Cultivating A Culture Of Authentic Care In Urban Environmental Education: Narratives From Youth Interns At East New York Farms

Abstract

Given an increasingly urbanized and ethnically diverse population in the US, many environmental education (EE) practitioners and scholars are reevaluating and seeking to transform practices, philosophy, and frameworks to better serve and support urban youth. Urban EE is an arena that provides an opportunity for creating rigorous, experiential, and culturally responsive place-based educational experiences in urban spaces with diverse young people. I conducted a narrative inquiry with participants in a food justice education organization called East New York Farms (ENYF) in Brooklyn, NY to gain insight into young people's experiences in the urban agriculture internship program. Emergent from my conversations with youth is a theory of change that emphasizes the importance of authentic care and other politicized notions of caring as a foundation for cultivating positive youth development, critical consciousness of social and ecological issues, and the transformation of self situated within community.