With the increased effect of anthropogenic climate change, the impact of environmental issues on human societies has never been more essential to understand. With science-backed research showcasing that human activities are actively worsening the effect of many environmental issues including severe temperatures, natural disasters, and biodiversity loss, there is severe need for all, whether we are scientists, activists, educators, or policy-makers, to take action.  However, the global nature of both our society and the dangers we are facing necessitates careful consideration in analyzing and combatting environmental issues in a modern world. To properly adapt to and mitigate these issues, which may directly target specific communities or affect societies across the globe, not only do we need a proper grasp of environmental and climate science, but we need to ensure that solutions are mindful of the communities and ecosystems that are affected. We must not be content with climate and environmental solutions that fail to consider diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility as key tenets. In short, justice must be at the heart of our climate and environmental work going forward.

Yet, facilitating just solutions cannot be done while the institutions that teach the next generation fail to highlight climate and environmental justice in their teachings. Without a natural and focused inclusion of DEIA values in environmental courses in higher education, there is reduced capacity for students who wish to engage to garner an understanding of what just solutions look like and how to implement them. This book seeks to remedy that gap.

Throughout this book, we synthesize the current efforts towards including climate, environmental justice, and civic engagement in courses taught at the University of Washington – Seattle. These examples range from specific lessons on environmental injustice to course-long integration of climate justice values, and include course details, lesson plans, and other resources provided by course instructors in an easy-to-access format. The chapters in this book each constitute a real method of integrating climate and environmental justice into a course, and thus provide a bounty of instruction for increasing the inclusion of justice in course material for instructors across any discipline. Lessons will be regularly added to the book as they are implemented and adapted. The existence of this book marks not only the history of environmental justice in courses at the UW, but also the emphasis on the topic of justice that the college is placing in the current day, as well as serving as a guide or model for instructors to use as more courses begin to fully integrate justice into their curriculum. Through this work, we can be more reliably assured that the people we are training to practice civic engagement and climate and environmental action can not just protect the planet, but preserve the life of the people, communities, and ecosystems who depend on it.

This book has been created with support from the University of Washington Program on Climate Change, the UW Program on the Environment, and the University of Washington College of the Environment, especially from material created at our annual Climate and Environmental Justice Faculty Institute.

The University of Washington (UW) Libraries is committed to providing equal access to library collections, services, and facilities for all library users. This book is developed as part of the Accessibility Quicktips workshop series hosted by the UW Libraries Accessibility Working Group (AWG). Questions related to this resource can be directed to uwlib-awg-training@uw.edu.

This book provides an overview of accessibility, discusses core elements of digital accessibility, covers accessibility topics you may encounter while working at a public service desk in the UW Libraries, explains the accessibility tools that UW Libraries provide, and gives some guidance on creating video captioning. The Appendix section contains additional resources such as cheat sheets that guide you step by step in the practical application of accessible elements.

Our hope is that this guide to citing personal experience and interviews meets our goal of supporting students to produce their own knowledge, as well as honoring the academic value of their lived experience and the experiences of their families and communities. Through the use of a set of guidelines we created for students to cite personal experience and interviews, we found students self-reported increase in engagement and success in academic assignments. We propose this set of guidelines are an important practical tool for critical, feminist, and anti-racist pedagogy, as well as a method for teaching ethical research.

Modules, games and labs focused on teaching climate change.  Developed by graduate students and faculty associated with the UW Program on Climate Change, a cross departmental collaboration to research, teach and communicate climate science.  Updated regularly.

This book showcases student exploration the role of sports in cultivating the collegiate ideal in their own college going experiences. Topics include the influence of esports, recreational activities, intramural, club, and spectator sports on pre-college choices and campus life. Students individually and collectively investigate how sports activities cultivate the collegiate ideal through ceremonies, stories, rituals and rites of passage, and unique language; all of which are most well understood by insiders to the campus community (Toma, 2010; Toma & Kezar, 1999). Using the inquiry tools of autoethnography, students highlight their individual and shared  experiences of ‘going to college’ and the role of the collegiate ideal.

 

Persistence is Resistance: Celebrating 50 Years of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies is an open access book with pdf available for download. This collection includes contributions from a diverse group of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) scholars, from undergraduate students to faculty emeritus, representing twenty-four different institutions. The Introduction is by Beverly-Guy Sheftall and there are twenty short essays on the following topics: history of the first program (SDSU); Africana Women’s Studies; GWSS in the Global South; the women’s studies name change; the urgency of GWSS; an annotated bibliography on the history of GWSS; feminist pedagogy and praxis; feminist publishing; institutional battles; feminist administrating; getting jobs with a GWSS major; an undergrad’s reflection on GWSS; GWSS in Ghana; feminism in Latin America; Indigenous feminisms; ecofeminism;  GWSS and community colleges; and Chanel Miller’s Know My Name. Every author is either presently teaching in a GWSS program and/or has at least one of their degrees in GWSS. The essays are punctuated by artwork from GWSS undergraduates and alumni, and their short answers to why they chose GWSS. It is ideal for the classroom because the essays are short, jargon light, and meant to inspire feminist inquiry, activism, and pride.