Potholes and Sociopolitical Possibilities: Deepening Environmental Education for Black Children Living and Learning in the City

Abstract

This article addresses a fundamental issue in urban and environmental education (EE): the sociopolitical savvy and everyday expertise embodied by city-dwelling Black children are seldom regarded as core indices of learning. While there is important scholarship focused on frameworks for expanding EE, very little of this work engages with Black city-dwelling children's place-based knowledge. Consequently, this study analyzes data taken from an 18-month project conducted in a mid-size city. I show how fourth- and fifth-grade Black children conceived of the quality of air, land, and water, often in ways that articulated blurred boundaries between scientific and sociopolitical phenomena.

Keywords

elementary school racism social urban African American students urban education culturally relevant pedagogy subjects qualitative

Introduction

This article addresses a fundamental issue in urban and environmental education (EE): the sociopolitical savvy and everyday forms of expertise embodied by city-dwelling Black children are seldom regarded as core indices of learning. While there is important scholarship focused on frameworks for expanding EE, very little of this work engages substantively with Black city-dwelling children's place-based knowledge and ideas. When I say “city-dwelling,” I refer to children who live and attend public elementary schools in major metropolitan, or urban, centers with a population of over 500,000 residents.¹ These urban centers are densely populated, characterized by human-built structures, defined neighborhoods, and minimal unadulterated green space. For many, they constitute vibrant mélanges that are lauded for their cultural, racial, and economic diversity (Vernikoff et al., 2022). Urban cities, like the one featured in this article, also often have specific, long and complicated histories of development, decline and revitalization (Noguera, 2003; Surkin & Georgakas, 2022). They serve as hotbeds for contending with racism, socioeconomic stratification, and a host of other human rights issues that all evidence the need for a societal otherwise (Crawley, 2014). A concept of place and the idiosyncrasies of city life are central to this analysis and critique of normative EE for Black children.

EE, what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines as a “process that allows individuals to explore environmental issues, engage in problem solving, and take action to improve the environment” has partial roots in early nature education (Carter & Simmons, 2010). As a component of formal STEM schooling, EE can be thought of as a response to industrialization (to include industries shaped by colonialism, militarism, and capitalism; Vossoughi & Vakil, 2018) and its negative impact on the natural world. To be clear, knowledge and reverence of lands, air, and waters predate (and exist outside of) the institution of schooling. As a human practice of ingenuity and care, EE should be seen as part of the cultural and intellectual repertoires of Indigenous and African peoples (Glave, 2010; Tuck et al., 2014). With this perspective, EE is a communal ethos and set of learning practices that decenters individual human problems and desire while privileging ethical relationships and interdependence with the natural world (Nelson & Drew, 2024). Expansive EE frameworks highlight the importance of drawing upon collective consciousness and historic memory of place (Bang et al., 2014; Nxumalo, 2015). This includes, but is not limited to, accounting for the long and violent histories of conquest, racism, and resource extraction within and beyond the lands now designated as U.S. cities.

Despite being widely accepted as an interdisciplinary field, EE as typically advanced in schools is a moving target that has historically done quite a poor job of considering racialized, cultural, and place-based meanings (Finney, 2014; Gallay et al., 2021; Glave, 2010; Nxumalo et al., 2022). Black city-dwelling children therefore find themselves in a precarious position with limited access to robust formal environmental learning environments (Flanagan et al., 2022). On the one hand, racialized children in the city are seen as detached from the natural world² and the “purest” or “richest” contexts for deep environmental learning (Duhn et al., 2017; Gallay et al., 2021; Weintraub, 1995). At the same time, they are more likely to directly face environmental racism and, to be familiar with the contemporary environmental “innovations” (e.g., recycling initiatives, water conservation tools, urban gardens/farming, public transit, EV cars, etc.) that have become regular features of city life. Building from important extant scholarship (Flanagan et al., 2022; McKittrick, 2020; Nxumalo et al., 2022; Nxumalo & Ross, 2019; Warren & Coles, 2020), this article argues for a need to center multidimensional Black childhoods and learning in urban EE discourses (Yoon & Templeton, 2024). I consider when and how Black children's (ages 9–11) everyday insights related to air, land and waters challenge and deepen traditional notions of EE. More specifically, I ask:

How do Black children make meaning of the key issues that characterize their city environments, to include contesting boundaries between scientific, political, and everyday forms of knowledge?

What does their layered sensemaking suggest for how urban EE can be designed and enacted in ways arched toward justice and (Black) thriving?

In response to these questions, I analyze interview data from an 18-month project conducted in a midsize, Midwestern urban-emergent (Milner, 2012) city, henceforth referred to as Riverview. I show how fourth- and fifth-grade city-dwelling Black children conceived of the quality of the air, land and water, often in ways that articulated blurred boundaries between scientific and sociopolitical phenomena (see also, Davis & Philip, 2025; Davis & Schaeffer, 2019). Findings evidence how these Black, city-dwelling children developed emergent understandings of everyday issues ranging from water access, sustainability, space use and allocation, pollution/asthma, blight, health as inherently complex, sometimes classed or racialized, and necessarily interdisciplinary. Children also presented ethical dilemmas that serve as invitations for how we might stretch EE at the elementary level and reassess the futures it is leading toward. I conclude with a discussion of what it could look like to build the collective capacity needed to design for robust forms of learning that are necessary for Black children's holistic wellness, self-determined place-making (Coles, 2020; Davis et al., 2020; Germinaro & Nickson, 2024) and survivance (Tuck, 2009) in the city.

Foundations in the Literature

EE-Origin Stories

Black people have long lived in kinship with the natural world, cultivating reciprocal practices that have sustained through generations and impacted the world on a global scale. Though not always coined environmentalists in the Western sense of the word, one would be hard pressed to find a Black person in the United States, who does not hold stories of kinfolk who were/are some manner of botanist, conservationist, healer, farmer and/or inventor. In my own lineage, my grandfather taught me about the lush lands surrounding his childhood home in Jamaica, land his elder countrymen cultivated while he roamed playfully with peers. This is the same land his granny learned and labored for years until one day she was able to purchase a small plot from British colonizers. When my family migrated to a city in the Midwest in the 1950s, my grandfather's generational environmental knowledge lived on through meticulous lawn care, gardening, plant knowledge, and general resource conservation practices.

Normative EE has been conceptualized as an area of study that bears no direct connection to my own history or Black epistemologies more broadly (Glave, 2010; Nxumalo & Ross, 2019). In the book, Black Faces, White Spaces, environmentalist and cultural geographer Carolyn Finney (2014) argues that African Americans have an “intimate, ever-changing and significant relationship with the natural environment,” one that they continue to nurture as individuals and communities in the present day (p. xvi). Despite this long stand-connection, the genesis of EE is typically thought of as a Western invention that gained traction with the establishment of ecology as a branch of science (Miriti, 2019). The North American Association for EE's (NAAEE) timeline of EE history begins with Swiss-born philosopher Rousseau and Agassiz, a Swiss scientist and natural history scholar (eePro for NAAEE, accessed 2024). Both were adamant about their students being immersed in the natural environment as part of the curriculum. NAAEE's disclaimer, “we realize that this timeline presents a very limited perspective on the history in terms of Western European philosophy and conservation in America and does not reflect the full cultural and ethnic diversity of the field,” while important, is not functional in elevating other specific and valuable contributions to the emerging field. For example, the legacy of Black scientists George Washington Carver and Booker T. Whatley, along with their core contributions and teachings about land, plants, and sustainability are often overlooked within the dominant narrative. And with these omissions, obscured too are the sociopolitical factors that shaped the freedom to safely pursue self-determined nature-based opportunities (Finney, 2014; Glave, 2010) for these Black environmentalists and their forebearers.

Shifting closer to the present day, accounts of the establishment of EE found on the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) website and in academic texts (e.g., Carter & Simmons, 2010) focus on its development in relation to the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. During this time, there was an uptick in organizing efforts and “teach-ins”³ designed to educate the populace on pressing environmental issues. Twenty years later, the National Environmental Education Act of 1990 became U.S. policy, requiring that the federal government establish and support learning. The EPA defines EE as, “a process that allows individuals to explore environmental issues, engage in problem solving, and take action to improve the environment. As a result, individuals develop a deeper understanding of environmental issues and have the skills to make informed and responsible decisions.” This definition is supplemented with a list of components that articulate commitments to increasing public awareness, knowledge, and action in response to environmental challenges. As per the EPA's website, EE “Does not advocate a particular viewpoint.” Still, there is no explicit mention of how learner expertise and relationships to the natural environment may vary across cultural and regional contexts. It is also unclear from this definition if/how learners should make sense of governmental accountability or instances where environmental issues pose disproportionate and direct threats to urban centers and/or Black communities.

Critical EE and Pedagogy in City Contexts

A robust body of scholarship has aptly critiqued narrow, imprecise, contradictory (e.g., Disinger, 1985; Stevenson, 2007) and deficit theorizations of EE with an eye toward advancing decolonial perspectives on design. Much of this important work has been developed by native scholars and through centering Indigenous epistemologies (e.g., Bang et al., 2014; Maina-Okori et al., 2018; Marin & Bang, 2018; Trinidad, 2011; Tuck et al., 2014). A major point of contention is a lack of recognition of multiplicity in environmental knowledge. As many have argued, the core of EE has converged around a colonial zero-point (Bang et al., 2014; Domínguez, 2019), one that positions non-Western, nondominant place-based understandings on the periphery (Gallay et al., 2021; Glave, 2010). Consequently, the need to reimagine EE has been well-established by scholars who offer a myriad of vantage points and pedagogical models (e.g., Bellino & Adams, 2017; Miller, 2018). Under this umbrella, a smaller body of research is focused on interrogating and reconciling the enduring tensions between normative EE and city living. I follow with a few illustrative examples that are indicative of this wave of urban EE scholarship.

Paperson's (2014) conceptualization of EE through the lens of “ghetto land pedagogy” engages with the complex relationships between now-urban Indigenous land and Black, Indigenous and “ghettoized” communities. A major contribution of this work is the way that it disallows settler environmentalism, arguing that learners need to understand the colonial legacies that bring people to and away from land (Paperson, 2014). It is important to note that settler logics show up even in relation to initiatives presented as antiracist and communal. For example, well-intentioned efforts to add more greenspace to urban ghettos may cloak an underlying neoliberal curriculum, one that is concerned with replacing Black/brown bodies in city alcoves with those thought to be more “ecologically responsible” citizens (Paperson, 2014). A featured example involving high school students in Oakland demonstrates how youth can and do resist “commonsense environmentalism” when it conflicts with their lived understandings of how people of color learn to survive in the city. Similarly, Morales-Doyle et al. (2019) discuss how a curriculum they developed in Chicago uplifts community efforts to grow nourishing foods while simultaneously interrogating how blindly calling for urban gardens masks histories of divestment and issues with soil toxicity in the city, among other things.

A seminal piece by Bang et al. (2014) highlights a disjuncture between place-based education and critical pedagogies, particularly when the former tends to denote “nature” while the latter is enacted more frequently within cityscapes. While scholars like Gruenewald (2003) have helped to narrow this divide, more work is necessary to contend with enduring issues of Indigenous and anti-Black erasure in EE. Bang et al. (2014) offer an analysis of a 6-year community-based design research project in what is now known as Chicago. In this work, elders and teachers sought to restory the lands of Chicago and refuse the narrative that Indigenous lives in urban cities are somehow deficit, unauthentic, or displaced. As they well argue, liberatory work in urban land education requires border thinking, “solidarity with consciousness of land … resistance to land becoming a resource for global markets and negating presumptions about the absence of sovereign Indigenous futures” (Bang et al., 2014, p. 43). The point about sovereignty is especially important for EE in that it calls for pedagogy that is attuned to the knowing and forms of environmental prolepsis that emerge from nondominant communities.

Finally, I briefly recognize efforts to center youth voice and meaning making in critical urban EE (e.g., Barton & Tan, 2010; Flanagan et al., 2022; Mendoza et al., 2020; Schlemper et al., 2025). Bellino and Adams (2017) document youth participatory work in New York City. This research leveraged a focus on political ecologies and how they intersect with environmental or nature-based problems, as was the case with gentrification (Bellino & Adams, 2017). Each of the above examples, while serving as vital resources for conceptualizing what urban EE could or should be, espouse values and draw from theoretical lineages that are not necessarily wholly aligned. Collectively though, they reflect the continued efforts to reimagine EE as a tool to drive critical learning in way that attends to multiple epistemologies and issues of power.

Uneven Childhoods: Black Children in City Environments

The state and evolution of EE raises questions about where and how city-dwelling Black children fit into the current discourses. STEM education continues to contend with histories of devaluing and marginalizing Black youth situated in urban cities (Wright, 2019). And, as I take up in prior research (e.g., Davis, 2017; Davis & Schaeffer, 2019; Davis et al., 2020), critical pedagogical design models tend to focus on adolescents and young adults, with less consideration of how multidimensional notions of childhood come to bear on design (Yoon & Templeton, 2024). Consequently, there remains a reluctance to engage Black children's sociopolitical sensemaking within and beyond formal disciplinary instruction. The political savvy that Black children regularly embody to “navigate and resist potentially disempowering social systems” is often overlooked as valuable indices and movers of learning (Lee, 2017). This relative inattentiveness to Black children as social and political meaning makers, while problematic in its own right, (Bryan, 2021; Dumas & Nelson, 2016; Garlen, 2019), has also limited opportunities to identify the types of pedagogical and relational practices that support their agency and critical analyses of city environments.

City-dwelling Black children find themselves in the crosshairs, presumed to be detached from the “wonders” of nature yet too naïve to engage in serious structural or historical analyses of if/why that might be. Of the few examples of extant research in EE that have focused substantively on Black children in urban cities, many are laden with deficit language and framings. In one mixed-methods study, prompts designed to invite Black children's environmental reasoning led to youth discussing “other realities of the inner-city experience” for example, violence, substance abuse, etc. (Kahn & Friedman, 1995). My concern here is that the classification of “other” suggests that these issues are irrelevant to urban EE. How people relate to other living beings, occupy space, economic disparities, resource allocation, and health overlap squarely with environmental justice issues (Barton & Tan, 2010; Kahn, 2010). Other examples of self-described interventions and nature-based programming (e.g., Deniz & Kalburan, 2024; Larson et al., 2009), while having merit, do not substantively anticipate or account for the kinds of rich cultural environmental knowledge that Black children may already hold. I attend to this gap in the present study and analyses with a particular focus on Black childhoods and city life.

This research study aligns with and extends prior work that has analyzed limitations and blind spots within normative EE, especially as they pertain to how conceptions of “urban” and the reality of uneven childhoods (Bernstein, 2011) shape theory and design. Duhn et al. (2017) provide a comprehensive analysis of EE and the precarious position of children who grow up in urban places and cities. Scholars offer this plea, “That environmental educators and researchers examine how urban childhoods are lived and located in assemblages of uneasy and messy urban/nature/childhood encounters” (Duhn et al., 2017, p. 1364). For Black children, these assemblages are further complicated by the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness. Nxumalo and Ross (2019) elaborate on the pervasiveness of deficit ideologies, colonial logics and Black child erasure in EE. The very same notions of running wild, free and with nature that are associated with environmental learning are often the least available to Black children, both structurally and conceptually. Thus, they use Black speculative story-telling as a means of disruption and a mechanism for centering Black children's situated science stories. In this way, Nxumalo and Ross (2019) implore us to think critically about livable Black futures, what is/should be sacred, and about the capacity of Black children to forge deep and loving relationships with the natural world.

Thinking with this work, the study that follows was designed to contribute necessary empirical insights into how young children are necessarily questioning environmental precarity while also dreaming and learning to refuse. I attend specifically to Black children's complex conceptions of the air, land, and water as a part of political and ecological landscapes, sensemaking that has not been the focus of empirical education research. Black children were given space to tell their own environmental stories without the limitations of normative EE. In doing so, I position children's observations and expertise as ideational resources in shaping what EE can and must become for city-dwelling Black children.

Positionality

I am a Black woman and former elementary school STEM educator who grew up in the Midwestern city that is the focus of this study. Riverview is my home. I have also lived, studied and taught in a host of other major metropolitan cities including Chicago, Atlanta, and New York City. My personal and field-based experiences offer insight into areas of growth not-yet-fully realized by EE pedagogy and research. As a child, I was very aware of the high levels of asthma, persistent poverty, hazardous roads, and insufficient public transportation in my city. These environmental dynamics, which seemed quite normal to me and my peers at the time, are each tied to histories of racism and government malfeasance. I took for granted our consistent access to clean running water. We used this water in abundance to fill water balloons on hot days, plant flowers, and grow vegetables in my grandparent's backyard. As an adult, I observed the norm shift as water bills in Riverview skyrocketed and access became more uneven. The above topics were seldom, if ever, taken up in my school-based environmental instruction. They also were not integrated as part of social studies or other formal disciplines. I share these snippets as context for the design of this study and modes of relating to participating children. As I met with each child to conduct interviews, I could sense what they meant in the present and was able to affirm the connections they were drawing in the moment. I also sometimes leaned on my familiarity, remembering my own vivid memories (Ohito, 2023) as children discussed long-standing dynamics in Riverview. This research study is an imperfect attempt to engage Black children from my hometown in conversations about living—walking, breathing, wading, and becoming in the city. I sought to do this with an openness to what they might know and share as tied to the environment. Children's ideas were thoughtfully amplified in this work and while doing so, I also affirmed the once-child (Ransom, 2017) in me who had many ideas about city-living and far too few outlets for sharing them.

Study Design

The analyses here are drawn from an 18-month project that took place in the majority-Black, mid-size Midwestern city “Riverview” from 2014 to 2016. Broadly, the project was designed to investigate the meaning making and political agency of elementary-aged Black students who attended schools with liberatory educational models (Davis, 2017). Drawing from an extensive corpus of ethnographic information sources (i.e., 66 child participant interviews, child illustrations and fieldnote data), I analyzed the perceptions and meaning making of fourth/fifth graders, with focused attention to the ways that they conceived of localized opportunities, constraints and their own agency to influence the social and material conditions of their communities and lives. I utilized a critical ethnographic approach to study Black children's learning (Carspecken, 1996; Trueba, 1999). This approach to research is anchored in commitments to disrupting conventional ideologies (Thomas, 2003), and attuning to complex relationships between pedagogy, learning, subjective experience and broader systems of (in)justice (Cannella & Lincoln, 2009). During the time of this study, I served as a teacher-volunteer and spent over 200 hr participating in both informal and formal school activities as an “active member” (Adler & Adler, 1987). Reciprocal, caring relationships with adults and children deepened my understandings of learning in the space and became a significant aspect of the study design (Davis & Neal-Jackson, 2022; Erickson, 2006).

As I engaged in analysis for the larger project in 2016/2017, I was struck by the many varied representations of land, air and water in the city that surfaced in children's interviews and in their drawings. I returned to this work in 2022, partly in response to the uptick of curriculum and studies focused on teaching youth about climate change as part of their EEs. Professionally, I also began collaborating with scholars and practitioners focused on water justice. We recognized that Black children living and learning with environmental precarity in cities were still rarely, if ever, centered in contemporary empirical education research. Consequently, I designed this secondary analysis to facilitate the deeper study environmental meaning making as reflected in children's interviews. Questions driving this analysis are as follows: (a) How do Black children make meaning of their city environments, to include contesting boundaries between scientific, political, and everyday forms of knowledge? (b) What does their layered sensemaking suggest for how urban EE can be designed and enacted in ways arched toward justice and (Black) thriving? These questions underscore the enduring need to bring notions of critical pedagogy in closer conversation with discourses in EE and Black childhood. The study is presented with an eye toward further theorizing around if/how a focus on city-dwelling Black children's sensemaking might deepen and expand the field of environmental STEM education.

Analysis Procedures

Focusing on children's 30–60 min interviews, I conducted one round of thematic coding inclusive of, but not limited to, the following topics:

▪ Features of the city landscape, to include children's references to space and place

▪ School-based STEM learning concepts or instructional activities

▪ Children's ideas about the root causes of environmental issues and possible solutions.

In this first pass, I sought to become more attuned to Black children's conceptions of the “here and now” (Lanouette & Taylor, 2022) as important Black spatial storylines (Coles, 2023; Davis & Neal-Jackson, 2022; Germinaro & Nickson, 2024). Though children were not prompted to discuss the environment in a formal sense, the many references and rich descriptions of air, land, and water spoke to the resonances in their lives. For example, when I asked children to tell me about their communities, to include positive resources and pressing issues, several children spontaneously mentioned the pollution, litter, and water access issues. Table 1 provides an overview of the topics introduced by children.

Table 1.

Scheme of Initial Land, Air & Water Concepts from Child Interviews.

Land	Air	Water
Plants & animals (nature-talk)	Asthma	Flint Water
Roads	Gas emissions	Fresh Water
Stability/safety of terrain	Air-borne pathogens	Bodies of Water
Land Use	Breathing quality	Water Access
Human Structures	Wind	Rain, puddles, snow
Themes Emerging Alongside Topics Above:
Race/Racism
Sustainability & Sustainable Practices (i.e. recycling, conservation)
Solutions & Action
Role of Government/Local Leaders
Comparison of Present Environmental Dynamics
Health and Safety

Before taking a second analytical pass, I reviewed Black children's drawings from the larger project. In these images, children were thinking creatively and depicting settings using a novel modality (Davis & Neal-Jackson, 2022). I was interested in reviewing these visual texts with an eye toward further analytical attunement. While not the focus of this analysis, I did so to help me decipher any elements related to environment that I may have inadvertently overlooked while focused exclusively on children's talk. For example, in the images below (Figure 1), Dante (left) depicted a historical instance of two African Americans escaping enslavement through a stormy, open field. On the right, Starr used weather symbols indicators to depict the ebbs and flows of her school environment. These examples indicated that I needed to attune to when/how children made associations between physical terrain (to include weather) and embodied experience across contexts. These drawings also evidence tensions that the children were making sense of. The recurring motif of rain and lightning here connects past and present, while also demonstrating how Black people's struggles were understood in relation to weather and the literal weathering of storms. I also considered how children made sense of historical shifts, to include references to how Black people's relationships to the land have evolved over time due to structural racism.

Finally, in line with prior work (Davis & Schaeffer, 2019), I analyzed children's articulations with consideration of layers of meaning making. Goodwin's (2007) concept of stance offers analytical guidance in attuning to the layers of thinking that might surface for surface for learners. I noted patterns in when children's ideas reflected (a) normative EE or STEM concepts, (b) affective and ethical sensemaking, (c) knowledge of sociopolitical and/or sociohistorical dynamics and (d) were oriented toward forms of agency, for example civic participation and community activism.

Findings

Black city-dwelling children offered important perspectives on the environment. I found that children were developing emergent understandings of everyday issues ranging from water access, sustainability, space use and allocation, pollution, blight and public health as complex and interdisciplinary. Children's articulations also underscored the persistence of anti-Black racism, class inequities, and tensions between government officials and the Riverview community. In their candid and rich responses, children presented ethical dilemmas that emerged through their assessments of the city landscape. For example, they show when and how common “green logics” simply didn’t fit, and/or, when they presumed a level of environmental justice that was incongruent with children's everyday experiences. I elaborate on these representations and dynamics in the sections that follow.

Air

Like most metropolitan locales, air quality was and still is an issue in the city of Riverview. Elevated asthma rates are often cited as part of the impetus for reducing air pollution via carpooling, public transit, biking, and other eco-friendly practices. Children in this study vocalized concerns related to air pollution and quality, with some insight into contributing factors. Their sensemaking was largely shaped by home-based discussions and through observing of the conditions of the spaces they occupied. Importantly, many children conveyed everyday knowledge about air in a manner that suggests a need to consider structural inequities alongside conventional, individualized “green” logics. The examples below offer entry points for supporting city-dwelling children as they (a) make meaning of the causes of air contamination and (b) evaluate strategies and interventions to facilitate meaningful change.

When asked to discuss problems most relevant to the Riverview community, fifth grader Nova simply said, “the pollution.” When I inquired into the source of that pollution, Nova elaborated:

My mom told me that there's this one thing and they’re downtown, something … that they put on some of the trash in … And then they like burn it. And then it makes toxic things go out in the air … that it causes people to have asthma.

Nova was referring to one of the largest municipal incinerators in the country, then found in the heart of Riverview and run by a major renewable energy company. Prior to its 2021 closing, toxic fumes emanating from this structure were the subject of many news stories, exposés, and community forums. Nova, informed by her mother, aptly outlined a dangerous cause and effect relationship between the incinerator and the health of residents. She also alluded to a tension between mechanical and chemical processes deemed socially necessary by public officials (i.e., efficient trash disposal in densely populated areas) and the direct environmental consequences for proximal residents (i.e., hazardous toxic fumes). Curricula could build on Nova's ideas to drive critical inquiries into normed processes that are presumed to align with environmental ideals. In this case, a long-standing trash management practice comes with severe and lasting health consequences for city residents.

Other children's responses similarly surfaced tensions between environmental ideals, public health and the everyday experiences of city-dwelling youth. Fourth grader Cole explained that a big issue present in school is the visible presence of mold, another allergen and air-borne containment: “There is mold …. in [my teacher's’] room,” a point echoed by other children in the school. Blair elaborated on the topic of persistent mold and explained, “we have mold on our roof … it's growing mold … [our principal] had paid the people a lot of money to come fix the roof but it's still not fixed yet.” Cole and Blair bring attention not just to the presence of mold, but also to the normed delays and bureaucratic inefficiencies associated with rectifying the issue.

Like the incinerator, the responsibility of upholding safe city environmental standards rests first with leaders and institutions. As tied to air quality, there was a recurring theme of conflict between institutions responsible for health and well-being being implicated in the maintenance of environmentally harmful conditions. While limiting emissions and the contaminants contributed by individual residents could certainly help, this strategy in isolation does little to hold institutions accountable to change at scale. Moreover, it does not consider the extent to which residents already ration things like fuel out of fiscal necessity or due to the lack of public transportation in the Riverview. Tasha, a fourth grader, offered this as an example of a “big” problem in the city, “[a lot of people worry] about their children going to school … Some people don’t have enough gas.” Children's ideas about air/air quality in Riverview point to a need to begin with everyday experience, recognizing how people in the city may already possess relevant knowledge (institutional and otherwise) and pursue eco-friendly practices in their daily lives.

Land

Emery offered a succinct summary of key issues on the ground in Riverview, “It's a lot of vacant houses and a lot of vacant schools, bumpy roads …. A lot of people don't have a lot of jobs.” Her conceptions were seconded by other children in the study, many with a keen awareness of land-based environmental dynamics, contributing factors and possible solutions. Children evidenced intimate environmental relationships through their capacity to recognize and assess proximal problems. A recurring theme was the emphasis children placed on multipronged and structural solutions, as was the case with Camille:

Camille: I think the biggest problem is that – that they need to fix the road and stuff.

[Natalie/Interviewer]: They need to fix the roads? You didn't name that one before when I asked you about problems….

Camille: Well, it is important, though – Because it's holes in the street.

[Natalie]: The streets? Okay. So do you think that that problem can be solved?

Camille: …If the governor get the people to fix the streets and stuff then maybe it'll make it better.

Camille reinforced her stance toward bumpy roads, rightly offering a retort to my line of questioning about its significance. She also imagined a solution that would begin with local leadership and trickle down to residents. There was a missed opportunity here to invite Camille to elaborate on how she imagined that the roads progressed to such a state of hazard. Questions about material use, durability, city infrastructure, climate, sustainability, economic disparities, etc., all come to mind and could be taken up explicitly through classroom instruction. As I discuss below, when children did discuss root causes in relation to land-based issues, they offered rich contextual and sometimes divergent ideas.

References to neighborhood blight as evidence of the state of the land in Riverview was recurrent across child interviews. Although children sometimes differed in their understandings of root causes, their frequent mention of abandoned homes provide insight into the meanings that unoccupied space held for these young city dwellers. Consider the similarities and distinctions between Kasey (fourth grade) and Lisa's (fifth grade) accounts of abandoned homes:

…sometimes I get sad when I see them—when I see abandoned houses … But now the buildings and houses just destroyed – some was demolished … Maybe it was something wrong with [the houses], maybe it was just in there so long that it started to grow mold in there and different types of bugs just went in there…

Kasey drew from existing knowledge about the decomposition processes catalyzed by mold and insects like termites, worms, etc., over time. Kasey also alluded to a dimension of human neglect or, a possible lack of structural integrity in the construction of buildings. Where Kasey saw somewhat of a disconnect between human needs (secure housing) and natural processes, Lisa described the issue of blight as a power struggle between residents and government officials:

There's a lot of abandoned houses, and [people in the community] tried to make a meeting and talked to the city to try to get them torn down because a lot of kids live around where I live and they like playing in the fields …. I don’t think that [they are there] because some of the houses just got old …. the city could have torn some of the houses down like we wanted, but they didn’t actually come because, maybe, because it was a Black neighborhood–mostly Black people live there…

Lisa and Kasey were aligned in their focus on blight and time-worn buildings. Where Kasey seemed to accept blight as a natural feature of city life, Lisa questioned the norm of leaving unsound housing intact, particularly in cases where the land could be used in ways more in step with community needs. Lisa also importantly introduced a racialized dimension and implied that city officials did not take Black residents’ calls to facilitate open and safe green space for play and leisure seriously. Where deficit notions of city life would offer blind critiques of the absence of green space for roaming and exploration, Lisa attested to structural processes that hinder Black residents’ pursuit of open space. Other children, like Diamond (fourth grade), similarly introduced race into their analyses of blight, fluidly drawing connections between racism and environmental conditions. In one of her interviews, Diamond offered an analysis of the place-based implications of “white flight” in Riverview:

White people, they don't live around – like, well, not to say the hood – but around where we live now …. because where I live, there's a lot of my color …. first, there was a lot of jobs – A lot of jobs started opening in [Riverview]. And a lot of Black people and White people started having more business in [Riverview]. But then they left…

Diamond directly connected blight in the city to historical, racialized phenomena. For her, an assessment of the way land is oriented in Riverview requires consideration of White migration into suburbs, anti-Black racism and the local economy. This is a spot-on and sophisticated line of reasoning.

Despite these dynamics, children remained open to the possibility of change driven by individuals and groups of Riverview residents. For example, Shayna offered this comprehensive outline of possible grassroots solutions:

I live around houses that's abandoned, and my mom want to help and clean up the houses and make them prettier and maybe buy one …. something I want to help the community with is fixing up the houses, helping the people on the streets,— cleaning up the places around us, because I see a lot of trash around us …. we don’t have to just clean up on Earth Day.

Shayna's response is further evidence that environmental awareness and a sense of personal agency and communal accountability are not necessarily areas where city-dwelling children struggle. Looking across these examples, we gain a window into how Black children saw tensions and opportunities in land use and maintenance in urban cities. These tensions are seldom taken up within normative curriculum, despite being salient for the city-dwelling children in this study. Moreover, there is an ethical dimension at play: failure to consider the larger sociopolitical backdrop as we seek solutions to environmental problems is unethical and intellectually deficient. Children's meaning making supported the assertion that knowing the land in Riverview from a socioscientific perspective, necessitates historical analyses of power, migration, and discriminatory behavior.

Water

Commentary on urban water at the time of this study was deeply influenced by public outrage around the Flint Water Crisis. Children in Riverview were particularly aware of the health crisis due to their (a) proximity to Flint and (b) Riverview's similar demographic composition. Some participating children also had insight into local (i.e., city-specific) water access issues. Collectively, their articulations highlight the salience of water and varied understandings of the nature and extent of water issues in Flint and Riverview (see Davis & Schaeffer, 2019). I offer the following extended commentary from fourth grader Angel as she amplified key themes across this data set:

The only thing I can think of is Flint, Flint, Flint … I think Flint needs care because they don't have any water and they won't be able to wash or wash their clothes, eat, because some food needs water in it …. I really think Gov. [—] should take responsibility. Because [the governor] didn't like, get the water for Flint, and he knew about it, he didn't tell anyone, and now Flint doesn't have any fresh water. Good thing that we have fresh water and we can send it to them, and maybe they can use it to wash up and stuff. Like, just pour water in here and wash up.

Angel's description was impassioned and rich with knowledge of the implications that water instability holds for human life. Her discussion emphasized the role of political negligence and dishonesty, concluding with a distinction between the state of water in Riverview and in nearby Flint. While accountability from leaders was mentioned as important, she also considered how the collective might lend support by sharing available water resources. Shae's insights largely aligned with Angel's but with more context for how water problems evolved over time, “[Flint] — their water was poisoned. They were using some of our water from [Riverview], and the Governor cut it off, but we still have good water, and we try to send them some … their water was good, but now it's metal in their water.” Notice the association of “good” and “fresh” water with Riverview. In both cases, Black children's explanations were not solely focused on the normative scientific dimensions at play and instead, also centered sociopolitical and human factors as critical to making sense of the environmental landscape.

In the previous examples, children's conceptions of Riverview water were articulated, in part, as a tale of two cities. Because the circumstances in Flint were salient and severe, Riverview's water defaulted to the environmental ideal. While this was a recurring theme, children also complicated this notion by recasting the water access issues as proximal and influenced by racism. For context, some children in this study became aware of mass water shut-offs in Riverview, a problem that gained the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union, United Nations, and NAACP. Darui, reflecting on a scene from a documentary, explained, “when people's water [in Riverview] was being shut off … they were going up to the White lady and they’re about to turn off her water she said ‘don’t do that’ and so they left her and then they went to her neighbor who was Black and walked over and she said ‘hey don’t do that’ but they just kept going …. I think that's a form of racism.” Iris echoed Darui's concerns about racist perceptions and differential water access, “People go sometimes in predominantly Black neighborhoods. People are coming like, ‘Oh, these people probably don’t pay their water bill. They probably waste all of their water and don’t pay anything.’ So, they charge more….” While children formed consensus around the idea that the water quality (i.e., purity) in Riverview was sufficient, they remained concerned about access and availability for Black residents in the city. This is an important dimension of EE that is often overshadowed by discussions of pollution, conservation, etc.

Black children's ideas on improving the state of urban water stemmed from their (a) a sense of urgency and solidarity with Flint and (b) recognition of the racialized, systemic barriers. When I asked Angel to further specify what she’d do to solve the city water problems she identified, she said, “I would give Flint – everybody 12 cases of water bottles, everybody in Flint, 12 cases of water bottles every day. Then if they run out, they will have more, 12 cases of water bottles.” Angel's solution runs counter to the conventional environmental logics that discourage the use of single-use plastic bottles. In her case, universal access to clean water took priority over sustainable material use.

Though children regularly referenced individual acts of helping like donating water bottles, this was often coupled with more top-down, structural initiatives. When children discussed how to solve water problems at scale, they frequently emphasized the importance of city officials as drivers of change. In line with examples outlined above, Mackenzie demonstrates this reasoning. Mackenzie said, “If I was just the mayor, I would try to get everybody's water turned back on. Because I wish I had all the money so I could give the people—without the filters—get them money. And I wish people didn’t have to pay their water bills because some people can’t afford it ….” Mackenzie was impassioned in articulating a vision for how the mayor might reallocate resources. For Mackenzie, financial resources and burden should have no bearing on resident's rights to clean water. This is a complex ethical dilemma that sits at the intersection of traditional science, history, and sociopolitical behavior. Still, it is important to recognize how Black children thoughtfully analyzed key issues while remaining open to a societal capacity for change.

Discussion: Toward Expansive Conceptions of EE in the City

EE is insufficient without substantive opportunities to unpack city-dwelling children's complex and sometimes conflicting place-based experiences. The data from this study are evidence of the wealth of insights that Black children drew upon as they navigated nature-based, sociopolitical and material dynamics in their daily lives. These understandings are neither deficient nor detached. Instead, they offer a clear window into their sensemaking, modes of relating, dreaming and learning in city landscapes. Children's environmental stories were rich with anecdotes from school, home, and daily observations. In almost all cases, the children in this study referenced structural barriers to quality air, land, and water as part of their environmental storytelling. Their ideas challenged normative logics that center individual responsibility and avoid potentially contentious subject matter, particularly with younger children. For reference, the Next Generation Science Standards call for students to be able to “communicate solutions that will reduce the impact of humans on the land, water, air, and/or other living things in the local environment” (K-ESS3-3) and lists “reusing paper and recycling cans and bottles” as a sample strategy. Children's ideas in the context of this study make evident how such standards, if taken as comprehensive, do not facilitate students’ deep engagement with pervasive, thorny issues. While children sometimes differed in their assessments of root causes for the issues they observed, they agreed that governmental accountability and collective action constituted important drivers of environmental change at scale. Furthermore, many of the ideas that children raised represent core facets of normative STEM and could be used as a bridge to deepen instruction. When Kasey and Lisa offered conflicting analyses of dilapidated buildings, an inquiry-based project might have supported them and peers in learning about sustainable materials and climate/climate change's relationship to “natural” decomposition processes. A well-thought-out design might also carve out instructional time to consider the city's current role in maintaining urban space while also exploring how responsibilities and environmental accountability structures may have shifted over time (Weintraub, 1995).

A close analysis of children's talk in this project underscores how common environmental stewardship guidance and advocacy, when not coupled with processes for interrogating anti-Blackness and disinvestment in Black/brown communities, may function in ways that are disingenuous if not violent (Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Nxumalo et al., 2024; Nxumalo & Ross, 2019; Paperson, 2014). Children implicitly resisted oversimplified, and at times tone-deaf logics when they didn’t fit, such as in the case of imploring residents to limit fuel emissions without access to transportation alternatives or concern for how people may already be doing this. Or, discouraging bottled water use in instances of water instability, when in fact bottled water may be one of the few viable short-term solutions. Children often foregrounded the ethical dilemmas and injustices associated with issues they identified, such as discriminatory practices (e.g., lack of urgency in remediating environmental threats) and disproportionate outcomes for Black people. As their articulations indicate, Black children were already noticing patterns in the silencing of Riverview residents when they challenged the destruction of land and comprises to clean air and water. These complexities often fall out of school-based elementary instruction and consequently, perpetuate the erasure of city-dwelling Black communities despite being home to an abundance of informal environmental educators, innovators, actors and problem-solvers. The idea of centering nondominant epistemologies and attending to coloniality in place-based, EE is not new, but my findings support that this stance toward design needs to be employed earlier and with meaningful attunement to Black children's everyday understandings and encounters.

Much more than a tale of urban ruin and pessimism, I argue that children's sensemaking serves as an invitation for the field to reconsider how/when EE advances notions of evitability and inevitability in ways that run counter to its purported aims (Berry, 2021). There is a tendency in EE to connect present action with future sustainable worlds in ways that gloss over racialized, cultural and classed dimensions. What is the role of whiteness and colonialism in contributing to and sustaining the urban environmental precarity that children are experiencing? Despite having robust knowledge and infinite access to information, policy and practices generally don’t align with environmental or public health ideals. This is not happenstance and was already evident to many participating children at the time of this study. Children trouble disciplinary boundaries and seem to have little difficulty melding cross-disciplinary understandings. The data here offers insight into how children understand the interconnectedness between social and ecological justice as something that is and has been but still, should not and can’t always be (Nxumalo et al., 2024). Their ability to creatively story city environments in ways that are critical but change-oriented, that demand systemic accountability while also valuing reciprocity and collective agency, reflects nuance and serves as a model for the field (Nxumalo et al., 2024). It evidences learning about practices of survivance as synthesis, renewal and self-determination (Vizenor, 1994) in pursuing more livable futures. I question whether the field values the intellectual siloes and boundaries that have characterized EE over building bridges that affirm the sensemaking of Black children. By anchoring EE learning design in ways that require listening to and thinking with city-dwelling Black children, expansive pathways emerge. EE cannot continue to undermine their individual and communal knowledge.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Academies of Education/Spencer Foundation.

ORCID iD

Natalie R. Davis

Notes

Natalie R. Davis is an assistant professor in Educational Studies. Her area of research is children's sociopolitical and environmental sensemaking, within and outside of innovative STEAM learning environments.

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