Spectrum of Inclusive Resilience: Designing and Assessing Climate Justice Education

In 2014, I took a course on "Measuring Environmental Education Outcomes" with Marianne Krasny and Alex Kudryavtsev, through EE Capacity, NAAEE, and Cornell University Civic Ecology Lab. For this course, I developed a three-tiered spectrum instrument that faculty and teachers could use to assess the level of inclusion of climate justice considerations in their curriculum. The intention was this would support teachers in designing for deeper integration of climate justice education in their courses.

In October 2014 I developed a visualization for this instrument and presented it as one of the Community Climate Change Fellows of NAAEE in Ottawa, Canada. In the following year, I refined the instrument, inspired by my experiences teaching doctoral students climate change education and mentoring graduate students in environmental justice and just sustainabilities. In October of 2015, I revised the instrument and was selected to present it at the Research Symposium of the North American Association for Environmental Educators. Now available are a companion briefing about the instrument as well as an informational poster. I am still in the process of further refining and articulating this work for academic publication.

Figure 1. Snapshot, Spectrum of Inclusive Resilience Poster (Hauk, (c) 2015)

Title: Spectrum of Inclusive Resilience: Designing and Assessing Climate Justice Education 

Abstract: Developed by meta-synthesis and refined by multi-case application, this research offers a three-tier spectrum to assess and design for depth of implementation of transformative climate justice approaches in curricula and projects, to avoid greenwashing and move more deeply towards social transformation, community-based action, inclusion, and resilience in environmental education.

Marna Hauk, Ph.D. – NAAEE – Research Symposium – October, 2015 in San Diego, California

Here's the handout I shared with visitors during the discussion.
Here's the poster I developed to share this instrument - more refined than the 2014 one, and still in formation.

Hope you find it of interest, and please let me know what you see missing or would suggest augmenting or changing. I have subsequently encountered the work of the Hackman Consulting Group on designing climate justice education, whose insights I hope to include in the next iteration of this spectrum model.

Thank you.