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Immigrant children promoting environmental care: Enhancing learning, agency and integration through culturally-responsive environmental education

Title:

Immigrant children promoting environmental care: Enhancing learning, agency and integration through culturally-responsive environmental education

Blanchet-Cohen, Natasha and Reilly, Rosemary C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7274-4488 (2016) Immigrant children promoting environmental care: Enhancing learning, agency and integration through culturally-responsive environmental education. Environmental Education Research . ISSN 1350-4622 (In Press)

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Abstract

This paper examines the potential of culturally-responsive environmental education to engage immigrant early adolescents. Our study suggests that environmental involvement can become a means and an end for children to bridge their school and home in agential ways. Drawing from a multi-phase study involving focus groups with children, parents, and teachers from three culturally-diverse schools in Montreal, as well as a green action research project, we examine children’s role as environmental educators and ambassadors. The role of environmental ambassador allowed children to take on positions that departed from conventional parent-child social scripts, and enhanced the communication between school-student-home, between generations, and spoke to their sense of place. We contend that culturally-responsive environmental education offers a unique space for enacting democracy, knowledge creation and integration, but this opportunity is often squandered. Bi-directional, responsive, and consistent home-school-community-place relations need to be actively supported.

Divisions:Concordia University > Faculty of Arts and Science > Applied Human Sciences
Concordia University > Research Units > Centre for Human Relations and Community Studies
Item Type:Article
Refereed:Yes
Authors:Blanchet-Cohen, Natasha and Reilly, Rosemary C.
Journal or Publication:Environmental Education Research
Date:February 2016
Funders:
  • Fonds de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture
  • Center for Human Relations and Community Studies
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):10.1080/13504622.2016.1153046
Keywords:environmental education, immigrant children, learning, culturally-responsive, agency, intergenerational
ID Code:980930
Deposited By: Rosemary Reilly
Deposited On:30 Mar 2016 20:28
Last Modified:07 Dec 2020 20:43

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