Scaling Up: California Climate Justice Knowledge Action Network

This past 9 months, I've had the honor of being the California State University representative on a statewide collaborative called the UC-CSU Knowledge Action Network for Transformative Climate and Sustainability Education and Action (or KAN, for short). Yeah, it's a mouthful.  But don't hold that against us.  This was one of the best professional experiences of my life yet, its long name notwithstanding.

You can check out the above link to find out more of the history and structure of this network, but in this post I want to talk about the highlights, for the purpose of thinking about the potential these kinds of networks hold to fuel our lifework.

The main reason I got involved was because I have been desperate to feel that the work I'm doing at my own institution and in my own teaching/research can have a broader impact.  I've written scholarly articles and books, and reach many students, but for some reason--especially on November 9, 2016-- I felt the need to magnify the work I have been doing to integrate social justice into environmental conversations, to increase interdisciplinary collaborations, and to spread the gospel of liberatory pedagogy.  Anybody else feel that way?  I hear some amens.

I had also been doing some research on emotion and environmental grief (see my previous posts for more)-- a dimension of teaching environmental studies that, I would argue, we must take much more seriously if we're going to reach students and equip them for the world they're growing up in.  I thought this was fluffy, feelings-stuff, but it turns out that, when I put this interest front and center of my application to the KAN, plus my passion for thinking about climate and sustainability through a justice lens (as opposed to natural science or engineering), I drew the attention of the organizing committee as a possible CSU-wide representative on the planning team.  I couldn't say no.

A chance to share these problems and resources about classroom affect and environmental justice with experts around the state?  Sign me up!

Over the spring 2017 semester, I met with groups of amazing, inspiring faculty around California over the course of four workshops, and learned a lot about myself, our shared problems, institutional barriers to interdisciplinarity and students from underrepresented groups (what the CSU calls Underrepresented Minorities, or URM).  I sat in rooms with natural scientists, planners, Chicano/a Studies scholars, and others from a variety of fields; what we had in common was passion for climate/sustainability and teaching/pedagogy, a feeling of urgency for these topics in higher education in California, and a sense that social justice should frame these discussions.

Some questions we agonized over were:

• How could we accelerate and improve our climate justice/sustainability pedagogy?
• What strategies and resources could we leverage to do more interdisciplinary work? 
• How could we engage our communities more for building climate resilience and just sustainability? 
• What kinds of pedagogical strategies could we use to include more students in environmental work?
• What kinds of privileges are we bringing to the table that may get in the way of these goals?
• What vision for change do we hold, how do we prioritize them, and what are practical steps we can take toward those changes?

To our great fortune, our workshops were facilitated by Abigail Reyes, whom I've written about in another blog post. I can't begin to describe the transformative experience of being facilitated by this woman; it was perhaps one of the most important parts of participating in the KAN for me.

It gave me newfound respect for the vocation of professional facilitation, for one, and it made me rethink my pedagogy-- perhaps I could run my classes as Abby ran our workshops! What would THAT entail?  Good grief, I really have begun to think this through, and have made it a goal this semester to practice her strategy in one of my classes.  Just to see.  What would happen if we treated our students like people with a shared set of concerns who need to solve some problems and find their agency in the world?   What a radical concept!

Besides the love I developed for Abby, facilitation, my co-planning team members, and the state of California, I also gained some of these insights:

HSU Doesn't Suck As Much As I Thought

My own institution, besides disappointing me time and time again on its inaction and lack of follow-through around issues of diversity/inclusion, and despite its deplorable idiocy and ass-backwardness on so many fronts, I actually came away from the KAN workshops with a great sense of appreciation for Humboldt State.  The main reason is because, even though we suck at so much, at least we think we care about social justice and environmental responsibility.  After all, it's in our mission.  We may not know how to do that, but at least we hold ourselves to some accountability around those concepts.  We don't have as much of a hill to climb to change hearts and minds on our campus around those topics.

Graduates from HSU can elect to take the "graduation pledge", which has been a model for other institutions around the country.  Great place to teach environmental studies from a social justice perspective, right? Yes, of course, but also, it's an ideal, not always a reality...

Relatedly, HSU rewards community-based and justice-centered research methods, radical pedagogy, public intellectualism, and interdisciplinary and/or student-based research.  Unlike some R1s, or other kinds of colleges, these values really are part of our retention, tenure, and promotion (RTP) standards, and I hadn't quite realized how big a deal that is.

I've Already Accomplished a Lot: Chillax More, Girl!

The KAN validated many of the efforts I've already been making in my post as the first program leader of Environmental Studies, a major that started in 2012 at HSU, and which I've been tasked to build from the ground up. Some of those important changes are:

• to develop a service-learning senior capstone that engages students in community problems and gives them a sense of efficacy
• to integrate professionalization and career development in my classes so students feel their skills are valuable and know how to "sell" them
• to find ways to co-teach and promote interdisciplinarity among the ENST affiliated faculty in other ways
• to draft RTP standards that reward all of these radical forms of knowledge production and pedagogy, instead of reinforcing the colonizing tendencies and ongoing corporatization of higher ed
• to add courses that emphasize the social change agent and social justice aspects of environmental studies in the curriculum. 

So, even though I have been working on these things, the KAN helped me realize that these are worthwhile efforts, and that what we've done at HSU can really be a model for others.

I'm no expert, but this is what I think chillaxing looks like in Humboldt County.

But Don't Get Too Lazy...

Yet, so much more to do!  My experience with the KAN told me that I would like to devote myself more to building relationships rather than adding lines on my CV.   I am again grateful that I'm at an institution that values those relationships over big-time, top-tier publications, and so I should take advantage of that. I want to collaborate more with people on my campus to improve student success, but also to co-teach more, create more interdisciplinary dialogue, and work more with student affairs/services.  Not that I have any time, but I did put these goals on the horizon as next steps.

1. Preach it! Get public! The KAN made me think hard about how to make the intellectual work of environmental intellectuals-- especially humanists and social change theorists-- more accessible.  Some ways we can do that are: publish more open-access stuff, value easier-to-grasp writing styles and venues, give more talks in the community and in the world.  I bought the book, The Public Professor, to help me with this, and I am going to get some training on how to give better talks. If I could figure out how to make a website to make my work accessible, I would. That's on the list.  Also, I agreed to do one of those "My Favorite Lecture" things in our town, even though I fundamentally disagree with the power dynamic there-- that I, an expert from the hill, would slum it with the peeps in the community to enlighten them, rather than the other way around, which is really what we need to do more of.  
2. One way we can get more public is to get savvy about press releases about our work, and learn to work more closely with our media folks.  Check out a press release about the KAN's culminating virtual conference here. And of course, our final KAN conference, where all the members report on their best practices and goals, is publicly and freely available here, thanks to Ken Hiltner, a UCSB environmental humanities dude who is pioneering a "nearly-carbon-neutral conference" model.
3. Pie in the sky: I thought that a social change agent boot camp based on Abby's facilitation process would be awesome to have a few weeks prior to classes starting.
4. I reinvigorated my goal of developing a GE class that teaches self-care for social change agents, e.g. "How To Be A Change Agent in the 21st Century" or "Self-Care for Social Change Agents".  Eh? Sound good? Thumbs up?
5. Do the work that fuels me, and not just all the work that needs to get done.   I want to write a book. I love to write. Hence, this blog.  The KAN helped motivate me to write this blog.
6. My hope from ending things with the KAN for now is to continue working with John Foran, whose support and collaboration are fueling, though it does disappoint me that he can't match my margarita-swilling prowess.   Check out his climate justice work here. 

I have many more things on my 'to-do' list after working with the KAN, but for now I feel the buoying sensation of expert, passionate faculty across the state supporting and magnifying these efforts. I feel our shared resources enabling our efforts, and I rest more easily--rather than in a constant state of despair and impotence-- that I'm not alone in thinking all of these things are important.  I like knowing that we're all out there, pushing California in all these little ways.

So, I'd love to hear more from you:

How are you scaling out your own work?  
Where do you find your resources? 
How do you use the annoying apparatuses of your institution in your favor to address problems?   
-