Environmentalism: A Challenge to Modernity

This chapter discusses the environmental movement vis-à-vis modernity in the last century. Starting in the early 70s, the contemporary environmental movement consists of articulated collective action opposing polluting agents in different areas of the world, and pursuing a new planetary natural equilibrium. This movement aims to construct a new more balanced model for natural development by scientific and technical means. This movement doesn’t pursue a romantic project to protect nature against modernity and modernization, nor a denial of modernity, nor modernity as a crisis, but a new way to understand and change the world. The environmental movement produces a critical consciousness of both itself and modernity.

Feminist theory, method, and praxis: Toward a critical consciousness for family and close relationship scholars

Feminism provides a worldview with innovative possibilities for scholarship and activism on behalf of families and intimate relationships. As a flexible framework capable of engaging with contentious theoretical ideas and the urgency of social change, feminism offers a simultaneous way to express an epistemology (knowledge), a methodology (the production of knowledge), an ontology (one’s subjective way of being in the world), and a praxis (the translation of knowledge into actions that produce beneficial social change). Feminist family science, in particular, advances critical, intersectional, and queer approaches to examine the uses and abuses of power and the multiple axes upon which individuals and families are privileged, marginalized, and oppressed in diverse social contexts. In this paper, I embrace feminism as a personal, professional (academic), and political project and use stories from my own life to illuminate broader social-historical structures, processes, and contexts associated with gender, race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, nationality, and other systems of social stratification. I provide a brief history and reflections on contemporary feminist theory and activism, particularly from the perspective of my disciplinary affiliation of feminist family science. I address feminism as an intersectional perspective through three themes: (a) theory: defining a critical feminist approach, (b) method: critical feminist autoethnographic research, and (c) praxis: transforming feminist theory into action. I conclude with takeaway messages for incorporating reflexivity and critical consciousness raising to provoke thought and action in the areas of personal, professional, and political change.

Critical Consciousness in High School Outdoor Experiential Environmental Education

Background: Research highlights how high school near-peer mentors (HSNPMs) in outdoor school settings enhance younger students’ programing experiences. Through this engagement, HSNPMs’ critical consciousness (CC) of equity in outdoor and experiential education (OEEE) expands. Purpose: This article explores how HSNPMs develop CC of environmental and social justice in OEEE. Methodology/Approach: We used critical ethnography to understand how near-peer mentoring programing associated with equity, diversity, access, and inclusion (EDAI) develop CC, in OEEE. Findings/Conclusion: Intentionally developed training and curricula rooted in social justice education facilitate CC development. This training includes staff's facilitation of equity discussions and support of high school students’ EDAI-related awareness, skills, and behaviors. Implications/Recommendations: HSNPMs contribute to EDAI in OEEE programs. We recommend including HSNPMs in staff training, program improvements, and planning activities.

The Critical Language Reflection Tool

Critical reflection is an integral part of the teaching and learning process that requires educators to reflect on their assumptions and practices to promote equity in their classrooms. While critical reflection practices and frameworks have been proposed in teacher education, a TESOL-specific tool that engages with the unique complexities of world Englishes has not been developed. The current chapter, thus, engages in critical praxis by providing an evidence-based, step-by-step reflection tool for TESOL educators to enact inquiry. The reflection tool is called the critical language reflection tool, which offers open-ended questions surrounding assumption analysis, contextual awareness, and reflection-based action. Moreover, it applies a critical lens to the TESOL international teaching standards to help TESOL educators and teacher educators foster critical consciousness in TESOL classroom contexts.

Critical Consciousness Checklist

This chapter aims at providing pre-service and in-service teachers with a tool to analyze the criticality of their lessons. Teacher training programs are focused heavily on reflection of the effectiveness of an educator's classroom. This reflection generally concerns itself with ensuring that students meet learning targets and master the content. This chapter examines reflection through the lens of critical praxis, including positions of power, funds of knowledge, and meaning making. It provides a recommended checklist of questions aimed at facilitating an analysis of the extent to which lessons and activities successfully allow students to inhabit positions of power, access their funds of knowledge, and make meaning. Implications of critical reflective inquiry will enable teachers to more equitably guide students through their education.

Intersectionality

Women continue to be underrepresented as P-12 school administrators, and this marginalization is more conspicuous in Appalachian Kentucky public schools. This chapter presents a review of extant scholarship on the intersectionality of the focus population as women, educational leaders, and residents of Appalachia Kentucky. The critical consciousness of administrators was examined in both male and female participants. Personal and school predictor variables served as additional variables in the prediction model to better understand the context of the participants. Comparisons of means and multiple regression analysis were utilized to potentially create predictive equation of social justice leadership propensity of school administrators and to determine differences between gender and if personal and school predictor variables had any effect on the critical consciousness of the sample. This chapter reveals the importance of context, intersectionality, and need for more inclusive quantitative instruments for the study of social justice leadership.

Pedagogical lines and critical consciousness for quality education at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic

In a global context of children’s material and cultural deprivation, the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to redefine the human condition’s vulnerability, favoring the emergence of new forms of poverty and invisibility. Starting from the analysis of the consequences caused by the spread of the pandemic on children’s environment and fundamental development factors, the contribution focuses on the emerging educational challenges, to offer a pedagogical reflection on the possibilities of quality education at the time of emergency. The interviews – carried out as part of the Research Project Povertà educativa e Covid-19: linee di riflessione pedagogica e di advocacy per i minori – make possible to restore visibility and voice to the discomfort of mothers and children between zero and six years old, acting as a starting point for the development of some work’s lines for a reappropriation of relationality, awareness and corporeality, with a look at the children’s rights and at the society’s ethical and civil responsibility in their global protection. Linee pedagogiche e sentieri di coscientizzazione per un’educazione di qualità al tempo della pandemia Covid-19. In un contesto globale di forte deprivazione materiale e culturale dell’infanzia e dell’adolescenza, la pandemia da Covid-19 ha contribuito a ridefinire i volti della vulnerabilità della condizione umana, favorendo l’emergere di nuove forme di povertà e di invisibilità. A partire dall’analisi delle conseguenze provocate dalla pandemia sugli ambienti e sui fattori di sviluppo fondamentali della minore età, il contributo si concentra sulle sfide educative emergenti, per offrire una riflessione pedagogica sulle possibilità di una relazione e di una educazione di qualità dentro il tempo dell’emergenza. Le interviste svolte nell’ambito del Progetto di Ricerca Povertà educativa e Covid-19: linee di riflessione pedagogica e di advocacy per i minori hanno consentito di restituire visibilità e parola al disagio delle mamme dei bambini tra gli zero e i sei anni, ponendosi come punto di partenza per lo sviluppo di alcune linee di lavoro per una riappropriazione della relazionalità, della consapevolezza e della corporeità, con uno sguardo ai diritti dei minori e alla responsabilità etica e civile della società tutta nella loro tutela globale. In un contesto globale di forte deprivazione materiale e culturale dell’infanzia e dell’adolescenza, la pandemia da Covid-19 ha contribuito a ridefinire i volti della vulnerabilità della condizione umana, favorendo l’emergere di nuove forme di povertà e di invisibilità. A partire dall’analisi delle conseguenze provocate dalla diffusione della pandemia sugli ambienti e sui fattori di sviluppo fondamentali della minore età, il contributo si concentra sulle sfide educative emergenti, per offrire una riflessione pedagogica sulle possibilità di una relazione e di una educazione di qualità dentro il tempo dell’emergenza. Le interviste svolte nell’ambito del Progetto di Ricerca “Povertà educativa e Covid-19: linee di riflessione pedagogica e di advocacy per i minori” hanno consentito di restituire visibilità e parola al disagio delle mamme dei bambini tra gli zero e i sei anni, ponendosi come punto di partenza per lo sviluppo di alcune linee di lavoro per una riappropriazione della relazionalità, della consapevolezza e della corporeità, con uno sguardo ai diritti dei minori e alla responsabilità etica e civile della società tutta nella loro tutela globale.

“Why Don’t They Just Move Closer?”: Adolescent Critical Consciousness Development in YPAR About Food Security

The aim of this paper is to explore high school students’ critical consciousness development in the context of youth participatory action research (YPAR) focused on food security at an alternative school in Alabama. The YPAR project took place in an elective agriscience class with 10 students (Seven Black, two white, one Latino) who were in the 10th to 12th grades. Utilizing data from researcher notes, classroom observations, and archival classroom documents, we present students’ YPAR project outcomes to share their research-driven solutions to food insecurity in their community. Vignettes of classroom dialogue are also constructed to illustrate moments of reflection in the YPAR context about food security. We present three “critical moments,” or instances of social analysis, to illustrate how students’ individual-level attributions occurred alongside teacher dialogue and student-led investigation of structural inequities in the community. Findings illustrate how students’ nonlinear critical consciousness development consisted of reliance on individual-level attributions in classroom dialogue co-occurring with systems-thinking activities and other YPAR project outcomes. This paper has implications for research on the imperfect and wavering nature of adolescent critical consciousness development in YPAR.

Critical Reflection and Cognitive Empowerment among Youth Involved in Community Organizing

Through youth organizing initiatives, young people conduct research into social issues and build power to address these issues. This study examines the developmental interplay between the cognitive components of two of the most influential civic developmental constructs—critical consciousness and psychological empowerment—through analysis of interviews with 19 current and former participants in a youth organizing initiative in San Bernardino, CA, all of whom identify as Latinx. Most participants clearly articulated viewpoints consonant with the cognitive components of critical consciousness and psychological empowerment, but these were much more pronounced among those who had been involved for longer periods of time. Findings provide insights into distinctions and crosscurrents between critical reflection and cognitive empowerment, and into the settings and processes leading to their development. Cycles of action and reflection can support the simultaneous development of critical reflection and cognitive empowerment.

Caste Patriarchy and the Dehumanization of Dalit Women in Indian Society: Phoole–Ambedkarite Perspective

Indian society is entrenched in graded inequality with the continuity of Brahminical order among the Hindu caste. The Ambedkarite perspective of graded inequality paves the way towards the possibility of a critical examination of the discourse based on a prospective theorization of the caste patriarchy having its epistemological origin in the ideas propounded by Mahatma Jyoti Rao Phoole and Dr B. R. Ambedkar. The article seeks to explore the potential of such a theorization emerging from the predominant practices in Indian caste society that are pervasive across the communities with respect to the dehumanization of Dalit women in their everyday life. The article also focuses upon the strength of such a stand-point which would not only form the basis of an alternate academic discourse but also contribute towards the agenda of Dalit women collective in envisaging their role in terms of self-identity embedded with critical consciousness. The multiplicity of vulnerabilities of being a Dalit and a woman reflects the way the Dalit women get dehumanized in a number of cases, and they are often considered a gateway to the caste system. There is an emerging need of such theorization based on experiential learning along with the realization of its importance in defining the base of a radical sociopolitical alternative championing the ideological principles of a Phoole–Ambedkarite perspective.