by Jane Compson, Assistant Professor
One of the things I most enjoy about working at UW Tacoma is the sense of community – not just the academic community that students and faculty share, but the emphasis on working with the local Tacoma community. I love the interdisciplinarity of UW Tacoma, and the support for projects that engage with the city of Tacoma and beyond.
Recently I was involved in project that exemplified many of these aspects. One of the classes I teach is Environmental Ethics (PHI 3640), where students are encouraged to explore the ways that humans value and interact with the natural world. One concept that we learn about in this course is environmental justice, defined as fair treatment for all people, regardless of race, gender, nationality or economic status with regard to environmental laws and policies. However, some environmentalists argue that this concept is too narrowly based on human interests and claim that the environment itself should be treated with fairness and consideration in its own right, not just because humans benefit from it. This ‘ecocentric’ view challenges the more traditional ‘anthropocentric’ (human-centered) view that the environment is valuable—as long as it is useful for humans.
During a conversation with Dr. Evans-Agnew, one of my colleagues in Nursing and Healthcare Leadership, I learned that he also teaches about environmental justice in his community health classes. He explains that he tends to use only anthropocentric definitions of the concept, however, and he was interested in exploring the ecocentric view. As a part of this exploration, he devised a project that would involve the wider community by getting students from my Environmental Ethics class to interview people from the local community who work in environmental fields—asking them to describe what environmental justice means to them. We were awarded a Community Engagement/Curriculum Enhancement grant by UWT’s Center for Leadership and Social Responsibility to help fund this project, which was undertaken in Fall 2013.
Student teams were required to interview local people in the community or faculty at UW Tacoma who have some professional or research interests in environmental justice. They were all asked the same questions about how they understand environmental justice. The interviews were recorded on video, edited where necessary, and students made transcripts of these interviews. For their final projects, students were asked to compare and contrast the content of two different interviews and explore some of the assumptions and values behind different definitions of environmental justice. With the permission of the interviewees this collection was made publicly available through the UW Tacoma library Digital Commons collection, to enable others to hear local voices about environmental justice.
To complete this project we enlisted the help of Chris Lower, a student double-majoring in urban studies and environmental studies. Lower had excelled in my environmental ethics class a previous quarter and was given the Chancellor’s undergraduate research award to help on this project. He helped collect the transcripts of the videos and then co-authored a paper about the entire project with Dr. Evans-Agnew and me. Lower graduated in 2014, and already has his name in print – the article about our project was published earlier this year. (Evans-Agnew, R., Compson, J. and Lower, C.S. (2015) ‘Bridging the interdisciplinary divide: Co-advancing the pedagogy of environmental justice through a digital commons initiative’, Interdisciplinary Environmental Review, Vol. 16, Nos. 2/3/4, pp.158–174.)
This was a truly interdisciplinary project, involving faculty, students, members of the Tacoma community, as well as university staff—like librarian Justin Wadland, who was heavily involved in creating the Digital Commons collection. It’s just one example of some of the great things we can do when we work together, and it was fun and interesting work, too. Many thanks to all who were involved in the project.