Higher Education Commons^™

Eating Change: A Critical Autoethnography Of Community Gardening And Social Identity, Jessica Gerrior

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

Community gardening efforts often carry a social purpose, such as building climate resilience, alleviating hunger, or promoting food justice. Meanwhile, the identities and motivations of community gardeners reflect both personal stories and broader social narratives. The involvement of universities in community gardening projects introduces an additional dimension of power and privilege that is underexplored in scholarly literature. This research uses critical autoethnography to explore the relationship of community gardening and social identity. Guided by Chang (2008) and Anderson and Glass-Coffin (2013), a systematic, reflexive process of meaning-making was used to compose three autoethnographic accounts. Each autoethnography draws on the author’s …

Exploring The Potential Of Online Education And College Students' Connection To Nature, Michael Weinstein

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

There is limited research examining the efficacy of online delivery for experiential, field-based, interdisciplinary coursework in environmental education geared towards undergraduate students, and how connection to nature can be understood through the theory of emerging adulthood. This research employed a convergent mixed methods approach to explore the experiences of 11 undergraduate students enrolled in an online, introductory ecology course, and how their experience of connection to nature was influenced through the course, technology-mediated nature embedded within the course, and how their identities as emerging adults were impacted by their connection to nature. Quantitative methods employed included pre/post surveys, while qualitative …

Emergence: Developing Worldview In The Environmental Humanities, Rhonda D. Davis

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

While the environment has long played a role in humanistic expressions and investigations, the need for a more integrated look at the human-environment relationship has become ever more pressing. More than ever, humanities scholars are recognizing their ability to mobilize critical and creative action to address pressing socioeconomic, sociopolitical, and socioenvironmental problems. Teaching and engaging students through interdisciplinary methods, connecting students and communities, developing a sense of agency and responsibility for planetary sustainability has become a visible focus in higher education. My study aimed to understand how an environmental humanities class affects, if at all, the way students construct worldview. …

Restoring Relationships: Indigenous Ways Of Knowing Meet Undergraduate Environmental Studies And Science, Nancy Leigh Rich

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

As places to engage with changing and complex ideas, institutions of higher education offer a logical site for bringing Indigenous ways of knowing together with environmental studies and science. However, profound differences between Indigenous and Western knowledges, as well as ongoing colonialism, cultural biases of science, and the nature of mainstream academia, have discouraged this endeavor. Recent developments in undergraduate pedagogy now point the way.

Using critical inquiry and qualitative methodology, this comparative study developed recommendations for practice based on current undergraduate teaching practices that bring Indigenous ways of knowing together with environmental studies and science across a diversity of …

Activist Training In The Academy: Developing A Master's Program In Environmental Advocacy And Organizing At Antioch New England Graduate School, Steve Chase

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

This curriculum action research study begins by raising the question of whether environmental studies programs within higher education should launch activist training programs for public interest advocates and grassroots organizers working for nonprofit organizations focused on environmental protection, corporate accountability, and social justice. Answering that question in the affirmative, the study then focuses on the theoretical issues underlying the creation of activist training programs within the academy, specifically within environmental studies programs, and reports on a case study of the successful development of a master’s program in Environmental Advocacy and Organizing. The first section on theoretical issues focuses first on …