Rebuilding Community Spaces: Integrating Resilience into STEPWISE

Abstract

Worldwide, communities are engaged in citizen-driven environmental practices. However, teaching activism can be challenging, given the other pressures teachers currently face. Science teachers have an opportunity to promote environmental justice practices that focus on improving lives for all. Specific strategies, such as STEPWISE, can assist teachers in ensuring that the approach is inquiry-based, relevant, and context-based, all hallmarks of environmental education. However, as teachers work to infuse these practices, resilience theory can provide support for students that face resistance during activism. This chapter provides an example of how one high school environmental class was able to persist in their activism through a STEPWISE approach, despite resistance from those in power. By beginning with a student concern about mosquito spraying at the school, the students conducted an investigation by employing aspects of STEPWISE including research, inquiry, and presenting their findings. The students used this place-based problem as a platform to become more active in their school. STEPWISE-informed practices bolsters the current narrative of traditional environmental education, which tends to expose youth to green spaces (e.g., hiking, camping), instead of providing them opportunities for action on spaces that are able to be transformed. Environmental education without context-based, real-life situations for students to discuss their perspectives about environmental sustainability cannot realistically engage civic action and bring about change. The chapter concludes with recommendations for science teachers and teacher educators on teaching resilience through STEPWISE approaches.