Transforming Jesuit Education
- The Initiative has been asked to play a leadership role in incorporating community-engaged research and learning for environmental justice in Jesuit education around the world.
In his keynote address at the Initiative’s April 2023 Climate and Environmental Justice Conference, Rev. Michael Garanzini, SJ, President of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU), commended the Initiative for providing a model of “community-based leadership for environmental justice with students and with neighborhood organizations.” Garanzini asked SCU to be an “anchor institution” that can help lead U.S. and international Jesuit education to strengthen community-engaged research and learning that “lead to action, research, and advocacy.”
At Rev. Garanzini’s invitation, the Initiative’s Chris Bacon co-chaired the AJCU’s Laudato Sí Commission (with Mike Schuck of Loyola University Chicago), which convened 21 representatives of Jesuit higher education institutions to develop a vision for making environmental justice and sustainability a hallmark of Jesuit colleges and universities. The Commission presented its recommendations at the AJCU Faith, Justice & Reconciliation Assembly 2024, detailing a broad range of ways in which Jesuit colleges and universities can incorporate integral ecology in their operations, academic affairs, community formation, and civic engagement. The Initiative’s Chad Raphael led the Commission’s subgroup on networking and organized a panel at the Assembly on incorporating integral ecology across the curriculum, and Iris Stewart-Frey organized a panel on fostering environmental and social justice through community-engaged research. (Lindsey Kalkbrenner of SCU’s Center for Sustainability also served on the Commission’s Operations Working Group.)
The Initiative is also advancing environmental justice through its professional development workshops for faculty and sustainability officers at Santa Clara and other institutions. The workshops are offered in partnership with SCU’s Center for Sustainability, which is a national training center affiliated with the Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). Each summer, Chad Raphael (along with SCU Center for Sustainability leaders Lindsey Kalkbrenner, Veronica Johnson, and Leslie Gray) leads three-week-long online workshops for an average of 50 faculty and staff members from SCU and 20 other institutions, including many Jesuit and Catholic universities and high schools. Participant evaluations highlight the value of the individualized feedback from instructors and the wealth of resources provided. In Summer 2024, Raphael collaborated with Brenna Davis (Ignatian Solidarity Network) and Michael Downs (Bishop O’Dowd High School) to organize a three-day workshop for Jesuit high school educators on how to infuse integral ecology in the secondary school curriculum and whole-school transformation.
Bacon and Raphael were also invited to teach workshops to leaders from Jesuit conferences around the world at the 2023 Ecojesuit Meeting on Commitment, Communication, and Collaboration at Balay Laudato Si’ in the ancestral domain of the Pulangiyēn community in Bendum, Malaybalay City, Mindanao, Philippines. Bacon led a session on Agroecology and Community-Based Research on Food and Water Justice - Methods and Process of Accompaniment, in which he shared insights gained from long-term community-based participatory action research partnerships and how agroecology serves as a framework for food systems change and advancing food and climate justice. Raphael led a workshop on Communications and Networking for Advocacy and Climate Action, in which participants sketched initial designs for campaigns they aimed to launch to engage youth in advocacy for environmental justice in their regions.
The Initiative will continue to work closely with our national and international partners to support the spread of community-engaged approaches to environmental justice education in the year to come. As Rev. Garanzini noted in his conference keynote, these efforts are “helping us understand a little bit more what our Jesuit University responsibility is to these communities that we live in, in this world that we live in.”
Image: Fr. Garanzini at the Initiative’s 2023 Climate and Environmental Justice Conference at SCU.
Updated: 10/1/2024
