Brief History
Teaching Environmental Psychology Critically (TEPC) began in Spring of 2020 at The Graduate Center, CUNY as a series of online meetings with current and former students. The goal was to create a collective space for Environmental Psychologists to come together and reflect on their pedagogical practices and agendas.
The impetus for this project came from a contradiction we experienced as doctoral students. While many of us teach at CUNY campuses and desire to become professors in the future, there is no space for our teaching experiences or pedagogical reflections to be expressed or validated within our program. Becoming a researcher requires preparation and we strongly feel the same principle should be applied to our development as educators as well.
Phd students and adjuncts are a huge portion of CUNY faculty, but those workers are normally underpaid and overloaded. Yet, most of them are very passionate about their role as educators and deeply committed to the learning process of their students who often come from marginalized backgrounds and are forced to learn in less than ideal educational environments. Even though there are well over 10,000 adjuncts at CUNY, there are very few spaces to support them on a regular basis.
This project is an attempt to address these two concerns: 1) create a space for Environmental Psychologists to develop their identity as educators and 2) recognize and support the amazing practices of critical education that have occurred over the years with little visibility.
Event & Programs
In April of 2021, TEPC hosted its first event, Environmental Psychologists Responding to COVID: Re-creating Assignments in a Context of Global Crisis. This was a remote event with ten educators from three countries sharing content they adapted to critically engage with the pandemic moment. Their assignments materials can be found on this site.
During the Spring of 2023, we organized our first series of five, paid TEPC Generative Circles to build community and generate methodological approaches. This was done with a small group of six student-adjuncts, currently in the CUNY Environmental Psychology program, interested in exchanging teaching projects and labor conditions around teaching EP as praxis.
Future Goals
During the 2023-2024 academic school year, we plan to develop a free, two-day workshop geared toward alumni and faculty from other colleges and areas. In preparing the workshops, we plan to invite people to explore specific issues and/or showcase projects and ideas. Additionally, we would invite attendees to share their TEPC-adapted materials, under a creative commons license, for this open-access online repository.
In the long term, as a program born out of community-building, we would like to produce/edit a “handbook” different from the ones circulating in the market. The handbook would be a topically organized, open-access collection focused on Teaching Environmental Psychology Critically by offering pedagogical approaches, methods, and materials to work in conjunction with this online repository.
Different from this online repository, the production of a book offers space for people to systematize their work and write new pieces in Environmental Psychology with a focus on education, pedagogy, and teaching. We believe this will be an important contribution for the field, but also a way to honor the history of our EP program and the many educators everywhere insisting on a critical perspective when teaching environmental and urban issues.
