New UW course aims to tackle environmental issues with a decolonizing lens

www.dailyuw.com - RSS Results in news,news/* of type article With big talks of climate change circulating in the news recently, it is clear many are starting to become aware of injustices regarding the environment.On Monday and Wednesday of this week, students enrolled in an environmental science and restoration management course, ESRM 490: Decolonizing the Environmental Discourse, gave presentations on environmental issues of their choosing.ESRM 490 is a newly established course designed by Dr. Daniel Vogt and Jessica Hernandez, a master’s candidate from the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. This was the first quarter in which the class was offered, as it took three quarters for Hernandez and Vogt to have the curriculum approved by the College of the Environment; it will be renamed AIS 475 for spring quarter.
“The main concern [from the College of the Environment] was that it would be too similar to other courses of the same likeness,” Hernandez said. “The College of the Environment focuses on more of the hard sciences rather than the social sciences.”Hernandez wanted to create a course that would merge both hard and social sciences in order to look at the environment holistically.“We talked with the students and garnered positive feedback,” Vogt said. “They acknowledged how interactive our classroom is and were appreciative of the space we gave them to speak their minds.”The students’ final presentations were held open and free to the public. Hernandez intended the students to learn, discuss, then teach others about what they learned as part of her pedagogy and to give more attention to environmental injustices.Attendee Lynn Roech enjoyed the event and found it important that undergraduate students are stepping up and taking action toward these injustices. She attended the event because she was curious about the colonial roots of rhetoric surrounding the environment, and how to move past it, which is the course’s primary focus.The presentations were split ...


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