Student: Samantha Shafer
Graduation date: May 2016
Type: Concentration (single major)
Date approved: November 2013
Summary
I am interested in exploring an intersection of the themes of the built environment, education, human ecology, and environmental justice/environmental racism. I feel passionate about education, and about place-based education as a viable solution to many (but certainly not all) problems faced by failing schools and districts as well as teachers struggling to engage their students. I am interested to explore sites where the system is not working–where for one reason or another students are disengaged and performing far below grade level, administrators are at a loss for solutions, community members are frustrated, and ultimately where schools are failing to educate their students to a degree that prepares them to be critical and successful in a complex world. These are commonly the same areas where segregation is the norm, where students of color are piped from schools to prisons–institutionalized as criminals and thrust to the margins rather than empowered and educated as free people. These are the places where power in the form of school administrations are often white in communities of mostly non-white constituents; here, the hierarchy of power is naturalized along racial lines. Black schools are fundamentally treated differently, and separate is not equal–a lesson that has not been internalized by educational institutions in the decades since Brown v. Board of Education (Hannah-Jones 2015). This disparity is not necessarily (and almost never explicitly) perpetuated with malicious intent, but rather with internalized racial bias that has plagued all of our country’s institutions since before its founding and has been reinvented time and again (Alexander 2011).
I do not presume to know the answer to these issues, but I am motivated to seek them. I am emboldened to question the power structures built into school environments and interrogate the motives of new educational movements so as to find answers to questions that can help us find a better way. The evidence is overwhelming that for many schools, for many students, schools are not working. What is it about some places that provide the conditions for students to fail?
Antwi Akom proposes the idea of “eco-apartheid,” which he defines as “the interinstitutional arrangements and interactions that produce unequal environmental benefits and burdens based on race, class, gender, language, and immigration status, as well as their interconnections” (Akom 2011). As such, this framework out to be considered within its historical relationship to health and educational outcomes, and as “a key determinant of health disparities [that] has led to the disproportionate exposure of Black people/people of color to the effects of concentrated poverty” (Akom 2011). In practice, Antwi introduces “eco-apartheid as a specific manifestation of structural racialization that limits Black people/people of color from accessing key institutional resources and privileges that promote health and academic achievement” (Akom 2011).
Spatial justice is also a component of this analysis, taking a critical look at how space is divided and along what boundaries. This has a physical, geographical meaning as well as a social and political meaning, intertwined in such a way that it is futile to discuss them separately. Environmental quality and health plays a role in terms of the distribution of risks and hazards. However, as with the more humanities components, this concrete measure is neither straightforward nor easily interpolated into the social landscape. Still, it is critical to consider.
Educational inequality in the United States is nothing new: it is a tale as old as the founding of this county and part of a story of class-, race-, and gender-based systematic sorting of who is worth investment of American dollars. Similarly based in long traditions of American history is a narrative of naturalness that comes to belie our (official) national identity. In line with the American Dream and the capitalist, neoliberal logic of “pulling ourselves up from our bootstraps”, the narrative is designed for some to fail–and when they do, it is their fault. It absolves the rest of a need to care, or feel personally or even indirectly responsible, for that failure and continue with our own hard work. It absolves us of a communal responsibility to support one another, and especially to support those already made vulnerable by the systems we entrust for our physical, social, and economic safety, well being, and prosperity.(e.g. prisons, healthcare/health insurance, affordable housing, the right to vote, financial saving/lending institutions, the right to a nontoxic environment, schools). We claim a narrative of freedom, of liberty and justice for all, yet reserve it only for some by way of a narrative that guarantees failure, and thus normalizes–or, naturalizes–those groups and individuals as failures, unable to win the game of this American Dream.
I am focused on education, environmental justice/racism, place, and the built environment through a lens (potentially) of human ecology. I am interested in the way public schools and new educational movements such as charter schools influence and are influenced by hegemonic power structures and naturalized expectations of class, race, and gender. I want to explore in my capstone places where the system is not working for students, possibly in post-disaster/disaster prone city like NOLA, and understand the structure of that educational landscape. This also examines naturalization narratives, and the resulting subjugation of marginalized groups to a second class status. My regions of interest in the United States are urban (or urbanizing or de-urbanizing) areas. There is much to be said both about highly segregated cities as well as more integrated areas, and particularly about the change in racial and socioeconomic demographics over time. For the purpose of this summary, as well as to narrow my focus as I work toward a thesis, I propose an investigation of three (four) different American cities: New Orleans, Louisiana; (Chicago, Illinois); (Detroit, Michigan); Portland, Oregon.
References
Akom, Antwi. 2004. “Ameritocracy: The Racing of Our Nation’s Children.” Ph.D., Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania.
Akom, Antwi. 2011. “Eco-Apartheid: Linking Environmental Health to Educational Outcomes.” Teachers College Record 113 (4): 831–59.
Alexander, Michelle. 2011. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Revised edition. New York: New Press.
Duncan, Arne. 2015. “Investing in Teachers Instead of Prisons.” U.S. Department of Education. September 30. http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/investing-teachers-instead-prisons.
“From Moynihan to Post-Katrina New Orleans.” 2015. Nonsite.org. Accessed October 14. http://nonsite.org/article/from-moynihan-to-post-katrina-new-orleans.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole. 2015. “Gentrification Doesn’t Fix Inner-City Schools.” Grist. Accessed October 11. http://grist.org/cities/gentrification-doesnt-fix-inner-city-schools/.
Yamamoto, Eric K., and Jen-L. W. Lyman. 2001. “Racializing Environmental Justice.” U. Colo. L. Rev. 72: 311.
Demby, Gene. “What We Lose When a Neighborhood School Goes Away.” 2015. WBEZ/National Public Radio. Accessed October 12. http://www.wbez.org/news/what-we-lose-when-neighborhood-school-goes-away-112919.
Bloom, Ester. 2015. “When Neighborhoods Gentrify, Why Aren’t Their Public Schools Improving?” The Atlantic, October 7. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/gentrification-schools/408568/.
Robert D Bullard. 1994. Unequal Protection : Environmental Justice and Communities of Color. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
Carter, Samuel Casey. 2000. No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools. ERIC.
Aoki, Keith. 1992–1993. “Race, Space, and Place: The Relation between Architectural Modernism, Post-Modernism, Urban Planning, and Gentrification.” Fordham Urban Law Journal 20: 699.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole. 2015. The Problem We All Live With. This American Life. Accessed October 15.
Gunewardena, Nandini. 2008. Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reconstruction. Rowman Altamira.
Neal, Daria E. 2008. “Healthy Schools: A Major Front in the Fight for Environmental Justice.” Environmental Law 38: 473.
Gruenewald, D. A. 2003. “Foundations of Place: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Place-Conscious Education.” American Educational Research Journal 40 (3): 619–54. doi:10.3102/00028312040003619.
Questions
- How does a naturalization of poverty and colorblindness manifest in educational systems?
- How does a post-disaster or disaster-prone area treat schools in the midst of crisis?
- Who should have control over public education?
- Where does/ought the money come from and how can equality be ensured?
- How can affirmative action principles be used to ensure equitable allocation of education funds?
Concentration courses
- ENVS 244 (Practicum: Ezulwini Valley Environmental Health Assessment, 4 credits). Summer 2013. Component of Environmental Studies abroad program to Swaziland; research examined one facet of the relations between community needs, resource use and health, and cultural norms (or conflict); gained insight into the ways in which lack of community resource infrastructure can affect the health and accessibility of energy, water, and waste resources.
- RHMS 352 (Gender in Public Rhetoric and Media, 4 credits). Spring 2014. Analysis of a variety of rhetorical and media forms and the role of gender in these communications; focus on intersectionality and the myriad ways in which our lives are mediated by gender and gendered media.
- ED 450 (Philosophy & Practice of Environmental/Ecological Education, 4 credits). Fall 2014. Explores the history of Environmental Education pedagogy and aims to understand the role of this framework as it relates to the contemporary (traditional) education system.
- ETHS 400 (Ethnic Studies Colloquium, 4 credits). Fall 2015. Course examines the role of prisons in the construction and practice of race, ethnicity, and gender in the United States and the intersections of the Prison-Industrial Complex in American society, with one significant intersection being education.
Arts and humanities courses
- HIST 261 (Global Environmental History, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.
- HIST 239 (Constructing the American Landscape, 4 credits). Complicating the history of the American landscape as it situates changes in physical landscape and land use practices over time.