Critical environmental agency: Leveraging youths' experiences during a summer field ecology program

Presentation given by Georgia Southern faculty member Lacey D. Huffling at the American Educational Research Association Conference, Washington, D.C.

Attending to global environmental concerns calls for renewed efforts in environmental education (EE), and important questions regarding equity and access need to be considered (NAAEE, 2011). Therefore, this study used Critical Environmental Agency (CEA), a framework which combines science education (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2008; Tan, Calabrese Barton, Turner, & Gutiérrez, 2012) and EE (Greenwood, 2012; NAAEE, 2011) constructs to explore participants’ agency, identity work, and critical consciousness of place. Using qualitative methodologies, I explored the CEA of 16 diverse high school youth during a summer field ecology program. Data analyses focused on how youths’ experiences were leveraged to develop CEA. The findings of this study inform our understanding of how diverse youth engage in EE and strengthen their CEA.