EJ Special Issue on Critical Pedagogy: Open for Submissions

Environmental Justice Special Issue Call

I'm excited to announce, Dr. Jonathan London and I are guest editing a special issue of Environmental Justice on "Critical and Environmental Justice Pedagogy," with submissions due by January 31, 2027. See more information on this call below and how to submit at this link. 

Introduction

Scholarship on environmental justice and climate justice (EJ/ CJ) pedagogy responds to the need for understandings the processes of building critical environmental literacies, enhancing the capacity for praxis by linking knowledge to action, linking local sites of impact to global systems, sustaining EJ/ CJ movements across generations. It is experiencing a recent growth in scale and scope addressing new issues, populations, places, and methods (Adamson, 2022; Bartlett et al. 2022; Cachelin & Nicolosi. 2022; Guevara-Herrero, 2024; Oberman and Sainz, 2021; Jinnah 2023, Walter 2023).

And yet, the field is still in its early phases and there are many promising directions for future research. These include aligning pedagogies with place-based contexts and to serve students from a diversity of backgrounds, employing project-based and experiential methods, linking classroom and community action contexts, utilizing the wide and growing range of educational technologies and hybrid learning formats. The field is also challenged by the limited number of undergraduate and graduate degree programs in EJ/CJ restricting the pathway from K-12 to higher education to the professions.

Therefore, a special issue on the topic will both raise the field’s profile and bring together diverse visions of EJ and CJ teaching to inform its future development. It would be relevant for Environmental Justice readers in the education sector, as well as activists and agency leaders who may want to integrate EJ pedagogy into their activities.

Suggested topic areas include, among others

This Call for Papers invites research that deepens pedagogical theories and methods adopted in teaching EJ, and CJ including project-based-, experiential-, service-, global- learning approaches, along with action/ community-based research, community-university teaching partnerships and related modalities. We welcome contributions that explore the diversity of ways in which university, K-12, and non-formal educators are helping young people grapple with the complexities of EJ and CJ in ways that promote critical thinking, community-engagement, explorations of relevant career pathways, as well as to explore emergent issues, including climate grief and anxiety among others. We invite contributes that include, but are not limited to, community-based research, participatory research, education, arts and humanities, geography, sociology, and justice-centered approaches.

Scope:

• The grade ranges can include K-12 as well as higher education
• Programs with a STEM as well as those with policy or humanities focus
• Youth-led as well as adult-led organizations
• Programs in both formal (in school) and informal (out of school) settings
• Programs in both the Global South and Global North (as well as comparative cases)
• Programs run by or with Tribes and Native communities
• Submissions by academics, practitioners, and activists
• Submissions with examples of student work are encouraged

Topics:

Submissions on the following and related topics are especially welcome.

Community-engaged and participatory approaches to EJ/CJ Pedagogies

• The contributions of community-based environmental mapping and monitoring as a teaching method and context
• How youth and students can effectively engage in participatory action research and citizen science
• Using oral histories to explore neighborhood social and ecological change
• The integration of interdisciplinary climate science into EJ/CJ pedagogy
• The integration of Indigenous Ecological Knnowlege into EJ/CJ pedagogy
• Informing social movements and public policy through student work

Creativity, joy, and expression in EJ/CJ Pedagogies

• The innovative applications of educational technologies (including AI) to promote critical literacies
• The use of the creative arts, digital and social media to illustrate and disseminate content knowledge
• Methods to cultivate joy and personal expression through educational experiences
• Project-based experiential learning to enhance collaborative and communicative capacities

Challenges to EJ/CJ Pedagogical Work

• Applying emotionally-intelligent approaches to addressing students’ (and educators’) climate/ eco-grief
• Challenging neo-liberal, white supremacist, and/ or colonial models of education
• Institutional constraints, for example the lack of degree programs in EJ and CJ and the implications for the durability of related social movements, research, and policy
• Attacks on EJ/CJ education as part of the anti-DEI federal policies

Submissions being solicited

The editors encourage submissions of original research articles, reviews, policy briefs, practice briefs, case studies (national and international), and perspectives. Manuscripts written by academics, community representatives, joint community-academic collaborators, or activists, and those that draw upon creative and critical pedagogy, are particularly desired. Student perspectives and those that center historically marginalized perspectives are also welcomed.

When submitting your manuscript, please select “Environmental Justice Pedagogy.”

Background references

Adamson, J., Evans, M. M., & Stein, R. (Eds.). (2022). The environmental justice reader: Politics, poetics, and pedagogy. University of Arizona Press.

Bartlett, M. L., Larson, J., & Lee, S. (2022). Environmental justice pedagogies and self-efficacy for climate action. Sustainability, 14(22), 15086.

Cachelin, A., & Nicolosi, E. (2022). Investigating critical community engaged pedagogies for transformative environmental justice education. Environmental Education Research, 28(4), 491-507.

Guevara-Herrero, I., Bravo-Torija, B., & Pérez-Martín, J. M. (2024). Educational Practice in Education for Environmental Justice: A Systematic Review of the Literature. Sustainability, 16(7), 2805.

Jinnah, S., Dubreuil, J., Greene, J., & Foster, S. S. (2023). Introduction to Teaching Environmental Justice: co-creating a faculty development model. In Teaching Environmental Justice (pp. 1-13). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Oberman, R., & Sainz, G. M. (2021). Critical thinking, critical pedagogy and climate change education. In Teaching for social justice and sustainable development across the primary curriculum (pp. 69-83). Routledge

Walter, M., Weber, L., & Temper, L. (2023). The EJAtlas: An Unexpected Pedagogical Tool to Teach and Learn About Environmental Social Sciences. In The Barcelona School of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology: A Companion in Honour of Joan Martinez-Alier (pp. 211-218). Cham: Springer International Publishing.