Exploring Conceptions of Creativity and Latinidad in Environmental Education Through the Lens of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Williams and Anderson (2015)

Williams and Anderson (2015) conducted a qualitative study describing the school garden experiences of 16 middle school students classified as English learners (ELs) in Portland, Oregon. This study was part of a school garden program—a collaboration between a middle school in a low-income area and a local university. Data were gathered over a period of 6 months via students’ photographs, free-write responses, semistructured interviews, and a collaborative project. The researchers employed a diversity pedagogy framework that encompasses three tenets: (a) social relationships and safe and inclusive settings, (b) culturally responsive teaching, and (c) experiential and multisensory learning.

Gay’s (2010) culturally responsive teaching was used to discuss how the garden project drew on students’ native languages, prior knowledge of foods, and experiences growing crops. This approach was designed to validate students’ cultural heritage, build school–home connections, and allow students to feel pride in their family backgrounds. These learning experiences were developed to offer an alternative to traditional schooling focused on standardized testing. Notably, one element of culturally responsive pedagogy that was not explicitly mentioned was attention to power and inequity; although the project may have included instances of students thinking critically about social inequities, such discussions were not described in the article.

In relation to conceptions of Latinidad, the five Latinx students who participated in the study were described in terms of their national origins (four from Mexico; one from Nicaragua). These students were depicted as Spanish speakers and classified as ELs by the school. These are important elements of student identity; at the same time, we worry that by attending only to linguistic and national dimensions of Latinidad, this study could be read in ways that perpetuate narrow conceptions of Latinx identity as being foreign-born or speaking only Spanish. We also found ourselves wondering about the ways in which local Latinx communities might have been involved in the design of the garden program or the study.

Williams and Anderson (2015) argued that school gardens are a way of enacting agentic, flexible, and place-based education in which students encounter meaningful activities. The study offered examples of activities that arguably meet the criteria for creative experiences identified by Glăveanu and Beghetto (2021). First, the activities exhibited an open-ended nature, allowing students to explore new directions: tasting new produce and designing their own garden plots. Students also took photographs to document what was most meaningful to them. However, these experiences were always substantially predetermined by the teacher, placing bounds on the open-endedness of the activities. There were apparent instances of nonlinearity, such as students trying various methods of cultivating crops. The learning experiences also appeared to embrace pluriperspectives insofar as cooperative learning enabled students to work with peers from different backgrounds. Of course, simply putting students in groups does not necessarily lead them to share their perspectives, but in this case, the authors reported that collaboration allowed students to decenter their own perspectives and learn from each other while also recognizing the value of their own knowledge and experiences. These activities also appeared to be future oriented because they were based on students’ engaging with the unknown; however, this dimension was the least clearly present in the study. The authors focused on the impact of these types of activities on children’s immediate learning outcomes (i.e., science content learned).

Djonko-Moore et al. (2018)

Djonko-Moore et al. (2018) examined a week-long science education program for 34 urban elementary-age children (12 of whom were identified as Latinx) from working-class communities in Colorado. The program engaged students in a summer camp that included classroom lessons at a community center and visiting a national park and museum. Teacher researchers, project staff, and scientists collaborated to design and implement the program.

To evaluate the effectiveness of this program, the researchers (Djonko-Moore et al., 2018) put Ladson-Billings’s culturally relevant pedagogy into conversation with eco-justice pedagogy (Mueller, 2009), which aims to counteract the oppression of both people and nature. Although the first sections of the article discuss the importance of developing critical consciousness and cultural competence within culturally relevant pedagogy, it was unclear how these constructs were operationalized in the program. Although the authors demonstrated careful attention to the environmental and social injustices suffered by students’ communities, it was not clear whether or how these injustices were directly addressed in students’ learning experiences. It was not explicitly indicated how educators attended to students’ cultural backgrounds and prior knowledge. Among Ladson-Billings’s three goals of culturally relevant pedagogy, then, the dimension most thoroughly discussed was academic achievement (and indeed, the data and analyses in the study focused primarily on student learning outcomes).

The authors reported that all 12 of the Latinx children who participated were ELs (Djonko-Moore et al., 2018). No further mention was made of their national backgrounds, heritages, or generational status, positioning English learning as the key distinguishing factor of these children’s identities. While this analysis may address important learning goals for these students, this framing could also perpetuate the harmful stereotype that all Latinx children are ELs without taking into consideration other aspects of their identity—and indeed, the participants were later referred to as “African American and ELL children” (Djonko-Moore et al., 2018, p. 150). We also found ourselves wondering once more about the extent of community involvement in the study.

The article reported the variety of activities in which children engaged and indicated that students made gains in their knowledge based on test results. Some students also discussed enjoying the field trips in their journals and focus group interviews. However, it was less obvious whether this program created the conditions that Glăveanu and Beghetto (2021) argued are necessary for creative experiences. The open-endedness of the activities was not readily apparent. While students may have had substantial choice or agency in decisions regarding lessons or field trips, this agency was not documented in the article. Although field trips could allow for nonlinearity in that they transcend the boundaries of a traditional classroom, such activities can just as easily follow structured sequences based on traditional notions of schooling and science learning. Regarding the pluriperspectives dimension, the authors indicated that the student participants were of different ethnic, racial, and linguistic backgrounds—and students may certainly have learned a great deal from each other—but this was not alluded to. Finally, future orientation could be inferred from attention to students’ science learning and engagement but was not discussed at length.

Montero et al. (2018)

Montero and colleagues (2018) undertook a qualitative study of student experiences as part of the National Park Service’s Every Kid in a Park and Muir Woods National Monument’s Into the Redwood Forest education program focused specifically on underrepresented youth. The program highlighted its use of inquiry-based learning for encouraging student participation, ostensibly connecting it to culturally relevant pedagogy in its inclusion of cultural-historical content. The qualitative data for this study included interviews with six fourth-grade teachers and 60 students’ journals randomly selected from a larger initial sample.

The study did not describe the demographic information of the interviewed teachers but did describe the process through which classes were selected (e.g., different geographic areas within the Bay Area). Of the eight classes from which student journals were sampled, three were designated EL courses (two being 100% Latinx, one 100% Asian). Additionally, five of the eight classes (including the two EL classes) consisted of 95% or more Latinx students.

One common element among the interviewed teachers and student journals was the program’s benefit in providing a novel, first-time experience for students to be outdoors. Such benefits are positive and key to environmental experiences. However, they can also be limiting in assuming “novel experiences” must inherently flow from pristine wilderness to the settings inhabited by marginalized youth. Similarly, we understand—and worry about—the implicit or explicit assumptions around what kind of outdoor experiences are typically available or valuable to students from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Among the most enriching program elements described by teachers were the bilingual curriculum, materials, and Spanish/English bilingual park rangers. Robust bilingual support was a strong component of relevance for the Spanish-dominant classes. In the context of CSP, we interpret this linguistic scaffolding as an important use of language competency to facilitate authentic connections.

In a contrasting example, many teachers described how curricula on the cultural heritage of the area—notably, the historical presence and practices of the Coast Miwok people—could have been improved. The teachers described how the connections attempted between the park’s ecology, cultural-historical context, and the lived experiences of the visiting students were not always successful. We agree with and expand on the authors’ implicit distinction here between cultural inclusion and direct cultural relevance. With more attention to how the ecological and historical contexts relate to each other and to underrepresented students, the cultural components of the program may have been more generative and relevant.

Within the frame of creative educational experiences, the program described in this study showed future orientation in that it generated positive feelings and wonder in students, prompting them toward an emerging environmental stewardship. We again see the importance of pluriperspective nuance in this study given that the authors described the benefits of providing bilingual materials and rangers. However, the component of the program most explicitly designed to center marginalized perspectives—the lessons on the Coast Miwok—was often the least accessible in actuality. Thus, multiple perspectives may have been present, but it is not clear whether these multiple perspectives were heard in the ways intended by the educators. A culturally sustaining educational experience could more deeply connect the perspectives of the Indigenous people that steward that ecological space with the marginalized lived experiences of visiting students. Such a connection could creatively generate relevance from marginality rather than attempt to provide creativity to the margins.

Tzou and Bell (2012)

In their study of how borders shape environmental education, Tzou and Bell (2012) argued for considering broader histories and social and political structures to understand the (re)production of educational inequalities. The authors argued that “borders” can serve purposes of categorization that enable communication about inequitably distributed environmental hazards—and at the same time, they argued that borders often reify oppressive and inequitable power relations. In this study, borders set limits on possible conceptions of what it means to be (or not to be) environmentally friendly—limits that complicate the meaning and the pedagogical implications of “relevance.” For example, the authors recount how an environmental educator showed students examples of household items common in their community and then proceeded to characterize these items as environmentally unfriendly—ignoring students’ observations that these products were desirable to them. Tzou and Bell argued that scenarios like this one positioned students at the margins of learning activities, creating situations in which learners engaged in acts of resistance.

In analyzing the ways students were sometimes positioned at the margins of environmental education, Tzou and Bell (2012) began to explore the nuances of Latinidad. Mexican history and culture are included among the topics addressed in the environmental education program. Although the authors did not provide an extensive explanation of what it means to be Mexican, they draw on Anzaldúa’s (1999) work and the example of a specific student, Miguel, to identify the richness that Mexican-ness afforded to students and the opportunities it opens to imagine possibilities of being, doing, and knowing in the program.

This is not an article about CSP per se, but the authors drew implications for future practitioners of science teaching, which are also essential for advocates of creative educational experiences. Essentially, they argued that standard, close-ended approaches to environmental education can (purposefully or inadvertently) create a border with “environmental action” inside and youth outside. Such borders are, we argue, intimately connected with close-ended approaches to teaching where “inside” and “outside” are static and predetermined. Tzou and Bell (2012) thus showed how non-open-endedness can foreclose on opportunities for creative experiences. Their analysis also implies an alternative: What might have happened if the educator in the “household items” scenario had taken an open-ended approach by engaging with (rather than ignoring) students’ interjections? The educator could have critically reexamined their own notion of what it means to be environmentally friendly, or students may have pursued unforeseen and potentially valuable lines of thinking. Importantly, students would also have experienced the “cultural relevance” of particular objects or experiences defined on their own terms, not on terms set by an authority figure. Open-endedness can thus create discursive space for multiple perspectives to be heard and to become part of students’ experiences.

Carlone et al. (2015)

Carlone et al. (2015) is not primarily an instantiation of CSP or related frameworks. However, its findings have explicit implications for practitioners of these pedagogies and for proponents of creative educational experiences more broadly. Building on the work of Tzou and Bell (2012), Carlone and colleagues examined the experiences of students enrolled in a summer enrichment program on herpetology, focusing on participants’ identity boundary work—youths’ acts of positioning themselves in relation to particular identities, people, or values.

Although this work is focused on identity boundary work, conceptualizations of Latinidad are not central to the analysis. One-quarter of the research participants identify as Hispanic or Latino, but Latinidad itself is not further explored, and the study population is generally characterized using variations on the term “diverse” (Carlone et al., 2015, p. 1524). The community of participants within the program is described as “familial,” but students’ families appear only indirectly—first in a discussion of how families’ “taking-for-granted notions of ‘who we are’ and ‘what we do’ . . . may not include the outdoors and wildlife” (Carlone et al., 2015, p. 1525) and later when the instructor “provided youth with scientific knowledge about the animals that sometimes contradicted cultural narratives from youths’ families” (Carlone et al., 2015, p. 1537). We admire much in this piece; at the same time, we find ourselves wondering how “cultural narratives” are conceptualized and whether this framing may inadvertently reproduce the same binary that Carlone and colleagues have so effectively analyzed and challenged elsewhere in their writing (see e.g., Carlone et al., 2014).

The authors went on to argue that with support, students engaged joyfully in activities that had initially prompted fear, disgust, or disidentification and that this has important implications for practitioners of culturally relevant pedagogy (Carlone et al., 2015). In particular, they argued that an overemphasis on practices that are “immediately relevant” to students’ lives, interests, or prior experiences may unduly constrain students’ learning experiences. In doing so, they challenge the idea that culturally relevant pedagogy must consist solely of experiences that are, to an outside observer, self-evidently “relevant” to students. This idea is not, in our understanding, a tenet of Ladson-Billings’s framework for culturally relevant pedagogy—as Carlone and colleagues (2015) correctly pointed out, it is merely a premise “commonly implied by much of the literature” (p. 1542). But because this idea does represent a common (mis)interpretation of Ladson-Billings’s framework, it is consequential and worth addressing. Misinterpretations of culturally relevant (and culturally responsive) pedagogies are one of several key factors that contribute to the ongoing marginalization of these pedagogical practices (Sleeter, 2012). In seeking to avoid this misstep and to act on Carlone and colleagues’ recommendations, environmental educators may find it useful to draw on mathematics education researcher Rochelle Gutiérrez’s (2012) metaphor of “mirrors and windows.” Such an approach could foster creative educational experiences by explicitly centering multiple perspectives, including those of students and their communities (“mirrors”) and other perspectives (“windows”) while maintaining an explicit future orientation.

Aguilar-Valdez et al. (2013)

Aguilar-Valdez et al. (2013) explored the complexity of teaching science with Latin@ ² students through Anzaldúa’s (1999) theory, centering creativity as the primary goal of this work. They acknowledged that calls for “culturally sensitive” instruction could be perceived as “something is lacking or deficient in Latin@ students” (p. 842) and argued that culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995b) provides a useful alternative. Although theirs is not a piece about culturally relevant pedagogy per se, they argued that the “framework provided by Anzaldúa builds on these sociocultural theories [including culturally relevant pedagogy] and leads us in a new direction” (p. 843). That new direction involves Latin@ science education as a process of navigating in-between spaces, or nepantlas, that span dominant and marginalized identities.

Using Anzaldúan’s (1999) theory, Aguilar-Valdez et al. (2013) explored the painful ways that dominant society attempts to break the identities of Latin@ persons into pieces, valuing and assimilating some while devaluing and discarding others. Navigating nepantlas thus becomes a process of understanding this fragmentation and piecing together new mestiz@ identities, imagining and creating possible future selves and—in doing so—constructing Latinidad as complex, dynamic, heterogeneous, and fundamentally future oriented. They also examined how teachers operationalize this complex nature of Latinidad in practice. We note two important threads in this argument—that one teacher in particular learns from students what Latinidad means to them and that at the same time, the teacher does not deploy the concept of cultural relevance to limit the scope of the classroom curriculum or resources. Projecting an educator’s own assumptions or preferred meanings onto students’ lived experiences can suppress open-endedness and pluriperspectives and thus constrain creativity. Therefore, learning from students about the meanings of their own lived experiences is a preferred course. Yet if culturally relevant pedagogy is limited to learning from students about the meanings of their own lived experiences, this too can constrain the perspectives available to students and similarly suppress creative experiences.

Exemplifying open-endedness and nonlinearity, one of the authors recounted having students document natural changes of the moon over time by creating “Journals of La Luna.” Surprisingly, after only a single night of observations (in which it was a new moon), students relied on memory or imagination to produce a wide variety of full, waning, and waxing moon images—“certainly not what I had expected to happen,” remarked the teacher (Aguilar-Valdez et al., 2013, p. 839). Rather than simply amend the assignment instructions, however, the teacher created an opportunity for students to discuss how they came to their results in creative ways.

The teacher also “encouraged the students to write in their native language” (Aguilar-Valdez et al., 2013, p. 839) and provided opportunities to discuss their observations in both English and Spanish. Such encouragement was backed by explicit actions valuing the participation and linguistic repertoires of the students’ families. Parents immediately reported how much they enjoyed the opportunity to participate in their children’s science learning and eventually began to visit the classroom, sharing stories, books, and traditions related to the moon.

As with open-endedness and nonlinearity, this realization of linguistic pluriperspectival experience is situated in a broader context of the teacher’s purposeful engagement with Latinidad. The teacher did not simply assign students to pump their parents for information about the moon, nor did she extend a contextless, abstracted invitation for parents to visit the school. Instead, she created an opportunity (but not a requirement) for parent involvement by urging students to observe the moon while accompanied by a family member. Meanwhile, she had already cultivated a multilingual classroom environment under which Spanish-speaking parents were more likely to feel “included and capable” (Aguilar-Valdez et al., 2013, p. 839). When parents visited the classroom, the teacher supported their participation in telling stories, leading to increased sharing of multiple perspectives. These pedagogical actions created conditions under which the creativity already present in Latinx communities could be realized through educational experiences.

Morales-Doyle (2017)

Morales-Doyle (2017) described the use of justice-centered science pedagogy in an advanced high school chemistry course to support marginalized students’ academic success and engagement with community-identified environmental issues. The piece makes extensive connections between Ladson-Billings’s (1995b) culturally relevant pedagogy and Freire’s (1970/2001) critical pedagogy in establishing its conceptual framework, detailing the social-historical context in which each of these theories developed. In terms of Latinidad, Morales-Doyle described the qualitative study participants in terms of their self-described ethnicities and genders (one African American woman, four Latina women, and four Latino men) and their postsecondary trajectories. He also expanded on the racialized and political context of the participants’ school and neighborhood community, establishing how La Lucha High School (a pseudonym) was founded in response to a hunger strike protesting the district’s neglect of economically marginalized Mexican American and African American communities. We see this as evidence of sensitivity to the social and contextual complexities of race, ethnicity, and other dimensions of identity and community.

The extended case study focused on the student and community stakeholders taking part in youth participatory action research focused on local environmental issues in the context of an Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry course. The author’s analyses of stakeholder interviews (of students, teachers, and community members), student work artifacts, and curriculum suggest that these practices supported students’ traditionally sanctioned academic achievement while also creating opportunities for students to position themselves as transformative intellectuals in their communities. The author argued for creative outcomes beyond academic achievement and toward identity building (Morales-Doyle, 2017).

Morales-Doyle (2017) consistently referred to the nuanced complexity of social justice science issues in participatory work, highlighting how the environmental racism regarding the nearby coal power plant was not a pressing issue for all community members. Most of the community member participants identified “the lack of economic opportunities, not pollution in general or the coal power plant in particular, as the central concern in Ridgevale” (p. 1044). We argue this understanding of “community issues” as relevant or important to some members of the community, but not to all, aligns well with the pluriperspective dimension of creative educational experiences.

The case study’s focus on the participatory-action priorities of the justice-centered pedagogy revealed a number of open-ended and future-oriented components. In addition, the author explicitly applied culturally relevant pedagogy to position and complexify the assumptions around “academic excellence” that was achieved by the AP Chemistry students in connection to the course’s social justice science issues (SJSI) components (Morales-Doyle, 2017). That is, while acknowledging the problematic nature of learning standards, the author highlighted students’ successes within those sanctioned standards and used them to challenge the assumption that justice-centered pedagogy compromises scientific or academic rigor. Additionally, the work presented how the SJSI curriculum provided ways for students to move beyond academic achievement and toward identities as transformative and credible community intellectuals. In these examples, we see multiple manifestations of creative education, particularly in the pluriperspective and future-oriented resistance to educational status quos.

Arreguín-Anderson and Kennedy (2013)

Arreguín-Anderson and Kennedy (2013) presented qualitative findings from a bilingual preservice teacher workshop centered around linguistic practices in environmental education. Taking a critical Latino theory (LatCrit) approach, the authors explored predominantly Latinx (22 Latinx, 2 White) preservice teachers’ engagement in and perceptions of the first Project WILD teaching workshop offered in Spanish. Using data from workshop evaluations, participant blogs, wiki entries, and media coverage, the authors uncovered a number of elements relevant to Latinx environmental education, including the importance of acknowledging Spanish as a high-status language and the value of leveraging cultural, linguistic, and place-centered strategies to explicitly build cognitive and affective connections for specific students and contexts.

In their findings, Arreguín-Anderson and Kennedy (2013) clarified that “relevance” to Latinx students and communities takes various forms, particularly linguistic, cultural, cognitive, and affective relevance. They distinguished, for instance, between the linguistically relevant practice of translating English-language activities into Spanish and the linguistic and culturally relevant practice of incorporating traditional Spanish-language songs and activities grounded in Latin American, rather than Anglo-American, heritages. The authors even provided samples of Spanish songs that address environmental topics. They note that this synergy of linguistic and affective/cultural relevance helps foster more meaningful experiences with learners’ surrounding worlds. We find this exploration of pedagogical nuance in relevancies a strong reflection of pluriperspective and open-ended enactments of creative practices.

We note that the authors did not discuss culturally relevant pedagogy at length or cite Ladson-Billings’s key articles on the topic. Instead, this work appeared in our searches because the authors deployed the term “culturally relevant” as one of their key findings regarding the benefit of bilingual preparation in environmental programs. After thorough discussion of the piece, we determined it employed key elements of culturally relevant pedagogy, grounding itself as it did in one of culturally relevant pedagogy’s direct predecessors, critical race theory (CRT). Ladson-Billings has written extensively about the importance of CRT in contesting the educational oppression faced by youth of color; indeed, she has explicitly called culturally relevant pedagogy a “critical race pedagogy” (Ladson-Billings, 1997). CRT is rooted in legal scholarship focusing on the centrality of racism in U.S. society (see e.g., Bell, 1980; Crenshaw, 1989). Within the scope of this review, we cannot do justice to CRT in its entirety, nor do we attempt to do so; entire works can be (and have been) written on the application of CRT to environmental justice, education, and to both of these domains for Latinxs specifically (Anguiano et al., 2012; Tate, 1997; Urrieta & Villenas, 2013). In the case of this piece, the combination of CRT and student-centered culturally relevant practices constructively added to the scope of our review, contributing an important dimension of creative and culturally relevant experiential practices stemming from Latinx and linguistic frameworks directly.

Table 1 provides a summary of the key constructs that guided our review of research: (a) constructions of Latinidad, (b) dimensions of creative educational experiences, and (c) the role of Latinx communities in shaping these experiences. Our descriptions focused on explicit elements that appear in these articles according to these three criteria. Therefore, there could be elements in these articles that could be interpreted as implicitly reflecting some of these criteria, but we are naming only those that were clearly identifiable.

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Table 1

Operationalization of Key Constructs in the Reviewed Articles

Article	Latinidad Latinidad is described in terms of . . .	Latinx Communities The role of Latinx communities in the experience studied is . . .	Creativity Framing of creative experiences clearly apparent in the article include . . .
Williams and Anderson (2015)	• English learner status • National origins (participants are immigrant and refugee students, about one-third are originally from Mexico or Nicaragua)	• Presented as mostly indirect; students share stories and insights about their families. • More explicit when students interview their family members during a “Harvest of the Month” project.	• Open-endedness: Students have some agency in making decisions (e.g., designing their own garden plots, choosing plants to research). • Pluriperspectives: Immigrant or refugee students work with peers and share stories and insights from their pasts. • Future orientation: Instructors explicitly sought to help newcomer students develop new, enduring social attachments to people and place, cultivating a feeling of being at home.
Djonko-Moore et al. (2018)	• English learner status • Working-class and inner-city status of communities	• Not explicit; students plant a community garden, and one author knows several participants through involvement in a local religious community.	• Nonlinearity: Authors discuss potential for out-of-the-classroom experiences to disrupt the rigidity/linearity of learning in traditional classroom settings. • Pluriperspectives: Although student participants were of different ethnic, racial, and linguistic backgrounds, authors did not elaborate on what students learned from each other. • Future orientation: Focused on students’ engagement with science learning.
Montero et al. (2018)	• English learner status • Proportion of participant population (e.g., 95% of students in five out of eight classes were Latinx) • Marginalized or underrepresented status	• Not explicit; students visited parks with teachers expressing concerns that families are unlikely to visit parks in the future due to financial and logistical obstacles.	• Open-endedness: Inquiry-based program for underrepresented youth conducting outdoor activities. • Pluriperspectives: The program provided bilingual materials and bilingual rangers that allowed for points of entry of the expression of multiple perspectives. However, authors point out challenges in deeply connecting the experiences and knowledge of Indigenous communities to the learning activities. • Future orientation: Authors connect the value of this program with the future support and survival of national parks.
Tzou and Bell (2012)	• Mexican history and culture, with emphasis on richness of being, doing, and knowing in environmental education (draws on Anzaldúa’s [1999] work in considering border theory) • Exploration of the richness of the experiences of one Mexican-born student	• Explicitly stated but not extensively discussed; students are engaged in community service work as part of their participation in the program; students are asked to communicate the results of their project to the community, but it is unclear how much this communication is one-way (e.g., handing out flyers) or two-way (e.g., presentations and conversation).	• Open-endedness: This piece states the limits of close-ended or reifying environmental education discourses and affirms the importance of youth and educators critiquing such discourses, widening acceptable positions to hold as environmentalists, and of “choosing” marginality as an act of counterhegemony. • Pluriperspectives: The piece argues for the importance of transgressing borders and living in the margins to reflect and uplift the historicity of students and their communities. It suggests that marginality can be an informative positioning, providing benefits that may be otherwise missed without such perspectives.
Carlone et al. (2015)	• Proportion of participant population (e.g., one-fourth of participants were Latinx)	• Explicitly stated but not extensively discussed; family engagement is described as an important element of the program, and some information taught in the program is characterized as “contradict[ing] cultural narratives from youths’ families” (p. 1537).	• Open-endedness: Authors challenge an overemphasis on practices that are immediately “relevant” to students’ backgrounds, arguing this may sometimes constrain learning activities in counterproductive ways. • Pluriperspectives: Youth bring their own knowledge, beliefs, perspectives, and personal boundaries related to animals (e.g., comfort or discomfort handling reptiles) and then have opportunities to share their perspectives and be supported in crossing their boundaries during the program. • Future orientation: Students engage in “border-crossing” to begin seeing and understanding themselves in new ways.
Aguilar-Valdez et al. (2013)	• Complex, heterogeneous, dynamically changing identities within oppressive context of dominant society (draws on Anzaldúa’s [1999] work in considering border theory) • Focus is not only on students but also on the teachers who coauthor the article	• Described in depth; family members are explicitly invited by the teacher to participate in learning activities with their children, and family contributions appeared to (re)shape the content and format of the educational experiences in ways that the teacher had not originally anticipated.	• Open-endedness: Teacher explicitly and substantially redesigns La Luna activity in response to unanticipated student interpretations of the task instructions and other student ideas. • Pluriperspectives: At the teacher’s invitation, students and their families share stories and insights about the moon using both Spanish and English linguistic resources. • Nonlinearity: Students iteratively revisit and revise their procedures for recording observations of the moon based on questions that arise in response to new observations. • Future orientation: Students are studying change over time; educator explicitly focuses on students’ progress toward a future state of conocimiento.
Morales-Doyle (2017)	• Self-described race/ethnicity and gender identities • Postsecondary trajectories • The social and contextual complexities of dimensions of identity • The sociopolitical history of Mexican American and African American communities in the school’s neighborhood	• Described in depth; community organization COVER and local scientist Dr. Héctor Reyes help identify local environmental justice issues for students to research; perspectives of families are also incorporated during student-led presentations of their work.	• Open-endedness: Students engaged in authentic research, with findings not known or predetermined in advance. • Pluriperspectives: Students’ research topic was shaped by community members’ ideas about what issues were important; students drew on multiple linguistic resources in sharing their findings and engaging with community members and professional scientists. • Nonlinearity: Authentic research is characterized as a messy, uncertain, and complex process. • Future orientation: Author argues for moving beyond simplistic conceptions of academic achievement to allow for students to enact identities as transformative intellectuals.
Arreguín-Anderson and Kennedy (2013)	• Authors take a critical Latino theory approach, described as “a theoretical lens to highlight Latinos/as’ racialized language experiences in environmental education.” • Authors point to demographic and linguistic context of south Texas schools; study focuses on students of Mexican and Mexican American descent. • Through critical Latino theory, study considers linguistic, cultural, cognitive, and affective background of students in describing Latino cultural significance.	• Authors draw from community publications to identify elements that could make environmental education relevant to Latinx students.	• Pluriperspectives: Translated workshop materials into Spanish, replaced English-language music activity with Latin American music activity rather than translating; invited feedback and contributions from bilingual educators. • Open-endedness: Authors explore pedagogical nuances in a strong reflection of the enactments of creative practices such as using Spanish songs that discuss environmental topics.

We would like to recognize that several pieces draw on the scholarship of Latinx, Chicanx, and Latin American scholars. For example, Tzou and Bell (2012) and Aguilar-Valdez et al. (2013) used Anzaldúa’s (1999) border theory to discuss being positioned and actively positioning oneself at the margins in environmental education programs. Morales-Doyle (2017) and Aguilar-Valdez et al. (2013) pointed to Paulo Freire’s work on the importance of addressing the realities of power and oppression, which impact the lives of Latinx individuals in the United States and the ways in which they can come to view themselves as agents in transforming oppressive realities through actively discussing environmental justice issues. Likewise, Arreguín-Anderson and Kennedy (2013) used LatCrit as a framework that environmental education programs can use to challenge discriminatory and racialized educational experiences that employ deficit perspectives toward Latinx students based on their skin color, culture, immigration status, and proficiency in the English language. Beyond these analyses, most pieces described Latinx students in terms of their EL status and as being underrepresented and marginalized but did not consider the many other dimensions and complexity of Latinidad.

Regarding the role that Latinx communities (beyond educators and youth) play in the environmental experience studied, these pieces showed a range of descriptions. For instance, in some of these studies, it was not specified whether members of Latinx communities (e.g., students, teachers, parents) were involved in the design of the programs or the studies. On the other hand, some pieces centered Latinx communities by providing a clear description of their involvement in the program or study analyzed. For example, Morales-Doyle (2017) involved Latinx community stakeholders in deciding what topics to address in the environmental education program, Tzou and Bell (2012) provided an in-depth analysis of the experiences of one Mexican-born student in the program, and Aguilar-Valdez et al. (2013) illustrated ways that teachers authentically and successfully invited family participation in students’ learning. These pieces offer models of how Latinx communities could be involved to a greater extent in the design of programs that seek to respond to their realities.

In applying a creativity framework, we noticed that these pieces pointed to the potential of environmental education experiences to be open-ended, pluri-perspectival, nonlinear, and future oriented. Not all of these dimensions were explicitly apparent in each piece (although any of these dimensions may have been present and simply were not explicitly mentioned in the final, published version of each article). Our table indicates elements of creative educational experiences that were clearly identifiable. For example, Djonko-Moore et al. (2018) described the potential for outdoor learning to disrupt the rigidity of learning in traditional classroom settings (nonlinearity), whereas Williams and Anderson (2015) pointed to the opportunities that school garden activities offer to students to express their multiple (pluri)perspectives. In terms of future orientation, Morales-Doyle (2017) and Aguilar-Valdez et al. (2013) clearly identified the power that environmental programs have to empower Latinx students and communities to transform themselves and the world around them, as opposed to approaches that seek merely to include Latinx populations into existing environmental initiatives. Yet it appears there may still be further potential for environmental education programs and researchers to tap into the creative power and richness of the Latinx communities with whom they work.

Different authors used different approaches to access some of the creative potential in Latinx communities. Sometimes, authors built on the research and frameworks of Latinx scholars, such as Gloria Anzaldúa (e.g., Aguilar-Valdez et al., Tzou & Bell); at other times, authors drew on their own insights and experiences as Latinx persons or involved members of local Latinx communities rather than drawing on a broader, imagined Latinidad; and at still other times, authors connected their work to issues of interest to local Latinx communities. Some authors did all three (e.g., Morales-Doyle).

Finally, we found it suggestive that the two articles that seemed to include explicit evidence of all four dimensions of creative experiences—Morales-Doyle (2017) and Aguilar-Valdez et al. (2013)—were also the two articles that appeared to describe the most extensive community involvement in learning activities and had two of the most extensive discussions of Latinx identity or history. While we do not go so far as to claim these characteristics of the studies are necessarily related, it seems at least plausible that attention to the complexity of Latinidad goes hand in hand with extensive community involvement and that community involvement could play a role in fostering creative experiences—not only because community involvement might include sharing of pluriperspectives or attention to the future of the community and the individuals within it but also because extensive community involvement might lead to the iterative reshaping of learning experiences in open-ended and nonlinear ways.