Education Professor Dr. Micaela Rubalcava’s newly published book Environmental Liberation Education: Diversity, Mindfulness, and Sustainability Tools for Teachers and Students is a thoughtful, polished, and comprehensive paragon for the future of learning. The book is a precursor for the extraordinary array of hands-on, immersive courses blazing a path at TMCC for innovative curricula and programs, inviting our community into cultural belonging and thriving. Students in Rubalcava’s courses know she practices what she preaches with research, exercises, and models, and she’s made this book a how-to guide grounded in theory.
Simple to implement into course structures, Rubalcava describes strategies to weave academic engagement for diverse student success into systemic change with social-emotional tools for dialogue, reflection, and action. The tools integrate subjects and students into global citizenship experiences for a complex, biodiverse world. Rubalcava’s strategies include asking authentic questions about existing problems in cross-cultural peer circles and generating projects for transformative action.
The Three Transformative Tools
Dr. Micaela Rubalcava poses for a photo in the TMCC Main Gallery, proudly holding her new book and standing before her student-created recycled paper bag collage.
Picture yourself sitting outdoors atop a mosaic of grass with furrowed red, yellow, and orange leaves resting peacefully beside you, the trees’ branches twisting and extending to shelter you from the sun’s rays. Nestled in a wreath with your classmates, colorful backpacks, books, and styluses sprinkled across the lawn spark a kinetic phenomenon: inclusive exercises connecting education to identity and the living world with genuine healing activities. These are holistic practices to support students’ collective resilience when confronting trauma, centered around repair and well-being rather than pathologizing damage. Instead of running away, fighting, or paralysis, the individual develops positive responses mindfully, connecting in diversity with others.
“I participated in an insightful Fulbright research project where I went to Santiago, Chile. I applied in 2017, and Fulbright picked 16 educators across the nation. As part of this summer research team, it was heartening to learn that Paulo Freire, a globally renowned liberation educator from whom I’d received training years before at UC Berkeley, had written his famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, about academic freedom there in Santiago years before. I internalized his action-reflection methods and applied them to a wider picture: global healing, critical consciousness in different communities, one pocket at a time,” Rubalcava explained her inspiration.
One liberation idea is to uplift conversations about sharing your fears by recognizing support systems in your midst to invite different ethnic and linguistic perspectives into academic engagement. Teachers and students respect cultural varieties as assets to learning rather than liabilities, incorporating “culture” and “environment” in the classroom vocabulary and engaging in culturally responsive sustainability projects to protect the Earth during educational experiences across the curriculum.
TMCC EDU students with Glenn Duncan Elementary School fifth graders facilitate Environment Liberation Education. Children write curiosity questions, do breathwork to observe nature with the senses and share their poems aloud.
“Today was the first day for one of my classes. We started by being outside, forming a circle under the contour of tree shade, and practicing breathwork together about four observable elements of nature: sun, land, sky, and water. We discussed how the four historical goals of US education, described in the required course textbook, relate to diversity in the natural world. This Multicultural Mindfulness piece integrates social and emotional academic learning into course standards. The teacher and students practice body-mind-environment breathwork, connecting the cultural soul to the soil and calming the amygdala for academic concentration. The rule of thumb in Environmental Liberation Education is to engage academic activities inside or outside with cultures and nature, unifying in diversity,” Rubalcava continued.
The three transformative tools Rubalcava champions are:
- Diversity Circles to organize for change,
- Multicultural Mindfulness to process change and
- Approach-in-Dimension to assess change.
They help educators see trees through the weeds by replacing the unconscious hourly and daily decisions that divide with conscious choices for unity and eco-friendly experiences. We use the tools to make better choices in areas where teachers have routine authority: education space, time, materials, and learning environments.
“This is easy, fun, and empowering. The tools strengthen educator efficacy, and our diverse students experience success. Rather than teaching top-down and individualistic, we open up and integrate. We inspire curiosity for holistic education, the hands-on part, organic and collective, coming from students. We facilitate. We bring in culture and nature materials to pose topic questions, ‘How does the campus vegetable garden in front of us relate to the textbook chapter?’ ‘What can we do with this pile of beach driftwood contributed by a participant to engage today’s subject?’ ‘How do we understand our environment through liberation education, here and now?’ Learning comes alive in our classrooms, and the world becomes our classroom,” Rubalcava said.
Chalk drawings depict emotions and insights about global healing from various disciplinary, race, class, gender, age, and ability perspectives in the 'Brave New World' mural.
This playbook for the next generation of teachers can revolutionize college fields by decreasing dehumanization and monotony in classroom settings. She invites instructors across disciplines at all levels to use the tools to reduce bias and increase sustainability decisions daily. Perspective is a mirror into strangers’ hearts. Life is not linear. Implementing humanity into your studies may prove unforgettable to one’s journey.
“You can use Environmental Liberation Education in math, English, history, art, science, or any class. It equips teachers who are otherwise unwittingly part of the problem of exclusions, divisions, and alienation. Educators perpetuate bias even when we don’t want to. By using the Diversity Circle tool, you have collaborators for accountability,” Rubalcava said.
“When you’re with people who offer cultural differences – race, class, gender, or even disciplinary perspective – from you, and you’re collaborating on big-picture themes, using mindfulness practices, you assess together through world healing concepts. Then you’re rocking and rolling. You’re being anti-bias and sustainable during academic engagement versus just adding a nod to diversity,” Rubalcava continued.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s work as a civil rights leader, prolific writer, and mindfulness educator whose deeds altered the course of history internationally informs Rubalcava’s textbook. Rubalcava applies Dr. King’s four steps to nonviolent, civic engagement for justice to the concept of super-diversity, which characterizes a world of 8 billion people dealing with global warming and challenges to democracy:
“Transnational migrations due to resource scarcity and climate crises interact with Indigenous communities and historical immigration patterns to impact the US economy, society, and elsewhere. European, African, Latin American, and Asian regions interface with biodiversity on Earth. We need to integrate global citizenship into our curriculum – so students become stewards for sustainability,” Rubalcava said.
“I do course content mini-lectures to set a framework, and then students cogenerate the subject. Students relate cultural stories to standard topics and theories, taking active notes,” Rubalcava continued. “I synthesize themes and guide analysis as students collaborate to design and implement hands-on projects. By the end of each session, we do mindfulness exercises, experience culture-conscious listening, activate curriculum through outdoor education or with nature indoors, and apply theory to discovery.”
For more information, please visit the Education and Environmental Liberation Education: Diversity, Mindfulness, and Sustainability Tools for Teachers and Students websites.