Toward “Resistance and Re-visioning”: Exploring the Integration of Community Partnerships and Decolonial Field Methods in an Undergraduate Environmental Justice Program

Abstract

Although environmental justice (EJ) scholars have demonstrated that Black, Indigenous and People of the Global Majority's (BIPGM), and low-income groups' knowledges and experiences have been excluded from mainstream environmentalism, less attention has been placed on this exclusion within Interdisciplinary Environmental and Sustainability programs in higher education. Research in this area shows that EJ content knowledge and those who embody that content knowledge (i.e., BIPGM students) are not fully included, pointing to the need to better understand how EJ content knowledge and pedagogy are developed within these programs. Emerging literature on EJ instruction illustrates that EJ curriculum and pedagogy is connected to EJ communities of resistance and includes critical community-engagement, protest, activism, and resistance. Using methodology inspired by feminist, Indigenous, and socioemotional ways of knowing, this study seeks to build off previous work by exploring one faculty member's instructional practices that include partnerships with EJ communities of resistance, and the integration of decolonial field methods as key components of student learning objectives. Findings illustrate how the faculty member engaged in a decade-long process to build community partnerships, which includes Indigenous educators, their conceptualization of and integration of decolonial field methods, and the role social identity played in a shift in instructional methodology. Implications suggest that involving BIPGM communities and decolonial methods into an EJ program may contribute to a more inclusive learning environment for BIPGM students and could provide key insights for creating EJ programs that transcend disciplines by blurring the lines between academia and communities of resistance.