Environmental Education Inspired by Critical Literacy, Indigenous Perspectives, and World-ending Texts: A Practitioner Inquiry Study with High School English Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This practitioner inquiry study took place in a high school English classroom at an alternative social justice-oriented school in a large urban area in Ontario, Canada. Working as a practitioner researcher, I collaboratively taught two units over ten weeks with a classroom teacher in his Grade 11/12 English classroom, seeking opportunities within the existing curricula for youth to engage with environmental issues. The key research question that guided the work is: How do students engage with a critical literacy approach to environmental education? I constructed an ecoliteracies framework which positions the environment as a text that recognizes functional, cultural, and critical aspects of environmental issues. I took up concepts from environmental education and critical literacy to intervene in “business as usual” environmental education in ways that allow for nuance, complexity, and the social experiences of youth. Data for this research emerged from students’ assignments and classroom participation as well as from follow up focus groups where, along with recorded conversation, students made projects that described their understandings of a critical literacy approach to environmental education. Findings from this study suggest that the environment is a social practice. As youth show through their work, taking a critical literacy approach to environmental education allows teachers and students to trouble assumptions, reimagine ways of connecting, dwell in difficulty, and speculate about our experiences with a damaged planet. This research therefore offers ways that critical literacy and environmental education can support and sustain each other while engaging youth in intertwined social and environmental catastrophes currently rocking our world. Rather than a neat, nice package of knowledge about environmental issues, environmental education can be taken up as a cyclical process of world-ending and world-building. The implication for educators is that existing English curricula have space to recognize the creative, theoretical, and conceptual genius of young people to explore and represent their own experiences of their worlds. This dissertation offers teachers and researchers opportunities to take up nuanced and complex relational environmental engagement, along with some examples of how youth might respond if given the leeway to creatively remake their worlds within schools.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".