UC Berkeley

We report on a curriculum development project in which students explore environmental racism through data. Recognizing that quantitative data alone is insufficient to understand the sociohistorical contexts of racism, we draw from syncretic approaches to learning that put everyday experiences and qualitative evidence into direct conversation with quantitative datasets through storytelling. Through two focal cases, we demonstrate how one student leveraged personal experience to engage in deep integrative analysis of data, while another with fewer perceived personal connections to environmental racism focused more specifically on patterns, with less structural or racial analysis. Implications of the analysis include the need to carefully attend to the use of quantitative data related to race and to scaffold the integration of other sources of information with quantitative data sets.