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In this poster, we share preliminary reflections on the ways in which hermeneutic injustice emerges and operates within educational settings and interactions. Hermeneutic injustice is a type of epistemic injustice that occurs when someone’s experiences are not well understood by themselves or by others, either due to unavailability of known concepts or due to systemic barriers that produce non-knowing (Fricker 2007). In 2021, we entered into a collaborative project to design a high school curriculum on environmental injustice and climate change for California’s K-12 students. Although the project convenors aspired to support the diversity of California’s K-12 student population through representational inclusivity across the program participant, they reproduced essentialized notions of what it means to be an “included subject”. In our first inperson meetings, activities intended to invite difference in the curriculum writing and design community were encountered by participants as an opportunity to point to the margins of that community. Who was in the room and who was not? Initial counts excluded some writers whose identity was not readily apparent by race, ethnicity, or age. Some individuals who, to their consternation, were assumed to be white, revealed themselves as people of color. The project chose the “storyline model” of curriculum design to bring coherence across the teams. The model was developed by science educators to promote student agency and active learning. Lessons start with an anchoring phenomenon, which should hook students and produce enough questions to sustain inquiry cycles that culminate in consensus making. As a result, each grade-level unit of our curriculum was intended to focus on a single environmental phenomenon, like wildfire. However, informed by Gregory Bateson’s theory of learning, we sought to foreground complexity by recursively analyzing environmental injustice through case study analysis of many hazards, injustices, and places. It took multiple meetings over several months to arrive at an articulation of environmental injustice as our central phenomenon that recognizes the compounding impacts of both climate change and toxic pollution. It also required restructuring the working relationships between the project's administrative arm, the curriculum consultants, and the writing team. The image we include is a photograph of an exercise done together with another HS team as we were tasked to clarify the aims and goals of our imagined lessons. As is evidenced in the photograph, each writing team found it difficult to articulate learning outcomes as a series of checklists, or goals, separate from skill-development that represented the dynamic need for curriculum capable of examining climate change and the environmental justice needs for California’s students.

Tebbe, Margaret, Tanio, Nadine, and Srigyan, Prerna. 2023.  "Reflections on Hermeneutical Injustice in K-12 Curriculum Development." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawaii, Nov 8-11.

"What does the lack in prominence of environmental coverage in German TV tell us about the general state of environmental journalism in Germany? It is almost impossible to draw con- clusions based on hard facts and numbers.There is no national organization of professionals in the media dealing with this topic like the Society of Environmental Journalists in the USA, for instance.That means there are also no statistics about how many editors, reporters, or producers would count themselves as environmental journalists; nobody is keeping track. Communications scholars, when asked about the number of environmental journalists in Germany, reply with: “That’s something I would also like to know; tell me if you find out.”There is no formal educa- tion, and only a few training opportunities are offered for established writers and editors who want to specialize in the field. In recent years, some well-qualified and experienced reporters on newspapers with influential voices have departed (or been made to depart) the publishing houses or even journalism per se, leaving a noticeable gap." (Schrader 2020)

"Summarizing, environmental journalism in Germany appears to be in a transition phase. Many traditional media and press outlets are struggling to keep their business model or find a new one. And reporting on air quality, biodiversity, or the climate beyond their often-superficial implications for national politics is not high on the list of priorities. Much of the work might be shifting to online publishing in new contexts and organizations, but those are still forming and far from settled."