Education Commons^™

Environmental Agency In Read-Alouds, Alandeom W. Oliveira, Patterson Rogers, Cassie F. Quigley, Denis Samburskiy, Kimberly Barss, Seema Rivera

Cassie F. Quigley

Despite growing interest in helping students become agents of environmental change who can, through informed decision-making and action-taking, transform environmentally detrimental forms of human activity, science educators have reduced agency to rationality by overlooking sociocultural influences such as norms and values. We tackle this issue by examining how elementary teachers and students negotiate and attribute responsibility, credit, or blame for environmental events during three environmental read-alouds. Our verbal analysis and visual representation of meta-agentive discourse revealed varied patterns of agential attribution. First, humans were simultaneously attributed negative agentive roles (agents of endangerment and imbalance) and positive agentive roles (agents of …