Open-ended responses of an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample of 593 12- to 19-year-olds (M = 16 years old, SD = 1.59) were analyzed to explain why some people in the United States are poor and others are rich. Adolescents had more knowledge and a more complex understanding of wealth than of poverty and older adolescents had more knowledge and a more complex understanding of both. Controlling for age and demographics, adolescents had a deeper understanding of inequality if they were female, from better educated families, discussed current events in their families, and attended schools with classmates who discussed current events in their families. Higher parental education and attending schools with classmates who discussed current events with their families increased the likelihood of structural attributions for poverty. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

The reflections of 205 4–12th graders (most from racial/ethnic minority backgrounds) on what they learned from participating in place-based stewardship education (PBSE) projects in their urban communities were analyzed. All projects involved hands-on collective learning/action by teams of students, teachers, and community partners in the communities where students attended school. Reflections were analyzed using an iterative process of deductive and inductive coding and identifying emergent themes. Deductive coding was informed by the authors’ earlier theoretical and empirical studies on the environmental commons (EC) and the key principles outlined in Elinor Ostrom’s work on effective group practices for stewarding common pool resources. Reflections were coded for up to 8 discrete references to the two elements of the environmental commons: (1) the natural resources on which life depends (awareness of nature in the urban space; nature’s diversity and ecological balance; interdependence of humans with nature; healthy environments and species’ well-being; students’ environmental identities; and human impact and agency); and (2) collective actions to protect a community’s resources (benefits and responsibilities of team work; within-group dynamics and civic skills; collective efficacy; generativity; and identification with the broader community). We found that students articulated, with varying levels of understanding, the two key EC elements. Most referred to positive human impact and one-third mentioned negative human impact. When discussing the community benefitting from their work, a majority mentioned humans; yet nearly half referred to other species or living systems; and a quarter referenced generativity, i.e., the legacy of their work for the future. Concerning the collective orientation of projects: one-third felt collective action was imperative for solving environmental issues, half expressed feelings of collective efficacy, and over one-third referenced their increased attachment and identification with a broader community (school, city, or nature). Core practices in this PBSE model parallel the elements of effective groups identified by Ostrom. We conclude with a discussion of the potential of PBSE projects in urban communities for developing young people’s sense of the public realm more broadly and their stake in the natural environment and their communities.

This study explores whether adolescents’ societal explanations regarding the causes of poverty are associated with distributive justice reasoning. Survey data were collected from 425 6th–12th graders who answered questions concerning the causes of poverty and a vignette depicting a hypothetical class project designed to assess the degree to which the adolescent respondent would distribute resources based on principles of need or merit. Findings indicated that adolescents who explained poverty based on structural or a mix of structural and individual causes were more likely to base decisions about resource distribution on need, whereas those who attributed poverty to individual causes distributed resources based on merit. Participants who were older, female, Caucasian, and from a higher socioeconomic status (SES) background were more likely to indicate need as a basis for distributing resources. Poverty attributions (i.e., societal, and mixed) had a significant interaction with age and SES in predicting distributive justice reasoning.

Prefigurative politics are typically understood as experiments in living, laboring or provisioning that are alternatives to ‘what is’ and prefigure ‘what could be.’ This paper rethinks prefigurative politics, which scholars have often approached by emphasizing their economic and political structures, not the transformation of social relationships and power in these experiments. Despite this scholarly trend, many collectivities organizing around a politics of survival engage in prefigurative practices. In fact, in the process of resisting domination, they are re-imagining social relationships and power. In this paper, we draw on women of color feminist theory to explore the tensions of practicing principled politics and social justice in the deeply compromised spaces of struggle for those groups that act in the radical in-between of prefigurative politics and the politics of survival. By analyzing a reproductive justice organizing project called ‘We are BRAVE’ as a case study, we re-imagine prefigurative politics through three central elements: relationality, self-determination, and intersectionality.

Communities of color shoulder disproportionate health burdens from environmental pollution and climate change, regardless of their location or social class (Bullard et al., 2011). Examples include air pollution from particulate matter, proximity to hazardous waste storage, and heat islands as a result of few green spaces in the built environment. Yet historically, environmental justice has not been prominent in environmental education (Kushmerick et al., 2007). However, in recent decades, attention to justice in environmental education has grown (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2010;Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Gallay et al., 2021), the theme is central to some graduate student training (Miller et al., 2021), and leading organizations such as the North American Association of Environmental Education have prioritized issues of justice.Racial inequities persist in learning opportunities related to science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM (Penuel, 2017) and contribute to the underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in STEM careers. The green energy workforce is among the least diverse: Fewer than 10% of workers in clean energy production and efficiency are Black (Muro et al., 2021). STEM pipeline models, the dominant paradigm to address divides in learning opportunities, have been criticized for ignoring the scientific relevance of minoritized students' cultural and community knowledge (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). Instead, place-based models where students and educators use STEM to address issues affecting their community are recommended (Vakil & Ayers, 2019), approaches that position students to use science as a catalyst for change (Morales-Doyle, 2017).