Miriam Solis, Abby Randall, Will Davies

A research-practice Partnership

to advance anti-racist green building, education, and practice

miriam solis abby randall will davies

CENTERING YOUTH OF COLOR IN OUR GREENING IMPERATIVE

The construction and operation of residential and commercial buildings account for 38% of total global energy-related CO2 emissions. Architects, planners, and designers across the United States are grappling with how to shape the built environment in ways that mitigate the consequences of climate change. The U.S. Green Building Council has formalized the uptake of green building principles through its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification and credential program, which encourage green building practices like rainwater harvesting, the use of recycled materials, and thermal and solar energy. Some local jurisdictions have begun to incentivize the use of these green building approaches. Combined, these strategies, codifications, and policy changes reflect some urgently needed headway.

Environmental justice scholarship and advocacy has illuminated equity implications of the greening of the built environment. Communities of color have less access to environmental amenities that contribute to wellness, such as parks and public space. Yet urban plans that allegedly seek to improve the neighborhood can be a double-edged sword, as both public and private urban greening efforts can precipitate “climate gentrification” and eventual residential displacement.2 Greening the built environment in ways that don’t uproot long-time residents presents a significant challenge to communities, planners, and designers.

Another example is the field’s labor stratification. The green building field is growing rapidly and can offer an attractive career pathway for young people of color. Schools, unions, and community organizations recognize the value of green jobs associated with skilled trades because of their high pay and stability.3 But, currently, many of the jobs classified as green are held by people with advanced degrees and credentials, such as licensed architects and certified planners. These more professionalized fields are also largely held by white people.4 At present, this racialized non-professional/professional divide is reproducing inequities in educational and career advancement. It also signifies that the field is missing the critical contributions that people of color can make.

These equity implications require that the planning and design fields attend to who is greening the built environment — a question of diversity — but also to how the environment is being greened. One way to address the former is through educational outreach in these fields through access to quality green curriculum.5 Green building training and expertise has historically been the domain of industry professionals, but scholars and educators are beginning to investigate how formal and informal STEM educational spaces can expand green building education through “green building literacies” in the K–12 school context.6 The designing, building, and operation of green schools can themselves be instructive processes, by providing students with hands-on opportunities to learn about how sustainability can feature in their learning environments.7

AN ECORISE/UTSOA RESEARCH-PRACTICE PARTNERSHIP

To diversify the field and identify conceptual interventions for how to green the built environment in anti-racist ways, University of Texas faculty, researchers, and students teamed up with EcoRise, an environmental education organization that implements school-based programs to provide youth with knowledge and skills in the areas of sustainability, design, and green building. The organization has worked with Austin

Environmental justice scholarship and advocacy has illuminated equity implications of the greening of the built environment.

FIG 1 Akins High School student participants tour Austin’s Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC). They also developed their own green school models at an MAA workshop. Image courtesy of EcoRise.

Independent School District (AISD) since 2009, when former UT student Gina LaMotte founded it. The organization has greatly increased its reach, now serving more than 5,500 PreK–12 teachers at nearly 2,200 schools annually.

In 2019, EcoRise launched its Green Building Lessons for a Sustainable Future (GBSF) program at an AISD high school. The school is a federally designated Title I school, which means that a high portion of its students are from low-income households. The school enrolls approximately 2,750 students, 86% of whom are students of color. Six twelfth-grade students in the school’s STEM Academy’s capstone Engineering Design and Development course, a career and technical education class, participated in the program. GBSF also provided professional development for teachers, which included a visit to the Mexican American Cultural Center Fig 1, a three-day training session before the start of the school year, and forty-two lessons of green building curriculum with hands-on activities and group projects like identifying their schools’ energy inefficiencies and making recommendations on how to improve them. In addition, BLGY, an Austin-based architecture firm that specializes in green and LEED-certified schools, provided hands-on learning by facilitating workshops and site-visits to AISD’s Blazier Elementary School Fig 2 . UTSOA Assistant Professor Miriam Solis, community and regional planning student Oriana Lopez, and College of Education student Will Davies also joined the initiative to design and offer workshops and evaluate the program.

In 2020, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Environmental Literacy Program (NOAA ELP) awarded EcoRise and the School of Architecture a $450,000 grant to grow the program in Texas. The Building a Green Texas: Activating a New Generation of Sustainability Leaders Program supports projects that both inspire and educate people to use Earth-system science to increase ecosystem stewardship and resilience to extreme weather, climate change, and other environmental hazards. EcoRise’s deputy director Abby Randall is overseeing program implementation. The program will now include paid summer internships in addition to those already offered during the school year and will reach 400 students from fifteen schools in Central Texas and the Gulf Coast by 2023.

FIG 2A View inside the new Blazier Elementary School designed by BLGY Architecture, which Akins High School students toured. Photo by Andrea Calo courtesy of BLGY.

UT’s role has also expanded. Assistant Dean for Student Affairs Charlton Lewis, Assistant Professor Katherine Lieberknecht, and landscape architecture graduate students are offering college readiness and design workshops in Central Texas, while UT’s Marine Science Institute will be doing the same for students in the Houston area and along the Gulf Coast. Associate Professor Carmen Valdez of the UT School of Social Work is a project advisor.

The pandemic temporarily affected the program’s momentum. In the ‘20-‘21 school year, it was at times difficult to coordinate with already overburdened teachers and students. As program coordinators, we took the time to learn from the challenges facing the school communities we were working with. We also hosted several virtual workshops that generated engagement, including a presentation by the School of Architecture’s Materials Lab Director, Jen Wong. This past summer was especially exciting, with Austinarea high school students interning at various offices throughout the city — including the City of Austin Office of Sustainability, Go Austin / Vamos Austin, and AISD’s facilities and STEM departments — all key organizations rethinking the intersection of equity, climate change, and the built environment. The high school students represented several campuses, including Eastside Memorial Early College High School, Northeast Early College High School, and Del Valle High School.

Throughout the grant period and beyond, we will iteratively evaluate if the project is achieving its overarching aim: to build environmental literacy among high school students and help communities become more resilient to extreme weather and other environmental hazards in the short- and long-term. We will do this via an in-depth study and on-the-ground application of green building principles. Our program evaluation efforts involve using a participatory action research approach (PAR) to identify and synthesize what we are learning from young people’s experience. PAR is a philosophy and a research approach implemented with communities and is designed to address diverse program and organizational needs across a broad range of local and cultural contexts.8 Insights generated through PAR enable collective deliberation and action to improve existing efforts. Thus, any insights generated from youth or the organizations we work with are collectively discussed and acted upon.

CONCEPTUALIZING CLIMATE JUSTICE PEDAGOGIES

In addition to working toward diversifying the field, our research-practice partnership is enabling us to identify conceptual interventions that can contribute to anti-racist green building practices. We seek to disrupt traditional “banking” pedagogical models of technical green building education, where a teacher unidirectionally “deposits” learning upon students.9 Our model engages high-school students’ knowledge about the connection between their daily lives and how green building plans — or their absence — affect their communities. By illuminating the potential role of youth in green building practice, we aim to advance green building methods that reflect historically marginalized communities’ concerns, priorities, and visions for the future.

Two insights about green building education have already emerged from this collaborative work.10 First, while green building curricula present valuable opportunities for students to help design and participate in decarbonization efforts in their communities, program designers and participants must consider the way that students’ and their communities’ perspectives and experiences are valued and incorporated. When green building promises a healthier future, the ethical implications of what and whom green buildings might replace emerge. Greening the built environment can precipitate “climate gentrification” or fail to adequately examine the historical and structural factors that produced high amounts of carbonization in the first place. Students visiting the Blazier school green building site made observations about the changing face of the neighborhood. Rapid residential growth, with hundreds of

brand-new condominiums, was a driving force behind the need for a newer, larger (and greener) school building. Because Austin’s brand of “sustainability” has pushed the costs of urban development onto low-income, non-white residents by relegating them to racially and economically segregated parts of the city, exploring the relationship between the social and built environment starts with recognizing, not erasing, the complexity and political dynamics of decarbonization initiatives.11 Education frameworks that center the past and present contexts of land and settler colonialism can offer a way to do just that. This involves recognizing how non-Indigenous people’s claim to land and citizenship is contingent on the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous people; in this way, Austin is a settler-colonial city. When working with Austin youth, avoiding Indigenous erasure requires an understanding that land and land education do not exist separately and apart from cities.12

Another emergent conceptual intervention in our research-practice partnership is acknowledging that youth hold critical insights on planning and design practice that ought to be reflected in green-building curriculum and pedagogy. Green building curricula, however, don’t generally engage youth as potential contributers to the design process, yet youth can develop critical analysis and ideas to changes to their built and social environment, including gentrification and displacement.13 To collect their insights, we designed and offered a series of workshops that prompted students to share their ideas on climate justice. Through drawings and models, students offered critiques of schools as sites of control, immobility, and surveillance, while simultaneously presenting their possibilities of schools as sites for community health and inclusion. They called for sufficient sidewalks, high-quality food, and space for exercise. Youth prioritized cultural knowledge and diverse community values in their green building designs, offering climate justice imaginaries that drew clear connections between their lived experiences of social and spatial injustice and their school.

When considering approaches to climate justice, green curriculum’s primary focus on the application of LEED certifications and associated green building principles can flatten conceptualizations of communities’ contributions to planning and design. Centering only discrete, technical modifications to buildings that promote incremental decarbonization interventions is not enough to disrupt the normative relations between those designing and those using the built environment and can reproduce and reinforce racialized and classed disparities. What good is a “greener” building where students cannot walk safely to and from the buildings, where resources are unequally allocated, and where community and family are systematically excluded from participation in the school and its educational opportunities? Designing a greener, socially just built environment demands that students are active participants; pedagogical and curricular approaches must encourage the same. Our UTSOA-EcoRise partnership will continue to generate applied and theoretical insights on how to make progress in achieving these essential goals.

FIG 2B Image courtesy of EcoRise. Andrew M. Busch, “Crossing Over: Sustainability, New Urbanism, and 10 2015; Eliot Tretter, Shadows Gentrification in Austin, Texas,” Southern Spaces, of a Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2016). Austin Megan Bang, Lawrence Curley, Adam Kessel, Ananda Marin, Eli Suzukovich 11 III, and George Strack. “Muskrat Theories, Tobacco in the Streets, and Living Chicago as Indigenous Land,” Environmental Education Research 20 , 1 (2014): 37–55. Molly Vollman Makris “Separate, Different, but Not Isolated: How Youth in 12 Public Housing Relate to Their Gentrified Community, Public Housing and School Choice in a Gentrified City (New York: Springer, 2015), 171–189; Odis Johnson, Jr. “Toward a theory of place,” Research on Schools, Neighborhoods and Communities: Toward Civic Responsibility , ed. William Tate (PA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2012) 29–46.

Ibid.; Laura Brianna Cole and Elke Altenburger, “Framing the Teaching Green 5 Building: Environmental Education Through Multiple Channels in the School , 11: 1654-1673.” Environment," Environmental Education Research 25

1 Isabelle Anguelovski, “From Toxic Sites to Parks as (Green) LULUs? New Challenges of Inequity, Privilege, Gentrification, and Exclusion for Urban Journal of Planning Literature 31 , 1 (2016): 23–36. Environmental Justice,” USGBC, LEED 2009 for Schools New Construction and Major Renovations, 6 2008. http://www.usgbc.org/ShowFile.aspx?DocumentID=5547.Accessed 1 March 2021. Christopher M. Bacon, Saneta deVuono-Powell, Mary Louise Frampton, Tony 7 LoPresti, and Camille Pannu. "Introduction to empowered partnerships: Community-based participatory action research for environmental justice," , no. 1 (2013): 1–8. Environmental Justice 6 (MB Ramos, Trans.), (New York: Pedagogy of the Oppressed Paulo Freire, 8 Continuum, 2007).

Ellen Scully-Russ, “The Dual Promise of Green Jobs: Sustainability and 2 The Palgrave Handbook of Sustainability: Case Studies and Economic Equity,” , eds. Robert Brinkman and Sandra Garren (New York: Practical Solutions Springer, 2018), 503–521. 3 National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS), & Coalition of Community College Architecture (2016). https://www. Programs (CCCAP), Examining the State of Diversity—AIA aia.org/resources/12416-examining-the-state-of-diversity. Miriam Solis, Will Davies, and Abby Randall, “Climate Justice Pedagogies in 9

4 Laura Biranna Cole, “Green Building Literacy: A Framework for Advancing , 1: 18. International Journal of STEM Education 6 Green Building Education.”