Open UNSUSPECTED TEACHERS 4.15.Pdf
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of Education THE UNSUSPECTED TEACHERS: ENVIRONMENTAL IDENTITY AND SUSTAINABILITY EDUCATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE A Dissertation in Educational Theory and Policy by Peter Dawson Buckland © 2015 Peter Dawson Buckland Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2015 ii The dissertation of Peter Dawson Buckland was reviewed and approved* by the following: Madhu Suri Prakash Professor of Education Dissertation Advisor Co-Chair of Committee Jacqueline Edmondson Professor of Education Associate Vice President and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Co-Chair of Committee Mindy Kornhaber Associate Professor of Education Christopher Uhl Professor of Biology Gerald LeTendre Professor of Educational Theory and Policy Department Head of Education Policy Studies Center for the Study of Leadership in American Indian Education iii Abstract People in higher education institutions are designing, advocating, and implementing curricular changes for sustainability and ecological literacy. This study sought to understand the environmental identities of sustainability education advocates working in higher education. Do they have self-conscious environmental identities? If so, what do those identities entail for their actions, ethics, and professional lives? To answer these questions, I used two research methods. First, using memoir and poetry, I wrote an extended researcher identity piece to investigate the development and facets of my own environmental identity. Second, the study detailed the environmental identities of twelve sustainability education policy entrepreneurs working at two Pennsylvania universities. This information was obtained through semi-structured interviews. The presentation of this study concludes with modest but transformative recommendations to foment a culture that values strong environmental identification and creates positive feedback loops for faculty and staff who work for ecological literacy and sustainability. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………….v Chapter 1: Ecological Crises, Sustainability Education, Policy Entrepreneurship, and Environmental Identity………………………………………………………………..1 Ecological Crisis: Unraveling Nature’s Threads………………………………….2 Sustainability: An Orienting Concept…………………………………………….13 Sustainability in Higher Education……………………………………………….25 Policy Entrepreneurs……………………………………………………………...33 Environmental Identity………………………………………………………....…35 Methods and Methodology………………………………………………………..45 Chapter 2: Awakening………………………………………………………………...53 Chapter 3: The Unsuspected Teachers………………………………………………..97 Bucknell University……………………………………………………………….98 Penn State University……………………………………………………………..109 Chapter 4: An Unsuspected Transformation of Higher Education……………………135 Appendix A: Recruitment Form……………………………………………………….152 Appendix B: Informed Consent Form…………………………………………………153 Appendix C: Interview Protocol……………………………………………………….154 References……………………………………………………………………………..156 v Acknowledgments Over the last several years, thoughtful, insightful, and kind people nudged me long. I should especially like to thank Emily, Katie, Beth, Alex, John, Seth and Seth, Jared, Zach, Kachine, Garrett, Steve, Derek, Kelley, and all the kids from 3E-COE and Eco-Action; Gary from Sierra Club Moshannon, Ed from National Wildlife Federation, Adam at Penn Environment, Braden from Groundswell, Barb, Jenny, Steve, and all my anti-fracking compatriots; my Collapse bandmates who gave me a venue to bark about ecological devastation; the many men and women with whom I’ve shared rides on ridge trails in Penn’s woods; the people at Voices of Central Pennsylvania; Mike my co-host on Sustainability Now Radio; the faculty and staff in the College of Education, the former Penn State Center for Sustainability and Office of Sustainability (now both folded into the Institute for Sustainability), Rock Ethics Institute, Office of Physical Plant, faculty members involved with Bucknell University’s Greening Initiative, the many participants in the Pennsylvania Environmental Resource Consortium, my friends, colleagues, and students at the Darby School, and my coworkers at Tait Farm. My committee supported me, too. Mindy Kornhaber and Christopher Uhl repeatedly encouraged me to find ways to be my most authentic self. Chris in particular confronted me as only a male elder can confront a younger man. I will never stop celebrating Jacqueline Edmondson’s warmth, calm intelligence, sense of humor, and her openness to my desire for conversation. She moved me on with firm and kind hands each time frustration threatened to stop me and once seemed likely to drive me over the brink. I could not and would not have done this work had it not been for Madhu Suri Prakash. She shines a light on our ways of living and being. She also seeds hope in both spirit and vi action. In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus wrote, “The struggle itself for the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” My committee sends me there. Finally, my partner and my family have supported me. My ex-wife Jessica did an enormous amount of work for our household and me. I do much of this work for my son Sacha for a beautiful world in which he too will know the beauty of the rhododendron and the hemlock. My sisters Catharine and Julie celebrate with me at every turn. My partner Meg has listened and nudged me to always be my best self. Finally, my mother and father have loved me more than words can say. My father did not live to see me earn this doctorate. His passion for teaching lives in and through me and I am proud to be his son. Like Telemachus to Ulysses, I meet adoration to his household gods. As he is gone, I work my work, him, his own. And now I strike the sounding furrows. This work is dedicated to my mother and father equally. vii Even among ecologists and environmental activists, there’s a tacit sense that we’d better not let our awareness come too close to our creaturely sensations, that we’d best keep our arguments girded with statistics and our thoughts buttressed with abstractions, lest we succumb to an overwhelming grief—a heartache born of our organism’s instinctive empathy with the living land and its cascading losses. Lest we be bowled over and broken by our dismay at the relentless devastation of the biosphere. David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology * * * I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible. Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination * * * People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth Chapter 1: Ecological Crises, Sustainability Education, Policy Entrepreneurship, and Environmental Identity People in higher education institutions are banding together and implementing sustainability policies to ameliorate and adapt to ecological crises such as climate change, extinction, loss of ecosystem services, and declining human-environmental wellbeing. In so doing, they are also creating opportunities. People—not machines—are imagining these policy changes, advocating for them, and implementing them. Who are these people? This dissertation seeks to understand the environmental identities of sustainability education advocates who are working in higher education. Do they have self-conscious environmental identities, defined as “the meanings one attributes to the self as they relate to the environment” (Stets & Biga, 2003, p. 406), and, if so, what do those identities entail for their actions, ethics, and professional lives? This chapter establishes the warrant for this investigation. First, it lays out the evidence for the ecological crises before us, especially regarding anthropogenic climate change and human-caused extinctions. Second, it reviews “sustainability,” looking at five ways in which the concept has been developed by the United Nations (UN), business leaders, engineers, a post-carbon activist economist, and sustainability education’s most prolific champion. Third, this chapter addresses the ways and depths in which sustainability has taken hold in higher education, especially in curriculum. Fourth, to understand the people who are developing these programs, this chapter presents the concept of policy entrepreneurs—people who have recognized problems and have developed policy solutions that they can propose and advocate. Fifth, because these people have participated in and/or devised policies that are meant to address ecological 2 crises, I investigate “environmental identity” as a way to understand them and their commitments. Sixth, and finally, I describe the methods and methodology that I used to complete this study. * I need only to stand in the midst of a clear-cut forest, a strip-mined hillside, a defoliated jungle, or a dammed canyon to feel uneasy with assumptions that could yield the conclusion that no human action can make any difference to the welfare of anything but sentient animals. John Rodman, “The Liberation of Nature?” Ecological Crises: Unraveling Nature’s Threads The educated and developed humans of the world have transformed Earth’s physical systems and undermined the biosphere in a blink of geological