Coverage of Disabled People in Environmental-Education-Focused Academic Literature

Abstract

Environmental education (EE) is a lifelong process to acquire knowledge and skills that can influence pro-environmental behavior, environmental activism, and disaster-risk management. Disabled people are impacted by environmental issues, environmental activism, and how EE is taught. Disabled people can be learners within EE but can contribute to EE in many other roles. Given the importance of EE and its potential impact on disabled people—and given that equity, diversity, and inclusion is an ever-increasing policy framework in relation to environment-focused disciplines and programs in academia and other workplaces, which also covers disabled people—we performed a scoping review of academic literature using Scopus and EBSCO-HOST (70 databases) as sources, to investigate how and to what extent disabled people are engaged with EE academic literature. Of the initial 73 sources found, only 27 contained relevant content whereby the content engaged mostly with disabled people as EE learners but rarely with other possible roles. They rarely discussed the EE impact on disabled people, did not engage with EE teaching about disabled people being impacted by environmental issues and discourses, and did not connect EE to environment-related action by disabled people. Results suggest the need for a more differentiated engagement with disabled people in the EE literature.

Potential Impact of Environmental Activism: A Survey and a Scoping Review

“…However, activities based on individual EDI concepts have limitations, so EDI phrases and policy and action frameworks containing more than one concept [79,80,[124][125][126][127][128] are increasingly employed to better the situation for members of marginalized groups such as women, Indigenous Peoples, visible minorities, racialized minorities, disabled people, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ2S+ [80,129] (for disability terms, see [130] (p. 38)). EDI, as a phrase, is also used in conjunction with environmental issues [131][132][133][134][135][136].…”

“…Regarding views on-and perception of environmental activism, stewardship, action and governance, many studies have engaged with the theme of students as activist [137], and environmental education focuses on how to teach students to gain knowledge [131] and to instill [138][139][140][141] and predict [142][143][144] environmentally responsible behavior, including on campus [145][146][147]. Studies have reported on educating students on action-related strategies [138,[148][149][150][151][152], instilling action in students [139,140,, and predicting action [175,182,183].…”

“…These differences in ability expectations can lead to environment-related ability-based conflicts (see, for example the concept of adaptation apartheid coined by Desmond Tutu [11] and expanded on through an ability studies lens in [12]). There are many problems for marginalized groups who do not fit ability norms and therefore do not do things and experience things in ways that are the norm, including in relation to environmental/disaster issues, environmental education, and environmental activism (for many sources, see [12,131,212]).…”

“…As a phrase, EDI is also used in conjunction with environmental issues [131][132][133][134][135][136]. However, our study showed that EDI policy frameworks and EDI phrases have not been covered in relation to environmental activism and the other environmental phrases we used in our scoping review, which is a problem.…”

“…This gap is problematic because it hinders the ability of students and others to become literate on the topic of environmental activism and disabled people. This lack of data especially problematic given the already noted problems regarding engagement with environmental issues including emergency and disaster management and environmental education in relation to disabled people [131,[212][213][214]259].…”