"The World Is Our Home": Environmental Justice, Feminisms, and Student Ideology

by Arlene Plevin

From interacting with their students, many teachers are aware that the concepts of feminism and environmentalism can conjure up impoverished, deficient, and equally painful stereotypes. For some college students, feminism can mean merely equal pay for equal work. Environmentalism may trigger similarly limited associations, but inevitably "treehugger" is what sticks in the minds of most of my media-saturated, generally stereotype- accepting students. Those definitions are powerful defaults, unfortunately, and it is part of my belief as a Freire-influenced teacher, an ecofeminist, environmentalist, and an inculcator of critical reading, thinking, and writing skills that I must structure courses that invite students to reflect on and reconsider the ideologies they are shaped by and (sometimes) unconsciously contain and reproduce.