During the 2020-21 school year, I served as an AmeriCorps volunteer in a small, rural Colorado town. Since I grew up in a vastly different environment, it was clear that my values did not always align with the local community. I often struggled to balance advocating for my beliefs and fit in with the local community. I was placed in an after-school program where I supported youth from kindergarten to the end of high school. I also spent significant time teaching and tutoring. It was not uncommon for contested topics to arise during my teaching. I realized early on that expressing my beliefs about social, political, and economic issues could risk my community connection. On the other hand, pretending to agree was inauthentic and prevented me from exposing my students to alternative ideas.
Most of my differences from the community were invisible. One noticeable difference was that I did not eat meat. This choice was something I could not easily hide from the children who frequently questioned me about my diet. Finding ways to communicate my choice to be vegetarian without villainizing the choice to eat meat was challenging. I thought that addressing the issue from my values would risk othering myself, so I tried to justify my choices from a systemic view. I decided the best justification would be to talk about food systems and how eating meat in a city is very different from eating meat from a farm five miles down the road. With this explanation, I was able to have deeper conversations about food systems with students who held very different values than me.
Educators, unable to distinguish between social and personal advocacy, risk creating unhealthy power dynamics in their classroom. Removing advocacy from a classroom, and especially from an environmental education classroom, would only disadvantage students. Educators and students come to the table with different values and morals. This variability can make the inclusion of advocacy a challenge. Alternatively, educators must be cautious of what they exclude. Any time an educator teaches, there is an implicit and explicit curriculum. Completely excluding advocacy from the classroom is a part of the implicit curriculum and teaches students to under-value components of advocacy (Jickling, 2003). This exclusion could result in students avoiding challenging conversations around advocacy and contentious subjects.
Advocacy can be broken into two subcategories: personal and social advocacy. The differentiation between the two came from the distinction between widely accepted and contested moral issues. Jickling (2003) identifies how educators advocate for specific moral issues such as non-violence, accepting cultural diversity, and honesty. I identify these as social values and then social advocacy. Social advocacy indicates support or recommendations for widely accepted values. This type of advocacy should be included in education. Social advocacy provides educators with the opportunity to go beyond hard facts and facilitate healthy discussions around moral issues. It is the responsibility of educators to develop skills such as those required to participate in moral conversations in their students (Hug, 1977). Thus, good educators must include advocacy around uncontested moral issues within their teaching.
The other form of advocacy is personal advocacy. I define this as support or recommendations of contested political, economic, or religious values. When conversations focus on personal values and the associated morals, there is a risk of creating an unhealthy power dynamic. This dynamic could occur between students or an educator and their students. If individuals feel that their values or morals are wrong or that their peers believe they are bad people, they will struggle to prioritize their learning. A student in this position might feel targeted, fearful, shameful, guilty, or defensive. These reactions are understandable but do not help create a productive learning environment. Power dynamics already exist in classrooms. The educator should identify how they hold power over their students and consider if that dynamic ultimately contributes to students' learning. In the case of personal advocacy, power dynamics often create barriers to student engagement.
Eliminating all forms of advocacy from the classroom is not a good solution. Advocacy will look very different depending on the age and maturity level of the students. Consistent with any other subject matter, educators must decide what their students can handle responsibly. Educators cannot remove themself from their values and morals. Attempting to do this in a classroom is often unsuccessful and may create a hostile learning environment. If teachers refuse to identify their own biases, students may not feel comfortable disagreeing with their teacher. Thus, educators must consider how they justify their values and morals to students. For example, consider an educator who wants to address single-use plastic water bottles. The educator could have their students discuss the morals behind using single-use plastic water bottles versus reusable bottles. This method may put students at risk of feeling othered or morally fractured from the group. Alternatively, the educator could look at the social implications of using plastic water bottles by asking questions like; Who is most likely to use plastic water bottles? What might motivate an individual to use a single-use plastic water bottle? Are their reusable solutions that address these motivations? These questions allow students to use advocacy to gain deeper insight into issues without putting individuals at risk of feeling like an outsider. Rather than using advocacy to judge personal choices, educators should provoke students to consider why people act the way they do and if those actions align with accepted social values.
Works Cited
Hug, J. (1977), Two Hats, In Aldrich, J.L. Blackburn. A-M., & George, AA. (Eds.) The Report of the North American Regional Seminar on Environmental Education for the Red World. Columbus, OH: SMEAC Information Reference Center.
Jickling, B. (2003). Environmental education and environmental advocacy: Revisited. The Journal of Environmental Education, 34(2), 20–27.