teaching, they had different reasons for doing so.
One teacher saw social justice as a way to introduce students to important aspects of scientific enquiry and to achieve certain learning standards. By identifying evidence to support theories or arguments, the students were also engaging with state-mandated education standards that look to integrate fact-based, scientific reasoning into learning outcomes. The other teacher interviewed saw the integration of social justice into science education as a way to address racism in science and to further incorporate race-related issues into science education.
This unit was complimentary to the one the students had already completed on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and brought the students awareness about the interplay of race and science into the present day. These two perspectives demonstrates that curricula which are critically aware of social justice issues and use them as tools for science education can offer diverse ways in which to broaden participation in science while also demonstrating the discipline’s role in bringing injustice to light and providing solutions.
Throughout the project, it is clear that context is exceptionally important. While both educators were effectively teaching the same material, one felt significant pressure to adhere to the state-mandated standards and avoid using the words “race” and “racism,” while the other had a supportive administration and colleagues who were interested in the possibilities of a more creative and socially conscious science curriculum. However, the authors found that both groups of students were already thinking about the ways in which location dictates the experiences of climate change and therefore were, in many ways, already prepared for these discussions, even when issues of race and socioeconomics were not expressly addressed.
Case Study: Leveraging Environmental Justice to Unlock the Potential of Education
¡Plo-NO! Santa Ana! LeadFree Santa Ana! (Orange County Environmental Justice, Jóvenes Cultivando Cambios, and UC Irvine partnership)
In 2017, an investigative reporter from ThinkProgressive, Yvette Cabrera, identified the high levels of lead (Pb) in Santa Ana, a small city in the greater Los Angeles area. The nascent Orange County Environmental Justice took up the issue, asking what exactly the the source was for these high levels. They reached out to the University of California Irvine (UCI) and another community-based youth collective, Jóvenes Cultivando Cambios.
Together, this partnership increased the testing areas and found that the highest concentrations of Pb were in the historic downtown. With the help of historian, Dr Juan Manuel Rubio, the group embarked on a parallel historical research project that included archival trips, examinations of aerial photographs dating back to the 1930s, maps, and governmental documents.
All of this data was digitised and collated using GIS software to create a georeferenced map, which was then compared to the soil maps. What the team identified was that the high levels of lead from the 1920s to the 1970s was likely to have stemmed from the high level of car traffic in the downtown area. The use of unleaded gasoline until the 1970s was extremely high and the 101 Highway ran right through Santa Ana, the primary artery connecting Los Angeles and San Diego.
Throughout the 20th Century, lead science was heavily influenced by industry and this has had significant effects on policy. However, leaded gasoline was phased out beginning in 1986 and Pb in household paint has been banned since 1978. Nonetheless, 81% of the housing stock in Santa Ana was built prior to this ban. Today, the most polluted places in Santa Ana are primarily lower-income, Latinx, and renter-occupied.
This research challenged the official narratives around lead poisoning which had previously focused upon poor construction techniques and the ingestion of lead through cheap toys, etc.
Where residents are concerned about their immigration status or if they cannot communicate comfortably in English, it is less likely that there will be inquiries to local authorities about Pb exposure in the neighbourhood. They are also less likely to discuss their experiences with public health officials, limiting their sources for advice on prevention or medical attention after Pb exposure. Furthermore, the majority of these households are based in rented accommodation and will not have the same ability to modify the property or structure as those families who are homeowners.
The results of the community-academic partnership’s study align with the extensive literature that already had identified low-income communities and communities of colour as being disproportionately impacted by Pb contamination and exposure. The researchers further align their work with previous findings that identify race and class, not only as social signifiers, but also as indicators of negative health outcomes, primarily as products or biproducts of individual and systemic racism.
Webinar of this case study featuring LEVERS Expert Advisor Dr Kelley Lê
LEVERS engages educators working at many different levels of formal and non-formal education, some who identify as purely science teachers, others who wear many hats and may work more adjacent to science or sustainability. As noted by Morales-Doyle and Frausto (2021), “Unfortunately, the enforcement of disciplinary boundaries has mostly kept critical pedagogy and YPAR out of science classrooms and science teachers out of conversations about knowledge democracy and learning for social transformation.”. In response to this, they present their model of Youth Participatory Science (YPS), which we propose as a practical tool for educators to adopt to tackle issues of climate justice within the LEVERS project. Embedding the concepts from the LEVERS Learning Framework into a localised YPS approach will allow for the development of action projects that promote democracy and rightful presence, take responsive action to champion justice and equity, and accentuate lifelong learning.
Like ABCD, YPS foregrounds the “brilliance, strength, and aspirations of young people and their communities even as [they] investigate real problems that people identify”.
YPS is outlined below Section alongside other related frameworks for project-based learning. There you will also find a series of scaffolding questions for educators to begin a social-justice science inquiry cycle, or a challenge-based learning cycle with a social justice orientation.
