Term
Summer 2024
Capstone
Capstone Project
Degree Name
MAED: NSEE
Facilitator(s)
Trish Harvey
Content Expert
Ashlie Adkins
Abstract
Humans pass down stories to transmit ways of knowing and ways of interacting within their culture. For Indigenous humans, stories give outsiders insight into a deeply intertwined connection with the environment. As a woman of European descent teaching Environmental Education classes, my lack of awareness inspired the question, How can a story lead to adolescents developing a kinship with the more-than-human elements of a place and lead to pro-environmental behavior grounded in reciprocity? The literature review focused on elevating Indigenous authors such as; Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gregory Cajete, Jessica Hernadez, Albert Wiggan, Masanobu Fukuoka. Traditional Ecological Knowledge is the current category in which the stories of Indigenous communities are housed. However, Wiggan and Kimmerer both challenge how word choice impacts the emotional response and respect given to concepts. Kinship and reciprocity are used to describe the interconnected relationship Indigenous communities have with the more-than-human lives on Earth. The current method to develop feelings of kinship and inspire adolescents to act in pro-environmental ways is to engage in hands-on environmental education either in public school or informal educational settings. One gap in this method is that access to the environment is not equitable for all human communities; my capstone project seeks to fill this gap. For students with no access to the outdoors, reading a book with a crawdad protagonist immerses the reader in the excitement of existing in the natural environment of a creek.
Project Type
Storyboard
Keywords
Environmental Studies, Multicultural Education, Science, Writing
Recommended Citation
Shaw, Ellen, "Stories Elicit Feelings of Kinship and Inspire Pro-Environmental Behavior" (2024). School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects. 1065.
https://digitalcommons.hamline.edu/hse_cp/1065
dc_type
text
dc_publisher
DigitalCommons@Hamline
dc_format
application/pdf
dc_source
School of Education Student Capstone Projects