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Linda Buturian abstract

Page history last edited by Richard Beach 1 year, 9 months ago

In this chapter, I share how I integrate environmental justice and climate literacy into two undergraduate education courses that don’t directly relate to climate: one is an art & identity course and the other on global literature. I cultivate a creative learning community that centers on students’ lives and identities and connects their innate care for others and the planet to their academic learning. With their permission, I feature students’ diverse projects that address the climate crisis through the mediums of dance, digital stories, short story, and visual art, as well as their written statements (for examples of art work from two students).

     My chapter title comes from Karen Nieto, the main character and narrator of Sabina Berman’s novel, Me, Who Dove in the Heart of the World. Karen Nieto creates an instruction manual with 3 points for herself in order to function as a person with autism while also helping her aunt run a tuna cannery in Mazatlan. 2. “Listen, there, to the way the real world thinks in Me”. (Nieto refers to herself as Me throughout the novel). Nieto takes issue with the damaging impact that Cartesian thinking has had on our imaginations by prioritizing thinking before and over existing. She states: “Trees, the sea, the fish in the sea, the sun, the moon, a hill or a whole mountain range. None of that exists all the way; it exists on a second plane of existence, a lesser existence. Therefore, it deserves to be merchandise or food or background for humans and nothing more.” I teach Berman’s novel (translated from Spanish) and other novels, graphic stories, and poems in the undergraduate global literature course focused on education, which is open to students throughout the University of Minnesota and satisfies one of the liberal education requirements.

     This chapter will be relevant to the many educators (k-12 and postsecondary) who teach in diverse disciplines and are working through how to integrate climate change/global warming into their teaching. The complex and interdisciplinary nature of the causes and effects of the climate crisis requires educators in diverse subject areas to integrate climate literacy into our respective courses. 

I will address the need for an intersectional approach to climate justice (Crenshaw) that takes into account neurodivergence, race, class, gender, sexuality, culture, and ethnicity. I will also address the roles of youth participatory action research and assets pedagogy and the support of my department in centering racial equity & justice. My chapter will also address how the murder of George Floyd and subsequent seismic events catalyzed my colleagues and me to take a more intersectional approach to understand and teach about environmental justice and climate activism.

     Courses: Global Stories of Education: Literature for Young Adults (CI1124) 

Creating Identities: Learning in and Through the Arts (CI1032)

 

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