Diversity, equity, and inclusion

Environmental stressors and lack of access to health education have exacerbated the poor health conditions of minority and underserved populations around the United States, particularly in Detroit, Michigan. Wayne State University's Center for Urban Responses to Environment Stressors (CURES) intentionally worked with community stakeholders by developing a direct partnership between academia and the affected population to alleviate the health challenges and educate the Detroit community on these issues.

Partnerships between universities and communities can benefit environmental education through the engagement, collaboration, and participation of demographically and ideologically diverse communities to address relevant and local environmental issues. However, institutions of higher education face challenges that affect their ability to develop such meaningful partnerships.

Intergenerational learning is the process in which knowledge, behaviors, and cultural traditions are passed between generations. This type of learning is important because while children are regarded as the future, some environmental issues require immediate action from adults. Research surrounding intergenerational learning is limited and is primarily focused on how parents or grandparents share knowledge with children. Additionally, research has not significantly addressed how formal learning influence attitudes towards food animals.

Connectedness to nature (CTN) correlates to environmental engagement and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, which are important for developing a society that will conserve and restore the natural world. However, even as climate change and environmental crisis are becoming more prominent, some research shows CTN is decreasing among youth in comparison to past generations.

Content Warning: This summary discusses suicide, particularly within queer communities.

One of the goals of environmental education (EE) is to promote environmental literacy, but this is only successful when EE programs effectively engage students. Yet student engagement is difficult to accurately measure. For example, a teacher may think a student who nods and smiles during a lesson is actively engaged, but that student may not be able to answer a simple question on the material when quizzed. Conversely, a student who may seem disengaged, perhaps by fidgeting and looking around, might perform well during assessment.

Environmental education is rooted in providing a space for children to play and explore outside while learning and becoming more connected to themselves and the natural world. Though the benefits of nature-based education (NBE) are well researched and understood, the role of gender in environmental education and the proliferation of gendered norms through it are less so.

Including diverse perspectives in the environmental movement and environmental education is invaluable in helping these movements achieve their goals. In this paper, it is contended that the environmental movement and environmental education often focuses on mainstream perspectives: those of dominant socio-economic groups. This paper is a thought piece that utilized existing literature and the standpoint theory to explore the role of diverse environmental perspectives in environmental movements and environmental education.

Individuals develop commitments to social and environmental action through their unique paths, which is shaped by their identities. Understanding what fosters and sustains this development is important for the field of environmental education. This study looked at adults' development of and motivations for action that promotes social and environmental change. To address a lack of research with multiple views in this domain, diverse perspectives were incorporated into this study. The researchers sought to understand three questions:
How do participants view their own activism?

A person's identity is influenced by many factors and therefore changes over their lifetime. This also applies to environmental identity, defined as a person's perception of themselves and how they relate to the environment. Environmental identity also dictates how an individual makes decisions about the environment. The concept of environmental identity is important to understand when developing inclusive environmental education curriculum and programming. There are two factors that influence environmental identity.